Musings: The Greatness Ceiling

Our short musings on design, branding, business and the human condition.

You will never be able to create or provide something that’s better than the organization you’re working for. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your branding or how excellent the strategy is, the end results will only be as good as the company itself. Paul Rand probably said it better: “[A logo] derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes. If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate.” If you can live within those confines, your best bet is to dive in and help make change alongside your client partners. If you believe it’s too hard to live under that ceiling, you’ll need to find better clients.

Oct 27 2011

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Musings: Getting There

Because fewer words are often more powerful, our musings are short thoughts on design, branding, business and the human condition.

Great work is hugely important, because it sets you apart, it gets results, maybe even wins awards. But how do you get there? If behind your successful outcomes lurks the wreckage of strained relationships, frustration, abused vendors, and shaking heads, is it worth it? You don’t want people describing your work with a caveat of “Yes, but…” People will remember the great work and results you do, but their most vivid memories will be how you treated people and went about your business — behind the curtain. That’s why it’s so crucial to reach your goals the right way.

Oct 7 2011

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Musings: Lawyer Up and Lose

These are short musings we’ve had on topics related to what we’re doing at Hexanine, in life, and beyond.

Lawyer Up and Lose

Scorching the landscape with C&Ds rarely wins you friends and probably hurts your brand image in the long run. Now that social media is maturing, we might even be able to measure how bad legal eagle actions affect the buzz around your organization. Maybe there’s a legal need to protect brand assets and preserve future profitability, but that needs to be weighed against the financial damage that turning brand fans into enemies can cause.

Sep 26 2011

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Musings: Authenticity

Because some insights are short and sweet, we’re adding something new to our writing. “Musings” will be some short thoughts we’ve had on topics related to what we’re doing at Hexanine, in life, and beyond.

Balancing Authenticity and Professionalism

It’s hard to be real and vulnerable, showing your mistakes and stepping out from behind the curtain of perceived perfection. This seems at odds with the cultural veneer of professionalism that we’ve come to expect from “the experts” in a field. But maybe showing a little bit of leg, revealing some of our humanity, doesn’t highlight our flaws as much as it reminds us of how much we are all alike.

Sep 21 2011

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Business Thoughts For Creative Minds

Business Thoughts For Creative People

Very few in our industry get into the design profession to run a business. For many creatives, business is the dirty word you have to use in order to keep doing the “fun” stuff — the creative and strategic acts of a design firm. But get far enough down the road, and you realize that managing a firm or business (whether you’re a designer, developer, marketer, or otherwise) is a great path to doing the kind of work you really love. Business stuff isn’t bad, and in fact, we’ve learned tons working closely with clients, managing teams, building relationships, and chasing down new projects. Along the way, we’ve found bits of hard-won wisdom that seem unrelated to design. But it’s crucial stuff — the kinds of knowledge that applies not only to design, but also to life in general. We have a lot of lessons to share (both good and bad), but here are a few worth repeating.

Read on…

Sep 20 2011

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Aug 5 2011

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Open Letter to CDOT: Steer Away From Crowdsourcing

An Open Letter to CDOT Chicago Department of Transportation

UPDATE: We received a Twitter reply from @CDOTNews. See the end of the post for details.

To:
Gabe Klein, Commissioner of CDOT
Chicago Department of Transportation
30 N. LaSalle Street
Suite 1100
Chicago, IL 60602
cc: Rahm Emmanuel

Dear Commissioner Klein and Mayor Emmanuel,

It’s no secret that the city of Chicago currently finds itself in a challenging financial state. The economy and the previous administration’s decisions and poor budget planning have left our city with the desperate need to do more with less. Many organizations and businesses face similar challenges — and there are a lot of ways to cut costs, trim expenditures, and stretch the city’s money. But crowdsourcing the new CDOT logo is a terrible idea.

Read on…

Jul 11 2011

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Behind The Design: Our SUPER iam8bit Book

We’re wrapping up the production on a book we’ve designed called “SUPER iam8bit: More Art Inspired By Classic Video Games of the ’80s.” The book was written by our partners at iam8bit. Hexanine designed the entire volume, from cover to cover, and we’re also co-publishing it under our new Plastic Highway imprint.

While the book won’t be officially released until next month, here are some fun moments we’ve had during the process:

Super iam8bit cover shoot

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Jul 8 2011

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Why Create When You Can Criticize?

Why Create When You Can Criticize?

There are so many voices out there.

The ubiquity of cloud computing, publishing software, and mobile devices have made it incredibly easy to make ourselves heard — and that’s great thing, whether it’s pro-democracy tweets from Chile or cat videos on YouTube. Creative collaboration, political dissent, freedom of speech, and organizational innovation have all benefited from a massive uptick in opinions and knowledge sharing. While the number of worldwide creators has skyrocketed through unique platforms — Behance, Etsy, Kickstarter, this also seems to have birthed a dark side.

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Jun 6 2011

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Tomorrow Is A Great Time For Design

Tomorrow is a great time for design

Ferris Bueller said it well:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It seems like every other day introduces a new platform, initiative, standard or way of working that forces us to question (if not completely rethink) what we do as designers and how we work.

The changes in our design landscape are ubiquitous and cut across disciplines and borders: gestural computing, social media, ePubs, mobile devices, outsourcing, cloud computing, 3D printing, design thinking – but it’s not going to help us to be afraid of these changes. In some small ways, our own moment seems to parallel the seismic shift in technology that began with the introduction of affordable desktop publishing in the mid-80s.
Read on…

Apr 11 2011

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