Have you ever looked up an old partner, potential boss, employer, or long lost friend on Google? Congratulations, you’re a voyeur.

There exists an extremely powerful, borderline perverse, and highly profitable ‘feature’ in many of the social media applications we use. Companies make billions off this feature, and it’s a behavioral phenomenon that has its roots in evolution. That feature is the ability to know who has been looking at you—who has viewed your content—sometimes without them knowing you have this privilege. I’ve labeled these phenomena as social voyeurism—the act of looking at people’s information, activity, and content without them…

Software applications don’t directly give you food, water, shelter, affection, or sex — the only thing they do is disseminate information that may lead to all these more basic human needs. Thus, graphic, UX, and software design is really about the selection and organization of information, through time. Information is everything, and you need to know what it is, what it means, and how to represent it in an honest and functional way to be a true asset to a company or society at large.

Designers aren’t scientists, mathematicians, economists, or even very rigorous researchers—and that’s fine. That in mind…

Americans are experiencing the majority of their waking lives in 2D. According to a study by Neilson, the average U.S. citizen spends over 11 hours per day on their devices. Considering sleep, that means the average American spends more time looking at a screen than interacting with the full-spectrum universe. Many researchers posit that this has serious health consequences. A study conducted by San Diego State University showed that more screen time was associated with lower psychological well-being with effects being; less curiosity, lower self-control, more distractibility, more difficulty making friends, less emotional stability, being more difficult to care for…

Contrary to popular opinion, businesses are not successful because of their sales, marketing, human resources, advertising, brand, or sophisticated acquisition strategies—they are successful because their product or service is awesome, and the palpable experience it provides causes it to spread virally requiring a minimum investment in all of these former departments. Moreover, great products market themselves, and this is why good experience/product design is absolute marketing gasoline—one of the best outside investments a company can make. The biggest reason why product design is such a great investment is that it adds to the perceived, functional, experiential, and mnemonic value of…

What does a free toothbrush, the fastest sprinter in a relay race, and the sweetest dish on the menu all have in common? They all happen at the end of an experience.

This article is about the bulletproof rule anyone can use to boost their service business and even quality of life. Not only will this rule improve your customer retention and profit — nearly anyone can use it to enhance their relationships, creative hobbies, or seemingly banal day-to-day activities. But this strategy is so effective, it has spread like absolute wildfire in almost every single industry — from sports…

As a solo designer going through the inevitable hardships of opening and operating a business, I decided to reflect on what the activity has taught me along my journey. I’ve been skateboarding for over 15 years and although it is a physically demanding sport, I’m sure that if I’m still standing at 70 I’ll continue pushing along. Below are the 18 invaluable lessons that skateboarding has taught me in business and life. This is a feel-good article.

1) Never Expect Immediate Success

Our culture glorifies youth idols, but the reality is that these people are absolute anomalies. Success, traction, and actually ‘landing it’ usually takes…

With the unveiling of the new Slack logo which has caught a lot of buzz, I decided to expound on some of the qualities of a great logo that nobody talks about. Let me preface this by saying this isn’t another article about logo design. While any of these ‘rules’ can potentially be broken, they do offer insight into what is a very important part of a business—the commissioning and selection of the visual stimuli that represent it. One of the reasons it is so important is because a logo or brand ‘pivot’ can cost a considerable amount of time…

There is one thing that all contractors (especially new ones) are very bad at. It’s one of the most challenging things to do properly, and the error is committed by both individuals and monolithic institutions — always and probably forever. Contractors are notorious for underestimating the amount of time it takes to complete a project.

I’ve been contracting for over seven years, and I — to this day — still make this mistake. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I read a book that explains this false-estimation tendency in scientific terms, that I understood the phenomenon known as…