You can have a healthy career as a designer even if you have trouble seeing certain colors — As designers, we all use color to inform, illustrate, and inspire. It’s an essential part of everything we do. From color grading to printing presets, our lives revolve around color. You know who else has lives that revolve around color? Pilots. Pilots must be perfect distinguishers of color in order…

Own Your Town and Create a Client Base of Raving Fans We all make different decisions as designers. Present the exact same client brief to 1,000 graphic designers and no two final products will be exactly the same. …

Setting effective deadlines, presenting timelines to clients, and how to stay sane as a freelance designer — There’s a very strange relationship between designers and their work that no one really talks about. In most cases, we love what we do — through all the frustration, problem clients, and long hours staring a hole in a computer screen — our reward is in the creating. There’s a…

Or: How We Lost the Idea of Craftsmanship and How to Get It Back This week, I got a new workstation — a 2019 MacBook Pro, thank you very much. …

When self-doubt comes knocking, try these tips for getting past it —

What Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Taught Me About New Year’s Resolutions and Setting Goals Over the weekend, I took my oldest son (he’s 5 years old) to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And while it was a phenomenal film and Miles Morales is absolutely the Spider-Man the world needs right now, that wasn’t my biggest takeaway from the film as a whole — instead…

Reaching Your Fitness Goals is Not a Magic Fix, You Have to Seek Happiness Everywhere Else in Life, Too — Take it from #sweaterdad here, he’s clearly found happiness in other things to be this pumped about an arbitrary number on a scale. (Perhaps a free t-shirt from work or the new Sharper Image catalog) I had to come to a realization recently that has changed my entire mindset regarding…

How to Get Started with Yoga and the Recovery Benefits for Big Ol’ Gorillas Like Us — Yoga isn’t just for skinny women. As a thicker male member of society, I have found a lot of benefits to recovery and core strength in my yoga routine. I’ve spent a lot of time recently feeling setback by a nagging issue with my hip. As frequent readers of this…

The Story of My Failure in the Face of my Wife’s Illness and How She Saved Us Both — We like to pretend that the ones we love are just “in a rough patch,” which leads us to ignoring the signs of mental illness and soaks the ones we love in shame, only worsening the problem. Operation Aquaman is not just about me getting into shape and working hard…