Last week’s post resulted in a number of lovely emails and positive feedback. Thank you for all of your kind words! Writing these articles is a lot of fun, but getting little notes from you makes it even more enjoyable! It’s a beautiful day here in Vancouver, and what better way to start it than with a few random observations?

The invasion of design has begun, fueled by an army of talented newcomers and low-cost offshore services. This new breed trades methodology for mimicry and by doing so radically undercuts pricing, sometimes even working for free. Like it or not, supply and demand in the design industry is undergoing upheaval. Worse yet, for design buyers it’s getting harder to differentiate between good and bad design.

Things remain interesting around smashLAB. (Interesting is code for “really great and also really fucking hard”.) Lots of new lessons for us, including some that have taught us a little humility, which I’ll talk about in a future post. That being said, here are a few more random observations.

Last night I tweeted that I had achieved and maintained “inbox zero” nirvana. I’m sure there are countless posts on the topic, but thought I’d briefly share how I made sense of the communication barrage that I was once drowning in.

Robert is the finest pastry chef in the city. He is so because he loves his craft. Every ingredient is of the highest quality, his kitchen is pristine, and he spends countless hours working to nurture staff that care as much he does. As a result, his bakery has become well renowned for mouthwatering delights.

The past few months have been full of wild ups and downs. My wife has been privy to me coming home and looking like I’m going to fall down from exhaustion, freak-out completely, or dance on the ceiling. (Oh, what a feeling!) I’ve made note of some points for myself, and thought I’d share them with you (you can also read #1, #2, and #3). Here goes…

I don’t know your design process, so, it would be foolish for me to generalize. For the sake of this post however, I’m going to have to. When I’m finished you can feel free to tell me that: (A) I’m a moron, (B) It won’t work; or, (C) This is how you always did it anyways. Any of those are fine–including (D) You might be on to something. Regardless, here’s my hypothesis.

It’s a September Friday and it looks as though the sun may make an appearance. I’m in one of those “places” where everything seems to be moving along pretty nicely. As such, I thought I’d share another set of random observations (there are others here and here).

I’m a big believer in design firms taking on self-directed projects. They are a wonderful outlet and afford designers the opportunity to “own” something, which is rather rare in most client-driven projects. In fact, I presented a Thinkshop on this topic at the Y Conference in lovely San Diego last spring.

In the past year we’ve been approached by six different agencies wishing to acquire smashLAB. Some were big players, two were regional firms, and the others were working as agents for other operations. Needless to say, we found all of this quite flattering, even if it wasn’t really on our agenda.