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Trust yourself
It’s simple, pithy, and cliche. It’s also something worth reminding yourself of more often than you think. There are two films that convey this message really well, spoiler alerts for both: In Rental Family, the protagonist is an actor whose job is pretending to be people’s family members. For example, a mom hires him to…
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Happy year of the fire horse
A few nights ago, I went to a lunar new year celebration at the Royal Ontario Museum, which was very energizing. Last year, I happened to visit The Met a few days before the lunar new year and saw the AAPI Jazz Collective play. When I realized this, I felt like it was a cosmic…
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Sketch, don’t paint
As I was developing my upcoming speech for CreativeMornings, I received some advice: you’re trying to paint, when all the audience needs is a sketch. There won’t always be a need for you to go through all the details in such high fidelity. Meanwhile, you can also choose from a variety of ways to communicate,…
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Nostalgia and withered technology
The Kodak Charmera digital camera has 1.6 megapixels. With technology comparable to phone cameras from the early 2000s, the pictures turn out horribly, with very low quality. One customer describes it this way, “It’s a crap camera, even under the most relaxed toy camera standards. But I’d buy it again.” They’re not alone. Over 10,000…
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10 years of stories
Whether it’s a client-initiated project or a self-initiated one, my projects all have one thing in common: I’m telling a story. Spending energy in this process—finding a story, developing a thesis, pitching it, giving it shape, infusing it with experience and expertise, writing it, editing it, publishing it, promoting it—effectively creating assets that connect the…
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I will speak at CreativeMornings
I’m going to speak at CreativeMornings Toronto on February 27. The topic is entitled, “Redefining Creative Commitment.” Here’s the description: Conventional creative advice suggests that you must dedicate yourself fully to your craft if you want to succeed. There seems to be no shortage of advice from people who took a leap of faith and…
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An idea not pursued
There’s a lot of valuable feedback that takes place in Google Docs, in the form of comments. The problem was the feedback felt very ephemeral; after someone resolved the comment, it would effectively disappear. A few years ago, I wondered if it might be interesting to make a plugin for Google Docs that helped people…