Using playbooks for designing and building products — These are the slides and speaker notes from a presentation I gave on July 21, 2016 at the Design & Content Conference in Vancouver, B.C.. I’d like to start be asking you a simple question. How do you do what you do? Bad grammar and alliteration aside. …

I met Nick Chirls in 2013 at an event Josh Miller hosted at the Branch office in NYC. It was a round table conversation, very informal. Afterwards, Nick and I ended up chatting. We hit it off. We kept in touch and over the next 2 years we would grab…

I delivered this eulogy for my Mom on November 6, 2013 — I was raised by a pioneer. Pioneers look at the open spaces where there is no road or even the faintest of paths and decide to move in that direction. They move that direction because they believe better things exist that way. …

Contemplating the end of your business — The documentary “Shut Up and Play The Hits” opens with an interview between the writer Chuck Klosterman and LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. The documentary captures the band’s final days and last concert at Madison Square Gardens. Klosterman asks Murphy “When you start a band do you imagine how it will…

In the wake of this past week’s events there is a lot of talk about how the media and the Internet deals with breaking news. There are a lot of people claiming that the Boston Marathon media coverage was the death rattle on a corpse long dead. The fact is…

I was thinking about what albums fundamentally changed how I thought about music the first time I heard them. There are more than five in my life but these five I can remember vividly. Paul’s Boutique - Beastie Boys I remember listening to it and being so confused. …

“What am I looking at?” I asked It was a Wednesday morning and Peter Nitsch, the Director of our Labs group at Teehan+Lax was standing in my office. We meet every Wednesday to discuss what he is working on. We started T+L Labs two years ago as a way to…

On December 20, 2012 the New York Times released Snow Fall, The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, a 5 part story of skiers and snowboarders trapped by an avalanche in Washington State’s Cascade mountain range. It is an amazing story reminiscent of Jon Krakauer’s, now famous 1996 Outside Magazine piece, Into…

History — In September of 2008, one of our designers, Greg Washington, began discussing a frustration he had. When starting any design project he would assemble a collection of images. These images are the foundational design research he would do before opening Photoshop or sketching. …