06 Jun Sephora: Used to Be Aspirational. Now It’s a Field Trip.
I've been designing brands and dissecting websites for over 25 years. What still gets me is how far a brand can drift from the business or human behind it...
01 Jun Jenna Kutcher’s Website Has a Brand Coherence Problem (and it’s not the photography)
Posted at 22:11h
in Brand Reviews, Coherence, Personal Branding, Posh, Power & Profit, Presence, Standards, Website Design
I've been designing brands and dissecting websites for over 25 years. What still gets me is how far a brand can drift from the business or human behind it...
06 Apr Intention Is Not Infrastructure
Emergency eye surgery rearranges your priorities fast. Detached retina. Horseshoe tear. Ten days face down, 23 hours a day, with a gas bubble holding everything in place while my eye healed. No screens, no work, no version of normal. By day two,...
18 Mar Urgency Is a Convincing Liar — And It’s Costing Your Brand
Posted at 10:36h
in Standards
Urgency and intuition feel identical when you're in the middle of them. The difference only shows up afterward. If you've ever made a fast business decision that felt completely right in the moment and completely wrong three weeks later, this one's...
13 Feb Why Presence Is Built on Structure, Not Polish
Posted at 20:00h
in Presence
Presence isn’t something you perform. It’s something people feel. In business, in leadership, and even in parenting, confidence expands when structure is steady. This is what that looked like in real life. Last night, Grace and I had a few hours alone...
06 Feb Why Some Projects Never Move Forward
Posted at 21:51h
in Standards
Over the past decade, roughly $1.02M in my design proposals didn't become projects. Not because the clients weren't great or I didn't want the work. In every one of those conversations, I did the same thing: I consulted honestly and recommended...
27 Jan Refinement Through Subtraction
Posted at 21:23h
in Coherence
I removed a line and flipped another. When we refined the Vanex Engineering logo, the improvement didn’t come from adding some clever visual metaphor meant to make people feel smart for decoding it. It came from taking something out that no...
20 Jan Discernment Without Explanation
Posted at 03:00h
in Standards
I got a mullet yesterday. Is it cool? Hard to say. Is it me? Entirely. My brother cut it. I described what I wanted and we went for it, without polling my audience, checking trend reports, or consulting the internet to see...