2020 VW Bus: It’s Okay to Believe
VW’s emotional comeback video might make you a believer. The post 2020 VW Bus: It’s Okay to Believe appeared first on Smith House Design.
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Aunt Becky Goes to Jail, Rigging the System Makes Everyone a Loser
Earlier this year a bizarre news story broke about Hollywood celebrities bribing officials to admit their children into top universities. The most famous name attached to the scandal is Aunt Becky on...
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Summer 2019: Fun Changes to the Website and the Blog 🎉
We recently launched Version 3 of smithhousedesign.com, and we want to tell you about what we changed and why. Update 1: Video is Front and Center Last year we had some great victories and some great...
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Lessons in Adulthood: You Don’t have to Put Up with Jargon
I have always hated jargon. Why do we use made-up words and silly phrases? What are we trying to prove? What’s wrong with speaking clearly? Everyone should hate these made-up words as much as me....
View ArticleUnderstanding Productive Tensions
There’s a beautiful, productive tension between fundamentals and trends. This tension informs everything that we do here at smithHOUSE, everyday. If we rely only on fundamentals, we ignore great...
View ArticleOffice Drama? Understanding the Difference between Disagreement and Disobedience
Last year, I wrote a couple posts challenging the top of the org chart. In my first blog, I warned against cultures of blame, and encouraged leaders to create cultures of accountability. In my second...
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Hope for Entrepreneurs, Dispelling the First-Mover Advantage
I have some words of encouragement for ambition souls who are eager to graduate college and start a business. Or for young professionals who want to skip out of their full-time job and create...
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For Social Networks to Survive, They Must Solve the Problems that They Created
In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg painted a picture Facebook could become: a place where people could connect online in new and powerful ways. We could stay in touch with friends, and make new friends easier....
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2020 Chevy Corvette C8, a Harvard Business School Case Study without an Ending
I really didn’t want to write a blog about a Corvette. As a designer, I respect the Corvette’s beginnings, back at the 1950s and 1960s when we were flying into Outer Space and flying down the roads in...
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10 Fundamental Differences Between Design Gurus and Legit Designers
For reasons I cannot understand, I’ve found myself surrounded by gurus wherever I go. I literally can’t escape them: When I listen to sports talk radio in the morning, I hear commercials from personal...
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The World Agrees: Emojis are the Best / Worst Thing Ever
It’s strange to me that emojis have spread like wildfire. When you bring up the topic of emojis, it seems that people are both excited by emojis, but also have deep reservation. Yet somehow, they have...
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5 Things Nobody Tells You About Work / Life Balance
A constant storyline in your life and within our society is figuring out how to reconcile work and life. How can we be successful and live a good life? If getting crazy rich isn’t an option, how do...
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Color Trends: “Battleship”
Later in the blog, I want to illustrate a completely unexpected color trend of today, but first let’s dispose of this idea that 1) color trends are constant and that 2) color trends are predictable....
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Designing with Restraints (or) Why Most Cars Look the Same
While on a family vacation over the summer, we took the kids to Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, CA. I was unloading our kids from my trusty Honda Odyssey minivan, and noticed a strange sighting: 6 white...
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Redesigning Your Logo? 5 Most Common Branding Mistakes to Avoid
Designers can be very pretentious when they talk about their craft. This annoys me, so I am going to be authentic and approachable with this blog. No fancy words or fancy concepts. I genuinely want...
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10 Life-Giving Work Habits
Work is complicated and and hard. That’s why they call it “work.” If you want to maximize your day, you have to need creative habits that free up your brain to do the hard stuff. Here are TOP 10...
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Secret: Some Logos are Easier to Design than Others
Some companies are blessed by having the right mix of letters in their actual name. Of the 26 letters in the English alphabet, some letters are blessed with good genes that make them balanced and...
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If You Love Art, You Should Hate the Art World
In case you missed it, earlier this week a rich fool paid $120,000 at an art auction for a banana taped to a wall. A few days later, an attention-starved “performance artist” invaded the gallery, and...
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2020* ← Let’s Talk about that Big Fat Asterisk
I would like to suggest that we always write the year “2020” with an asterisk. Every email, every social media post, any reference to this calendar year deserves a big fat asterisk. Go ahead, try it....
View ArticleNo Title will Suffice
This was going to be a blog summarizing what we’ve been up to since the pandemic upended life as we know it. For anyone keeping score, it’s been 14 months and only one blog post to our website. In...
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