Design is a difficult and complex field no matter what your specific industry or title is.

Clients and users won't recognize the effort that goes into your output. Presentations are persuasive and expository, like a sales pitch. You have to prepare for everything you present to be questioned. Frustration and burnout could be easy to come by without a personal North Star.

I love industrial design because it's the intersection of everything in life. People, cultures, business, craft, experiences, thoughtfulness, creativity, language and all the other stuff that exists.

Text to Image had a boost in image quality, image details, customizable settings and shareability with Creative Cloud apps.

Here's a list of everything new and upcoming with Adobe Firefly from today's, October 10th, 2023, Adobe MAX conference.

Persistence is a skill and a choice.

Anyone can get better at drawing so long as you persist and think critically.

Don't let anyone ever tell you it's easy. Pinning up bad drawings in front of classmates and teachers never feels good, even when you distance yourself from your ego.

No matter how well you oil and heat your pan, the first pancake is never as good as the second or third one.

That doesn't prevent you from making pancakes, you expect the first one to be a dud.

The role of first pancake is to show you what to do next.

Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design are a good place to start in a broad sense.

“Everything interacts with, and is dependent on, other things. We must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it and why we are doing it.” -Dieter Rams in Rams, 2018

Rams' influence is remarkable and his principles are considered design dogma. Anyone who went to a product design school has studied them already, but it never hurts to brush up on fundamentals.

2018 was without a doubt the year of the electric scooter.

Bird started this trend. It was a unicorn among unicorns, being the first company to reach a $1 billion evaluation in a year.

It took off because they're a sustainable and cheap way for people to get around town faster. They're as convenient and fun as they are annoying and dangerous.

If you can't tell whether to push or pull to open a door, it's called a Norman Door.

Norman Door = Bad Design

I don't know a world without personal computers.

I was born in 1995, right at the cusp between Gen Y and Gen Z. The same year Microsoft changed how people interact with software with the Windows 95 operating system. It was only a few years prior to the iMac G3, which revolutionized the way we interact with computers.

There's no other option.

Maybe you keep ideas to yourself because you don't want to appear naïve.

You can't afford to keep creative ideas to yourself.

We all have creative ideas and we all have potential to create meaning.

It's easy to get stuck in the analysis-paralysis cycle.

We want to make sure a design is perfect before shipping it, but no product has ever been perfect. Even revolutionary universal designs have pain points.

"Step, Jump, Leap" can be a useful way to develop new and innovative ideas.

It's a flexible innovation management framework that uses a 3-step iteration process.

It follows the idea that the best way to come up with a great idea is to start small and to build on larger and more ambitious jumps and leaps to discovery.

2 days ago, Meta announced their new AI-integrated smart glasses.

They might be the most promising affordable smart glasses to hit the wearable technology market, with potential to democratize access to this technology and bring it to the mainstream.

John Sylvan, inventor of the K-Cup, doesn't own a Keurig.

John makes drip brew coffee. "Before I go to bed, I put the coffee and water in, and when I wake up there's a pot of coffee," he said pointedly.

Originally, his idea was aimed at office workers that normally go to Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. He wanted to design a faster, cheaper and "no fuss" solution that would lower waste from disposable coffee cups. He's upset that his design is, at best, carbon neutral in relation to the world prior to disposable coffee pods.

Service models are taking over many industries.

You could buy Photoshop just 6 years ago. Today, it's exclusively a subscription.

DVDs can still be bought, but you likely buy movies through a streaming service. Although, you don't really buy these movies, you're purchasing a "Limited License" through Amazon and all of the others. What you buy is the ability to watch your movie on-demand. If Amazon were to go under, or lose the streaming rights to what you've "purchased," you would lose access.

I believe that the deepest pain you feel should be understood as a cry for humanity and universal love.

Charles Bradley, one of the greatest soul singers of all time, embodied this idea.

At 14, Charles felt unloved by his mother and ran away from home. He lived in the subway tunnels of New York and in the winter, he would ride the trains to stay warm. At 16, he found work as a cook and began singing in small clubs.

Minimalism is a design philosophy to strip away the excess and leave only what is essential.

It ties in with designers' and engineers' general goal to simplify solutions as much as possible.

However, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. Complexity can be necessary or even wanted.

Some people buy luxury products because they're well-made and offer a high-quality experience. But others buy them because they want to signal their wealth and status.

Grocery stores commonly keep cheaper products on the bottom shelf. As you move up the shelves, prices generally increase.

Product placement strategies for stores have been used to influence customer buying decisions since the existence of stores. Current logistics make sense from a store's perspective because every inch of shelf space has a dollar value. From their perspective, it's logical to reserve the bottom shelf for storing items with limited demands, bulk items, oversized items and store brands.