101 design rules from siteleaf
Design is hope made visible.
You can live your life as the result of history and what came before, or you can live your life as the cause of what’s to come. You choose.
When talent doesn’t hustle, hustle beats talent. But when talent hustles, watch out.
When you work only for money, without any love for what you do in and of itself, your work will lack energy. People will feel that. So give every project everything you’ve got, at every moment, every time.
A good philosopher will say: “Know thyself.” A good shopkeeper will say: “Know thy customer.” A good designer will say: “Know both.”
Listen for when someone is dismissing your ambitions. Only the petty do that. Avoid them. Instead, seek out those much better than you; they’ll make you feel that you can achieve your dreams, as theirs are probably even larger. They’ll wave you on to the finish line.
A brand is always answering two questions. The first one internally facing: What do we believe? The second, externally: How do we behave? You must remain authentic to yourself, your core values, and what you stand for. If you’re not, people will sniff you out. But your brand must maintain cultural congruence — remaining relevant to the times, always evolving to inspire people at large. The answers to these two curiosities must always be aligned.
Find a way to connect every project to something much bigger: a higher order value, a truth, a courageous goal, or a larger question. Then, if your efforts start to lag or feel mundane, return to that larger ideal that inspired you in the first place. It works.
Put this over your desk: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller knew stuff.
A good designer will help a company get to where they want to go. A great designer will push a company to where they *should* go.
Are you going to tell a story? Then tell a big story. An enormous story. An epic story. Or tell no story at all.
The role of creative leadership is to create more leaders — not more followers. This view is more uncommon than I’d like.
I’ve learned that there are only two kinds of people: 1.) People who do exactly what they say they’ll do. 2.) People who are full of shit.
Form follows fantasy. Every good idea comes from a spark of imagination, not pragmatism. Facts are important. But possibility creates futures.
Never take an unpaid internship. Ever. It is unethical to be offered one, and in many places, it is illegal. But more importantly, what kind of people would refuse to pay you? Oh yeah, really shitty people.
If you lose the desire to be silly, the power to laugh, and the ability to poke fun at yourself, you will lose the power to think. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy for one reason: It kills off his imagination.
Stuck on a problem you can’t solve? Go bigger. Expand it. Make it giant. Do not try to contain it, or simplify it, or reduce it. Make it so large that you can begin to see a new pattern. Solve the larger problem and the smaller one will get solved along the way.
Always begin in mythology. It’s good fuel. Fables and fantasy don’t age or grow stale for one reason: They are a step into a dimension beyond the reach of time itself. Build with them.