Feedback is critical, and knowing how to deal with it is a vital skill for any designer—our egos are famously fragile, after all. But whilst all feedback is valuable, not all of it is good. Some of it is actually bad, and some is downright ugly. Good feedback is when the client or peer (or family member whose opinion you didn’t realise...

You know that website you keep coming back to? It’s the content that makes you return. It’s not the font, nor the colour, nor the layout. It’s the words, the pictures, the story. It’s the laughs, drama, tension, the personality—or utility—smiling back at your from the otherwise hollow glow of your monitor. Content is what brings us in....

Fancy a tale of betrayal, moral (and financial?) bankruptcy, rum, pirates, and bad design? Well, boy, do I have a story for you. A few years ago, whilst I was still at Primate, we were approached to help launch a new brand of rum. It was called Rumburra, a not-fantastic-but-also-not-terrible play on the words “rum” and “Edinburgh”, whi...

A few years ago, I left Facebook. It was a fairly easy decision, based on a combination of the dubious morals of Mark Zuckerberg, its complicity in the election of Donald Trump, its dealings with Cambridge Analytica, the effect it had on my mood, and, not least, the enormous time cost of endless scrolling. In the years that followed, I...

Web design is a bit like architecture in that it usually takes two teams to complete a project: architects — a.k.a. designers — and engineers. Construction projects are completely beholden to their materials. No wooden skyscrapers ever make it to production. No highway bridge is made from unarmed concrete. As such, architects must know...

Every project – no matter how small – needs a purpose, a goal (or goals), and, ideally, ambition. Without them, we have no context to guide our decisions, to measure success, or to drive motivation. They are critical to remember, easy to forget, and often hard to define. In order to pin them down, I made myself a little guide. It helps...

Recently, I had a very novel design experience: I created a website entirely in the browser, using only default CSS colours and system fonts. With the exception of a squiggle posing as a logo, not a single draft was made in Figma. No pencil ever touched paper. The whole process only took a few hours, and I loved every second of it. Nor...

I used to think that print is more permanent than digital. For better or for worse, the print design process inevitably includes that final step — print — and once that button is pushed there’s no going back without a costly rerun. For this reason, print designers and editors are in many ways more meticulous than their digital counterp...

Saying "yes, and" is a fundamental way thinking in improvisational comedy. By accepting what a previous participant has suggested ("yes"), and then building on it ("and"), the stage is set for greatness. I often wonder if designers, too, could benefit from this mindset – especially when receiving feedback. Ask any designer about client...

I spend quite a bit of time thinking about design. Sometimes I think that I'm pretty good at it. (Design, that is, not thinking about it.) Other times I think I'm not good at all, that any modest success I've had is down to my ability to pretend to be a good designer, and that one day people will discover my incompetence. But most of t...