Small Budget. BIG Impression. Dress your event for the success you want. I’ve always told my clients: You don’t have to have a huge budget to look like a million bucks. Think of it as dressing for success. You may not have a closet full of expensive clothes, but you can still walk into the room looking polished, confident and put together. Your business, organization or nonprofit should do the same thing. People can’t see your bank account. They can see your brand. And if your brand looks professional, you look professional. “We Don’t Have the Budget” Is the Beginning of the Conversation I’ve heard some version of this throughout my career: We’d love to do that, but we don’t have the budget. Fair enough. Budgets are real. I’ve worked with enormous budgets, tiny budgets and just about everything in between. But not having the money for the obvious solution doesn’t mean there isn’t another solution. It means you have to start thinking creatively. Can someone sponsor it? Can someone donate it? Can you trade for it? Is there a nonprofit rate? Can you produce it differently? Can you do fewer things and do them better? Is there something you can sell that helps pay for something else? Can five smaller sponsors accomplish what you were hoping one large sponsor would do? A small budget requires more creativity, not lower standards. Don’t Automatically Cut the Thing Everyone Sees One of the first things organizations tend to cut when money gets tight is marketing. And graphic design is particularly vulnerable because somebody inevitably says, “We can just do that ourselves.” Yes. You probably can. Someone in the office has Canva. Someone knows PowerPoint. Someone has AI. Somebody’s secretary can put the invitation together. But being able to make something and knowing what to make are two entirely different things. Your graphic design isn’t decoration added after all the important decisions have been made. It’s your brand showing up in public. Your invitation is your brand. Your website is your brand. Your signage is your brand. Your event program is your brand. The presentation on the screen is your brand. The materials sitting on the tables are your brand. If all of those things look amateur, your organization looks amateur. If your brand doesn’t look good, you don’t look good. So if you can’t afford the standard rate for professional graphic design, don’t immediately decide you don’t need professional graphic design. Ask questions. Perhaps the designer offers a nonprofit rate. Perhaps a sponsor would be willing to underwrite the design. Maybe there’s an appropriate trade. Maybe someone wants to sponsor the printing. And no, being a nonprofit doesn’t mean a designer, photographer, printer or anyone else automatically owes you free work. Their time has value too. The point is to look for a solution that works for everyone. Stop Thinking of Sponsorship as One Giant Check This is something I think nonprofits and event planners can be particularly creative about. When people hear “sponsor,” they often imagine finding one company willing to write a very large check. It doesn’t have to work that way. One company might sponsor the valet parking. Another might sponsor the drinks. Someone else might underwrite the printing. Another sponsor might cover photography, entertainment, signage or some other part of the evening. A printer may be willing to provide printing in exchange for appropriate recognition in the event program. You might sell T-shirts or another piece of merchandise that generates revenue. Depending on the applicable rules, an opportunity drawing or donated experience may create another source of funds. Suddenly, one enormous financial problem has become several smaller problems—and smaller problems are often much easier to solve. That’s creative thinking too. Creativity isn’t confined to choosing a typeface or designing a logo. Sometimes creativity is figuring out how to make the thing possible in the first place. Do Less. Just Don’t Do It Worse. Sometimes the answer really is that you can’t afford everything you wanted. That’s okay. Maybe instead of twelve mediocre pieces, you produce six excellent ones. Maybe you simplify the invitation instead of making it look cheap. Maybe you find a clever production solution instead of trying to imitate an expensive one badly. There’s a big difference between simple and cheap-looking. Good design knows that difference. When the budget gets smaller, every decision becomes more important. There’s less room for waste, less room for mistakes and less money available to fix something that didn’t work. That’s when experience can actually become more valuable, not less. And Yes, Now There’s AI AI has added one more temptation. Why do I need a designer? AI can do it. AI can certainly help stretch a budget. I use it myself. But it still needs someone who understands the brand, hierarchy, strategy and what the communication is supposed to accomplish. AI can confidently tell you it has created the perfect solution. Confidence and correctness are not the same thing. Use the tool. Just don’t confuse having a tool with having an art director. Looking Good Can Help Pay for Next Year Here’s something organizations sometimes overlook. The way this year’s event looks can affect your ability to attract sponsors for the next one. Sponsors are paying attention too. If a potential sponsor sees a polished, professional event where the organization presents itself beautifully and its existing sponsors are represented well, that company can imagine its own name being associated with the event. That matters. A sponsor isn’t simply giving you money. They’re putting their brand next to yours. Make them want to. If your event looks thrown together, potential sponsors may wonder how their company is going to look when its logo appears on your materials. But when you present yourself professionally, you build credibility. And credibility has value. Looking successful can help create future success. The professional image you invest in today may be part of what attracts the sponsor who helps pay for tomorrow. Look Like a Million Bucks A limited budget is a limitation. It doesn’t have to become an identity. Don’t advertise how little money you have by lowering your standards. Start asking different questions. Who could help? What could be sponsored? What could be traded? What could be simplified? What could generate revenue? What could we do differently? What haven’t we thought of yet? Sometimes the best creative solution doesn’t begin with a sketch. It begins when somebody says, “We can’t afford that.” And instead of accepting that as the end of the conversation, somebody else says: “Okay. So how else can we do it?” You don’t need a million-dollar budget to look like a million bucks. You just need to know where to spend, where to save—and when to get creative. Your budget may be small. Your standards don’t have to be.

AI customer service: “I hear you.” Then it hands your complaint back in a mirror and gives itself five stars for empathy. Customer service should sound human—and back its words with action. I recently received a reply from Custom Ink after explaining that the experience had cost them my confidence, my future business, and my recommendations to clients. The response told me the impact went beyond a single order. It repeated that losing my confidence as a creative professional and losing the referrals that came with it was serious. It even said trust has to be earned. All the right sentiments. Nicely arranged. And somehow, it still felt as if nobody had really heard me. Then came the sign-off: “Thank you again for choosing Custom Ink!” I had just explained that I would not choose them again. That last line made the whole message feel less like a conversation and more like a system had found the “sympathetic customer response” button. I can’t say for certain who wrote the email or how much AI was involved. I can say it reads as AI-washed: polished until the human details disappeared. And I can smell AI a mile away. But this isn’t only about one company or one email. Customer service is often the one place where a person comes face to face with a company after something has gone wrong. That is exactly when the human touch matters. Empathy isn’t an echo Repeating a customer’s own words back to them doesn’t prove you listened. It can make the reply feel even more robotic, especially when those words are dressed up in formal sympathy. A customer doesn’t need a company to restate the emotional impact of the problem. They need someone to understand what happened, answer the actual concern, and say what comes next. A response can be brief and still feel human if it is specific and honest. A real response might say: “I reviewed your order and the messages. Here is what went wrong on our end, here is what I can do now, and here is what I’m doing to keep this from happening again.” Then the company has to follow through. That’s not a magic apology formula. The point is that the reply answers the situation instead of performing concern. When the words had to carry the weight A much bigger example came in 1982, when seven people died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area. The capsules had been tampered with after they left the factory. Johnson & Johnson could have limited its response to the affected lots. Instead, the company pulled Tylenol capsules from store shelves nationwide, urged people to use tablets, offered to replace capsules, and worked to bring the product back in tamper-resistant packaging. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History describes the decision as taking responsibility and pulling all capsules from stores nationwide. A contemporary Washington Post account reported that the company kept escalating its response and accepted the enormous cost of destroying and replacing the product. The advertising matters here, too—but the words did not do the job by themselves. A TV spot produced by Compton Advertising featured McNeil’s medical director, Dr. Thomas Gates. He spoke directly about the tampering, what the company had already done, and what it would do next. One line was: “We will now work even harder to keep it.” The ad then told capsule users to use tablets and explained that capsules would return in tamper-resistant containers. Read UPI’s October 1982 report, which quotes portions of the ad’s spoken copy. You can also watch a Retro Report video about the Tylenol crisis and response, with archival footage. Imagine if the spot had ended with, “Thank you for using Tylenol for your pain relief!” It would have sounded about as human as thanking a customer for choosing a company she had just told you she would never use again. I haven’t found a source crediting an individual copywriter for that spot, so I won’t invent one. What we can see is the craft: the message named the danger, gave people useful instructions, explained the company’s actions, and made a promise the public could check against what happened next. The words had a real job to do. Imagine replacing that with a generic, AI-polished paragraph: “We understand that recent events have affected your confidence. Your safety is our top priority, and we are committed to rebuilding trust.” It sounds appropriately concerned. It also leaves out what a person urgently needs to know: Should I take the capsules? What is the company doing? What happens next? AI could help write a clear version of the Tylenol message if it had the facts and a careful brief. A person still has to decide which facts belong, which promises are real, and what the audience needs first. That judgment is part of the writing. The craft of a well-written apology—or any message delivered at a moment of real concern—is an art. Don’t wash the person out AI can sort messages, find order details, and help prepare a first draft. Those are useful jobs. But when a customer asks for help, someone at the company has to take responsibility for the reply. They need to check whether it fits the situation, answers the question, and says something the company can actually stand behind. A polished message can sound caring while doing none of the work of caring. It can reflect the customer’s frustration back in elegant language and still leave them with no sense that anyone took action. Customer service should feel completely human—humanoid, even. Not a customer’s own words sent back in a corporate cardigan. Not a generic apology with the customer’s name dropped in. A real response from someone who understands there is a person on the other end of the email. Thank you, Custom Ink, for giving me the idea for this blog post. I’ll be using this experience as an example. For companies using AI in customer service: let it help with the work. Don’t let it wash the human being out of the reply. Sources ● Smithsonian National Museum of American History: “Tough Business Decisions” ● The Washington Post, October 11, 1982: “Tylenol’s Maker Shows How to Respond to Crisis” ● UPI Archives, October 25, 1982: “TV ad asks viewers to trust makers of Tylenol” ● Retro Report: “A Trusted Pill Turned Deadly. How Tylenol Made a Comeback”

The tools got smaller. The job got bigger. And somehow, everybody ended up sitting in the designer’s chair. When I started as an art director, design was a team sport. There were art directors and designers. Typesetters. Retouchers. Production artists. Photographers. Illustrators. Writers. Prepress people. Each person had a specialty, and you relied on all of them to get the finished piece out the door. Then computers arrived. And slowly, all those people started sitting in my chair. Suddenly I wasn't just designing. I was typesetting. Retouching photographs. Preparing files for production. Writing copy. Troubleshooting software. Managing color. Building presentations. Creating websites. Fixing files. Explaining resolution. I became my own IT department. And occasionally, I became my IT department because a client broke my computer. Just Undo That Last One Years ago, I was restoring an old photograph on my Macintosh IIsi. This was long before autosave, and the little IIsi was already working hard. I had discovered layers, and apparently believed the appropriate number of layers was all of them. A client insisted on sitting beside me while I worked because he thought the restoration was taking too long. At one point he said, “Just undo that last one.” Then he reached over and hit a keyboard command. On my Mac. He was a PC guy. Everything disappeared. Hours of work. I remember frantically trying to figure out what he'd done, searching the early Internet over an AOL dial-up connection while contemplating the remains of my afternoon. Then he argued with me about the billable time it took to redo the work. That experience taught me a rule I still use today: You may watch. You may have an opinion. But do not touch my keyboard. People sometimes laugh when I say it. Those people are asked to step back. 300 DPI Meets Las Vegas Of course, clients weren't responsible for every technical lesson I learned. I once created a huge background graphic for a friend who had moved to Las Vegas. It was going behind television newscasters—something like 180 inches across. I knew print production, so naturally I built it at 300 dpi. With multiple layers. The file was around 400 MB, which at the time wasn't so much a file as a cry for help. My friend loved it. He sent me roses and told me it was the best background they'd ever had. The technical guy apparently had a somewhat different reaction. Both of them were right. The design worked beautifully. The file was ridiculous. That's how we learned. The tools were changing underneath us, and the rules we knew from one medium didn't always apply to the next. Then the Job Kept Growing Desktop publishing didn't eliminate the need for expertise. It simply moved more of that expertise onto fewer desks. Today, on a single project, I may be the art director, designer, typesetter, retoucher, production artist, prepress technician, writer, proofreader, image restorer, presentation designer, webmaster, file troubleshooter and occasional IT department. I check resolution. I check bleed. I check color spaces. I rebuild logos. I repair photographs. I notice when the supplied logo isn't actually the company's logo. I notice when something that looks perfectly fine on a monitor is going to fall apart in print. And now there's another person sitting in my chair. “AI Can Do That.” That's the newest one. Someone inevitably says, “AI can do that.” And sometimes it can. Until you look closely. Suddenly nobody quite looks like themselves. Hands have entered another dimension. Logos have been creatively reinterpreted. Type has become an unidentified language. And everyone looks as though they've been sealed inside a plastic container. Then the file comes to me. Now my job isn't simply to design something. It's to determine what AI changed, what it invented, what it destroyed, and whether any of it can be repaired without creating an entirely new problem. AI is an extraordinary tool. I use it myself. But “AI can do it” and “AI did it correctly” are two very different sentences. And apparently, checking the difference is another person sitting in my chair. “But I Can Do This Myself.” Of course you can. Or: “I found someone who'll do it for $15.” You probably did. But the question isn't whether someone can operate the software. The question is whether they know what they're looking at. Do they know what's missing? Do they know what will happen at the printer? Do they know when a photograph doesn't contain enough information to reproduce at the requested size? Do they know why a logo shouldn't be casually reconstructed? Do they know which problems can be fixed—and which ones need to go back to the client before they become expensive? More importantly: Do they know what they don't know? Software has made it extraordinarily easy to make something. AI has made it extraordinarily easy to make even more things. Experience is what tells you whether any of those things will actually work. My first little Macintosh struggled because I gave it too many layers. Today my computer can handle things I couldn't have imagined then. But there are considerably more people sitting in my chair. And somehow, we're all still expected to fit into the same hourly rate. Same designer. A much bigger job.

The best ideas don't just land. They keep flying. Or, in This Case, Wings Some ideas solve the assignment. The better ones keep going. Years ago, I was sitting in a meeting about a marketing piece for an aviation event. Everyone was talking about how to make the piece stand out. Maybe it needed an unusual fold. Maybe it needed an interesting shape. Maybe there was something clever we could do with the printing. And, as usually happens when you start talking about unusual folds and shapes, the conversation eventually got around to all the reasons those things are difficult to produce and mail. I asked a simple question: How is this going to be distributed? It wasn’t going to be mailed. It was going to be handed out. Well, that changed everything. I picked up a piece of paper, folded it into a paper airplane and sent it sailing across the room. Why don’t we make the piece a paper airplane? Suddenly, the production problem wasn’t a problem. The fold was the idea. And for me, that idea had started a very long time before that meeting. My First Aeronautical Engineer When I was a kid, my father and I used to have paper-airplane contests. My dad was an electrical engineer who worked with Honeywell on NASA-related projects, so naturally we couldn’t just fold one airplane and call it a day. We engineered them. He would show me how changing a fold changed the way the plane flew. We’d make different shapes and test them across the room. Some flew farther. Some flew straighter. Some probably went directly into the furniture. But we kept changing them and trying again. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was teaching me something I would use for the rest of my career: Don’t just make something. Ask what else it can do. Years later, sitting in that aviation meeting, all of that came back without my consciously looking for it. Paper. Airplanes. Flight. Of course. But the Idea Didn’t Stop There The piece itself worked, but there was another opportunity. We had a call to action. People could request additional sales information after the event. Normally, you would fulfill that request, send the material and consider the job finished. But why should the idea end just because the first piece had done its job? Along with the requested information, we sent instructions for making a better paper airplane. Now the concept had traveled from the event into the follow-up. The first airplane got their attention. The second one continued the conversation. That’s what I mean when I say: Give your ideas legs. Or, in this case, wings. Don’t Decorate the Idea. Extend It. This is something I think gets lost when people talk about branding and design. They’ll create a visual device for an invitation and then abandon it for the program. They’ll have a wonderful idea for an ad and forget about it when they get to the event. They’ll develop a concept for a campaign and then treat every subsequent piece as another isolated assignment. That’s decoration. A good concept should be able to travel. If you’ve found an idea that’s strong enough, ask: Where else can it go? Can the invitation become part of the event? Can the packaging become part of the experience? Can the response mechanism continue the joke? Can the follow-up bring people back to the original idea? Can something people were going to throw away become something they want to play with, keep or show somebody else? That’s when design stops being a collection of individual pieces and becomes an experience. Sometimes the Best Ideas Have Been Waiting for You I certainly wasn’t sitting in that meeting thinking about being a little girl making paper airplanes with my father. But somewhere in my head, that experience was still there. That’s one of the wonderful things about being a creative person. Nothing is really wasted. The odd things you’ve seen. The places you’ve been. The people you’ve known. The ridiculous things you’ve tried. The things somebody taught you when you were eight years old. They all go into this enormous mental drawer. And then one day, somebody gives you a problem. You open the drawer. And something flies out. Literally, in this case. So when you have a good idea, don’t stop when you’ve solved the first assignment. See where else it can go. Give it legs. Give it another chapter. Give people another reason to remember it. And every once in a while… give it wings and see how far it can fly.

AI "Ingredients" are Almost Right. Apparently, somewhere along the way, the logo stopped being a piece of finished artwork and became more of a suggestion. A jumping-off point. A general direction. Something kind of like this, only make it sparkle. Welcome to branding in the age of AI. And before anyone gets nervous, I use AI. I like AI. AI is enormously useful. But AI has also introduced us to a fascinating new category of artwork: The logo that looks exactly like your logo until you actually look at it. The letters are almost right. The spacing is almost right. The proportions are almost right. The color is somewhere in the general neighborhood. And there it sits in the middle of an otherwise beautiful AI-generated ad looking perfectly confident. Just like it belongs there. It does not. Pantone? How Quaint. For decades, companies went to enormous trouble to establish specific brand colors. Not “blue.” Not “a nice blue.” Not “something blue-ish that works with the background.” This blue. Pantone numbers were specified. CMYK builds were established. RGB and HEX equivalents were documented. Designers created brand standards explaining exactly how those colors should be reproduced. But apparently we don’t need any of that anymore. Because now AI can make your logo sparkle. It can make it metallic. It can make it glow. It can make it look like it was carved out of ice, dipped in rose gold and illuminated from behind by the northern lights. Which is fabulous. Unless your logo isn’t supposed to do any of those things. Your corporate color did not suddenly become “whatever looks pretty in this particular ad.” A Pantone color is a specification. Not a mood. And While We’re Here, Those Letters Aren’t Suggestions Either. Many logos use customized typography. A letter may have been redrawn. Kerning may have been adjusted manually. Shapes may have been altered. The relationship between the symbol and the type may have been carefully calculated. That little space between two letters that nobody notices? Someone noticed. Someone probably spent an afternoon on it. There may also be an X-space or clear-space rule determining how close other elements can come to the logo. There may be minimum reproduction sizes. Approved horizontal and vertical configurations. Rules governing when the symbol can appear without the name. Those things aren’t there because a designer had an unusually slow Tuesday. They’re there to protect the brand. “But It Looks Right.” This may become the new version of my favorite production sentence: “But it looks right on my screen.” AI is extraordinarily good at creating things that look right. That’s one of its strengths. And one of its dangers. Give it a company’s logo and ask it to create an advertisement and it may produce something gorgeous. It may also redraw the logo. Slightly. Change a letter. Slightly. Stretch it. Slightly. Alter the color. Slightly. Move things around. Slightly. And when all those slightlies get together, congratulations: You have a brand-new logo nobody approved. And the same thing is beginning to happen to the rest of the ad. It looks finished. The lighting is beautiful. The typography is sitting there confidently. The photograph looks expensive. Everything has shadows and depth and perhaps a tasteful little glow. You look at it and think: Well, that’s done. Except maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s square and the publication needs a full page. Maybe the image that looks enormous on your phone is nowhere near large enough for print. Maybe the copy is baked into the image. Maybe the type isn’t editable. Maybe there’s no bleed. Maybe there’s no room to create bleed. Maybe the logo is wrong. Maybe the entire beautiful thing is essentially one flattened picture that now has to be pulled apart, rebuilt and recreated by somebody who knows what the final piece actually needs to do. But boy, does it look pretty. And therein lies the problem. Looks Branded ≠ Is on Brand. This distinction is going to become increasingly important as more people create their own advertising with AI. An ad can look branded because it contains approximately the right colors, approximately the right typeface and something resembling the company logo. That doesn’t make it brand compliant. And an ad can look professionally designed without actually being professionally built. Those are two entirely different things. The real approved logo should be placed into the finished artwork from the original master file whenever possible. Not recreated. Not interpreted. Not “enhanced.” And definitely not extracted from the magical sparkly version AI decided would really make the brand pop. AI can create the environment around the logo. The logo itself should remain the logo. Welcome to the TV Dinner School of Design. This is where I keep thinking about TV dinners. They look surprisingly good on the box. Everything is right there. Meat. Potatoes. Vegetable. Dessert. There may even be a sprig of parsley in the photograph, although I have yet to open a frozen dinner and discover that someone at the factory thoughtfully tucked fresh parsley beside my mashed potatoes. You heat it up. You peel back the plastic. And technically, dinner has been served. That doesn’t mean anybody cooked. And that, increasingly, is what worries me about the phrase: “But I already designed it.” Sometimes what I’m being handed is the graphic-design equivalent of a TV dinner. Everything appears to be there. Headline? Check. Picture? Check. Logo? Sort of. Pretty background? Absolutely. Sparkle? Naturally. It has been assembled, heated up and presented in a container. And from six feet away, it looks like dinner. But design isn't just putting all the ingredients into the tray. Someone still has to know whether the ingredients work together. Someone has to know what size the tray is. Someone has to know whether it can survive the oven. Someone has to notice that the logo has quietly turned into something else while everybody was admiring the mashed potatoes. Pretty is not the same as prepared. And that distinction matters. For years, graphic designers occasionally heard some version of: “So basically, you make things look pretty.” Well. Now we actually have software that can make things look pretty. Extremely pretty. Instantly pretty. Sometimes breathtakingly pretty. And that may finally demonstrate that making something pretty was never the entire job. Because after the pretty part comes the annoying stuff. Is it the correct size? Is it the correct resolution? Are the colors correct? Is the typography correct? Is the logo correct? Will it reproduce? Will it scale? Can it be edited? Does it meet the publication specifications? Can somebody actually print the damn thing? That is the part nobody notices when it's done correctly. They just notice when it isn't. AI didn't eliminate graphic design. In a strange way, it may be doing a spectacular job of demonstrating what graphic designers were doing all along. Protect the Boring Stuff. Brand standards aren’t particularly exciting. Nobody gathers the family around after dinner to read the corporate identity manual. Kids! Come quickly! They’ve increased the minimum clear space to 0.5X! But that boring little document is what keeps a company looking like the same company everywhere it appears. And your brand shouldn’t become a TV dinner either: assembled quickly, heated up in a few minutes and served in whatever shape the container happens to allow. It may be convenient. It may even look surprisingly good. But it doesn’t have the same nutrients. Convenient is not the same as considered. And we’re entering a period when protecting those standards is going to matter more, not less. Because creating advertising is becoming easier. Creating something that looks professional is becoming easier. Creating something that looks branded is becoming easier. And creating something that is subtly, convincingly and beautifully wrong is becoming easier too. So use AI. Have fun with it. Make the background spectacular. Make the lighting dramatic. Make the product float through space if that’s what the concept calls for. Hell, make the entire ad sparkle. Just leave the logo alone. Because your logo is not an AI prompt. It’s not an interpretation. It’s not a starting point. And it is definitely not a suggestion. It’s your brand. Protect it.

Pay no attention to the production problems behind the curtain! Every few years, a new piece of software arrives that is going to make designers obsolete. I know this because I have apparently been becoming obsolete for decades. First, everyone got Microsoft Word. Suddenly, people discovered fonts. ALL the fonts. Why use one when six are sitting right there? Then came PageMaker. Then Publisher. Then PowerPoint started moonlighting as a design program. And now we have Canva. And AI. Each new arrival comes with essentially the same promise: Congratulations! You can now do this yourself. And you can. Sort of. Which brings me to one of the most terrifying sentences in the English language: “I already designed it. I just need you to…” Whatever comes after that sentence is rarely “admire it.” Pay No Attention to That File Behind the Curtain I actually like Canva. There. I said it. Canva is terrific at making something look remarkably finished remarkably quickly. It gives people access to layouts, typography, imagery and templates they never had before. That’s a good thing. But sometimes Canva reminds me a little of The Wizard of Oz. Everything looks magnificent up front. There are lights!There is smoke!There is an enormous green floating head! Then somebody pulls back the curtain. And behind it is a 72-dpi JPEG that needs to become a four-foot banner. Toto, we have a problem. The file looked beautiful on the screen. Unfortunately, the printing press has never been particularly impressed by the screen. It wants bleeds. It wants resolution. It wants the correct color space. It wants fonts that actually exist. It wants logos that aren't tiny JPEGs somebody found in an email from 2017. The printing press is extremely needy. “But It Looks Right on My Screen” It does. I believe you. But here's another favorite: “It's the right size. I can see it.” Seeing it is not, unfortunately, a unit of measurement. A full-page ad that is supposed to be 8.5 × 11 inches cannot be 7.25 × 9.5 because it looked approximately full-page on your laptop. A quarter-page ad is not simply a full-page ad made smaller. And an 11 × 17 poster does not become a 24 × 36 poster because somebody grabs a corner and drags. Printers are annoyingly literal about these things. They want actual dimensions. Sometimes they even want an eighth-inch bleed, which is printer language for: “Yes, we really do intend to cut some of this off.” And then there are proportions. If you designed something square and now need it horizontal, we haven't encountered a sizing problem. We have encountered a redesign. This is also why I don't determine whether my car needs an oil change by looking at a photograph of the car. There are things happening underneath. Design has always had an underneath. Hierarchy. Composition. Typography. Color. Production. Resolution. Paper. Ink. Folding. Binding. File preparation. And the deeply glamorous skill of knowing that if you put important copy THERE, the bindery is going to chop it off. Nobody puts that part in the software commercial. Owning the Tool Has Never Been the Same as Knowing the Craft I own a very nice set of kitchen knives. This has not made me a chef. I have a sewing machine. Dolce & Gabbana has yet to call. I own a toolbox. For the safety of everyone in my building, this does not make me a contractor. Software works the same way. The program can give you the tools. It cannot automatically give you the years spent learning when to use them, when not to use them, and when to quietly back away from the drop shadow. That last one takes experience. And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen: AI AI is the newest version of the same story. Except this time the software talks back. And with confidence. Extraordinary confidence. AI can write. It can make pictures. It can organize information. It can generate ideas. It can alphabetize a giant list in approximately the amount of time it takes me to say, “Oh God, I have to alphabetize this.” I use it. I like it. It saves me enormous amounts of time. But occasionally AI will hand you something completely wrong with the confidence of a maître d' informing you that you made the reservation for Thursday and today is Wednesday. This is why AI doesn't eliminate the need for skill. It makes skill even more important. Because now someone has to know when the machine is brilliant… …and when the machine has just made something up and put it in a very nice sentence. The Good News You don't need to be a designer to use Canva. You don't need to be a writer to use AI. You don't need to be a photographer to take a terrific photograph with your phone. That's the wonderful part. These tools have put creative capabilities into millions of hands. Use them. Make things. Experiment. Have fun. Bring me your Canva file. Bring me your AI idea. Bring me the thing you created in PowerPoint because that was the only program you knew how to use. I promise I will not judge you. Okay. I may judge the drop shadow. But never you. Because the software isn't the skill. Knowing what to do with it is. And apparently, after Word, PageMaker, Publisher, PowerPoint, Canva and AI… I'm still not obsolete. Frankly, I'm beginning to think they may be bluffing.

the problem line up There is a very specific moment in almost every project when someone realizes there is a problem. And there is an equally specific moment when they decide not to tell the designer. Why? I have no idea. Perhaps they think the problem will become embarrassed and leave on its own. It will not. Problems are remarkably self-assured. They sit quietly in the corner, grow several heads, invite friends, order cocktails, and wait until the deadline is six hours away before making their grand entrance. That is usually when I get the email. “Small issue.” There is almost never anything small after the words small issue. It is generally followed by something like: “We changed the size.” “The printer needs it today.” “Legal has a few comments.” Or my personal favorite: “We may need to rethink the whole thing.” Wonderful. And what time does the printer close? Report the problem before it becomes a disaster! Tell Me When It’s Still Fixable I have been doing this long enough to know that problems happen. Files arrive late. Copy changes. Someone forgot a logo. Someone approved the wrong photo. The printer suddenly needs something different. A person who apparently did not exist during the entire approval process suddenly materializes and has several strong opinions. Fine. That is work. What makes it difficult is not the problem. It is finding out about the problem after everyone else has known about it for three days. Because now we are not solving a problem. We are performing emergency surgery on a brochure while someone stands behind us asking how long it will take. Designers Are Actually Very Good at Solving Problems That is, in fact, most of the job. People think graphic design is about making things pretty. That is the visible part. The invisible part is constantly solving small problems so the final piece looks effortless. The photo doesn’t fit. The headline is too long. The copy is too short. The copy is too long. The logo has changed. The logo should not have changed. Someone wants twelve things in a space designed for six. Someone else wants one of those twelve things much bigger. And then, just for sport, another person wants everything centered. This is normal. Give me the problem early and I can usually give you options. Give me the problem late and I can usually give you one option: Whatever we can still get done without violating the laws of physics. Those are very different conversations. There Is No Prize for Hiding It Sometimes I think people are afraid to tell the designer something has gone wrong because they think we will be annoyed. Maybe. For five minutes. But I promise you, I will be considerably more annoyed when I discover it myself at 11:30 at night. Especially if someone then says: “Oh yes, we knew about that.” Excellent. Thank you for allowing the problem time to mature. Perhaps we can bottle it and sell it as a reserve. Early Problems Are Cheap This is the part people forget. A problem discovered early is usually inexpensive. Change the copy. Swap the photo. Move the section. Adjust the schedule. Make another version. Done. A problem discovered after everything is approved, packaged, uploaded, sent to the printer, reviewed by seventeen people, and blessed by legal is no longer a problem. It is an event. Now everyone is involved. Emails multiply. People are copied. Then more people are copied. Then someone replies all. Then someone who has never seen the project before joins the conversation and says: “Just a thought…” No. At this point I do not want a thought. I want a time machine. “Couldn’t We Just…” There are four words that should make every designer nervous: “Couldn’t we just…” Because whatever follows is never just anything. “Couldn’t we just make this one photo bigger?” “Couldn’t we just add another page?” “Couldn’t we just move everything around?” “Couldn’t we just change the size?” Of course. And while we are at it, perhaps we could just rebuild the kitchen because the toaster moved. Small changes have a funny way of dragging six other things behind them. That is why designers occasionally stare at you after you say just. We are calculating the blast radius. I Would Rather Hear Bad News Early This applies to clients, account people, printers, vendors, everyone. Tell me. The file is wrong. Fine. The dimensions changed. Fine. You hate the photo. Fine. You forgot an entire page. Not ideal, but still tell me. There is something wonderfully efficient about knowing the truth while there is still time to do something useful with it. What I cannot work with is surprise. Especially surprise wearing a deadline. The Designer Is Not the Last Stop This may be the part I wish more people understood. The designer should not be the person brought in after every other person has already discussed the problem. If the problem affects the design, bring the designer into the conversation. Early. I may have a solution nobody else has considered. I may tell you something is impossible. I may tell you it is easy. I may tell you it will take three hours instead of three days. But at least we will know. Because sitting around a conference table speculating about what the designer might be able to do is certainly one way to spend an afternoon. Calling the designer is generally faster. Bring Me the Actual Problem Not the polished version. Not the version everyone has already agreed upon. Not the version where someone has attempted to solve it in PowerPoint. Please, especially not that one. Bring me the actual problem. This is wrong. This is missing. This does not fit. We changed our minds. We made a mistake. Good. Now we can work. Designers are problem solvers. We can usually fix far more than people think. But there is one thing even the best designer cannot manufacture. Time. So bring me the problem. Preferably before it has grown three heads, invited legal, copied twelve people, and become a disaster. Contain the probelms and prevent the disasters!

The drawer test: because everything looks brilliant at 2 am. There’s a very simple test for whether an idea is actually good. Put it in a drawer. Not literally, although in the days before everything lived on a hard drive, I suppose that was exactly what we did. You work on something. You love it. You’ve stared at it for hours. You’ve moved the headline three pixels to the left, changed it back, changed it again, convinced yourself the first version was better, and eventually reached that dangerous stage where you can no longer tell whether it’s brilliant or whether you’ve simply looked at it too long. That’s when it goes in the drawer. Walk away. Work on something else. Go home. Sleep. Make dinner. Argue with the dog about who owns the blanket. Do absolutely anything that has nothing to do with the piece in front of you. Then come back later and open the drawer. That moment tells you almost everything. A good idea usually survives the drawer. Sometimes it’s even better than you remembered. You look at it with fresh eyes and think, Yes. There it is. Other times you open the drawer and wonder what on earth you were thinking. That headline you thought was incredibly clever now requires an instruction manual. The layout that seemed wonderfully sophisticated suddenly looks as though fourteen different ideas got into a bar fight. The logo you spent six hours refining looks like a plumbing company. The drawer is ruthless. And that is precisely why it’s useful. Distance Is Part of the Creative Process Creative people are terrible judges of their own work while they are making it. We’re too close to it. We know what we intended, which means our brains conveniently fill in all the things that may not actually be there. We know what the headline means. We know where the eye is supposed to go. We know why that strange little graphic is sitting in the corner. The person seeing it for the first time knows none of that. The drawer gives you a tiny bit of the distance your audience already has. You stop seeing the effort and start seeing the result. And effort can be terribly persuasive. If you’ve spent eight hours on something, there is a natural tendency to believe those eight hours must have produced something worth keeping. Unfortunately, creativity does not work on an hourly billing system. Sometimes the thing you did in twenty minutes is the answer. Sometimes the thing you labored over all afternoon deserves a respectful burial. The Best Ideas Don’t Need You Standing Beside Them This may be the hardest part. When we present work, we often want to explain it. “Well, what I was trying to do here…” Dangerous sentence. If the idea requires you to stand next to it and explain why it works, it may not be working hard enough on its own. The drawer test strips away the sales pitch. There is no presentation. No beautifully rehearsed rationale. No one reminding you that the blue represents trust and the circle represents unity. There is just the work. Does it still communicate? Does it still make you feel something? Do you understand it quickly? Does it still have that little spark that made you excited when you created it? If yes, good. If not, back to work. This Is Also Why I Don’t Trust “Fresh” Fresh work is seductive. You’ve just made it, so naturally it feels new. And because it feels new, it can feel better than it actually is. This happens constantly in design. You create Version 7 and immediately prefer it to Version 3 because Version 7 is the one you’ve been staring at for the last hour. Then you look again the next morning and discover Version 3 was better all along. The drawer has no loyalty to chronology. It doesn’t care which version is newest. It doesn’t care which took longest. It doesn’t care which one you were most excited about at 11:47 last night. It just asks: Which one still works? Clients Could Use a Drawer Too The drawer test isn’t only for designers. Clients could benefit enormously from it. Anyone who has ever received feedback eleven seconds after emailing a presentation knows exactly what I mean. Sometimes the first reaction is useful. Sometimes it’s just a reaction. “This feels too blue.” “There’s too much white space.” “Can we make the logo bigger?” “Can we try something completely different?” Certainly. But perhaps first we could all have lunch. There is an enormous difference between instinct and impatience. Good work occasionally needs a minute. Not six committees, twelve focus groups and a three-week research study. Just a little time for the initial noise to settle. I have often found that the idea somebody dislikes immediately becomes the one they like best after they’ve lived with it for a day. The drawer works on clients too. The Drawer Has Changed Of course, most of us don’t put work into actual drawers anymore. We close Illustrator. We minimize Photoshop. We shut the laptop. We leave the file alone. Same drawer. The important thing isn’t where the work goes. It’s that you go away from it. Creativity needs periods when you are actively working on the problem and periods when you apparently aren’t. Your brain keeps doing things while you’re off making coffee. That is why the answer sometimes arrives in the shower, in the car, halfway through dinner or at three in the morning when you suddenly know exactly what was wrong. You gave the problem room. Open the Drawer There is a temptation in every creative business to keep moving. Deadlines. Emails. Revisions. Meetings. Another project waiting behind this one. But when you can, give the work a night. Even an hour helps. Then come back and look at it as though somebody else made it. That last part is important. Don’t ask: How hard did I work on this? Ask: Is it good? Don’t ask: Do I remember why I made that choice? Ask: Can I see why I made that choice? And don’t ask: Can I fix this? First ask: Should I? Put it in the drawer. Then open it again. The good ideas will usually be waiting for you.

Payment Obstacle Course Freelancing comes with a lot of jobs nobody tells you about. You are the designer. You are the account person. You are the scheduler. You are the bookkeeper. You are tech support. You are collections. And apparently, sometimes, you are also expected to finance the privilege of receiving your own money. That last one is where I draw the line. I Already Gave You a Deal Freelancers do this all the time. We shave a little off the estimate. We throw in one more revision. We don't charge for the five-minute thing that somehow becomes twenty minutes. We try to be reasonable. We try to be good partners. So when a client then tells me the only way they want to pay is by credit card, my first thought is: Wonderful. Who is paying the processing fee? Because if the answer is me, then what you have actually said is: "We would like a small additional discount." You just didn't call it that. Take a $5,000 invoice. At roughly 3%, you can lose around $150 just because of the payment method. For a large company, $150 may look like a line item. For a freelancer, $150 looks like hours of work. Those are very different things. Then There Are the Payment Platforms Now we have an entire industry of companies designed to help companies pay other companies. Which sounds fantastic. Until you are the freelancer at the bottom of the chain trying to get the money. Recently, I had to deal with BILL.com. The client uses BILL. Fine. The client had my information. BILL had my information. My bank had my banking information, which I think we can all agree is a reasonable place for it to be. And yet somehow, getting the money from Point A to Point Me became an event. The bank connection didn't work correctly. Payment was delayed. And I found myself trying to understand the internal mechanics of a financial platform I never selected, never asked for, and had no particular desire to become familiar with. This is the part I find fascinating. Companies choose these systems because they make Accounts Payable easier. The approvals are easier. The accounting is easier. The vendor tracking is easier. Everything is easier. For them. That last part seems to get lost. BILL.com May Be Great for BILL Payers To be fair, BILL.com may be very useful for the company paying the bills. That is what it is designed to do. But something can be wonderful for an Accounts Payable department and still be annoying for the person waiting to be paid. Both things can be true. BILL currently lists a recipient fee even for a standard ACH/ePayment, with faster transfer options costing more. And that is where my brain stops. Why am I paying to receive money you owe me? Did I hire BILL? No. Did I choose BILL? No. Did I wake up one morning and think, You know what my business needs? Another financial account and another password. Also no. We Need to Start Asking This Before the Job Freelancers ask about everything else. What is the scope? How many revisions? What is the deadline? Who approves the work? What size is the final file? But very few of us ask: How exactly are you planning to pay me? We should. Because payment method is part of the project. If your company requires vendors to use a particular platform, tell me before I start. Tell me whether there is a fee. Tell me whether I need another account. Tell me whether my bank has to connect to it. Tell me what happens if it doesn't. And tell me whether there is a backup plan involving something revolutionary like an ACH transfer or a check. A Payment Method Is Not Free Just Because the Client Doesn't Pay for It This is the part businesses sometimes miss. Credit card processing fees are real. Transaction fees are real. Instant transfer fees are real. Some services cost more than others. And somebody is paying. If that somebody is the freelancer, then it needs to be part of the conversation. Because there is a difference between: “I choose to use this service because it makes my business easier.” and “You are required to use this service because it makes our business easier.” Those are not the same arrangement. If I choose Stripe, PayPal, Square, Wise, or any other payment platform because I like the convenience, then I can decide whether the fee is worth it. That is my choice. But when a client chooses the system and then passes the inconvenience or expense down to me, I become less enthusiastic. Funny how that works . Direct ACH Is Not Very Sexy Nobody is writing love songs about ACH. It doesn't have a cute app. It doesn't promise to disrupt finance. It doesn't need a clever startup name. It just moves money from one bank account to another. Which is rather exactly what I need it to do. Zelle can also work beautifully for some small businesses. Wise can be especially useful for international payments. Stripe, PayPal, Square, and similar systems can be great tools when you understand their fees and choose them knowingly. The issue isn't that payment services are bad. The issue is choice. And transparency. And maybe not taking a bite out of somebody's invoice on the way past. My New Freelance Question From now on, somewhere between: "When do you need it?" and "Who is approving the final?" I think freelancers should add: “How do you pay your vendors?” Because the answer matters. And if the answer is: "We only pay through BILL.com," or "We only pay by credit card," then my next question is going to be: “And what does that cost me?” That is not being difficult. That is running a business. My New Rule I am not saying nobody should ever use BILL. I am saying I would be very reluctant to accept a job where BILL was the only way I could get paid unless I understood the entire process first. Will my bank connect? Will I be charged? How long does payment take? What happens if something fails? Can the client send a regular ACH? Can they issue a check? These are not questions I want to discover the answers to after the work is finished. At that point, I am no longer negotiating. I am hostage to the payment process. And that is not a particularly fun phase of a design project. One Final Thought I pay Adobe because I chose Adobe. I pay for software because I chose the software. I pay my bank for services I chose to use. I have no problem paying for things that help me run my business. But I have a philosophical problem with paying a company I didn't hire, using a system I didn't choose, so that a client can send me money they already owe me. I designed the work. I revised the work. I delivered the work. I sent the invoice. At this point, I feel I have participated enough. Please don't make me pay to get paid. P.S. One thing I should add: the client I was dealing with wasn’t the problem. They were sympathetic and said they would take it back to their accounting firm. Which may be the most telling part of all. Sometimes the people inside the company are jumping through the same hoops the freelancer is. The difference is, they already have the work. The freelancer is still waiting for the money.

Everything starts somewhere. Even original ideas. A few days ago I saw a post about an AI-generated song that had made its way onto the charts. The reaction was furious. The machine had stolen every riff. Every lick. Every vocal inflection. Every musical thought from the human artists who came before it. And I found myself thinking about Mark Twain. Which is probably not where most people go when discussing artificial intelligence. In 1903, Twain wrote to Helen Keller after she had been accused of plagiarism as a child. His point, in wonderfully Twain-like fashion, was that almost all ideas are second-hand. We gather them consciously and unconsciously from a million places, mix them together with our own experiences, personalities and peculiarities, and eventually something comes out that we call ours. That idea has always fascinated me. Because anyone who has spent a lifetime in a creative business knows it is true. Designers look at design. Writers read writers. Photographers study photographers. Musicians listen to musicians. Art directors have drawers, folders, bookshelves and, depending on their age, possibly several collapsing filing cabinets filled with things that made them stop and think, That’s interesting. We call them references. We call them inspiration. We call them research. We very rarely call the police. And no, before someone begins assembling the bonfire, I am not saying that artificial intelligence and human inspiration are exactly the same thing. They aren’t. The scale is different. The technology is different. The commercial implications are different. And there are very legitimate questions about how AI systems were trained, whether copyrighted material should have been licensed, how creators should be compensated and what disclosure should be required. Those conversations need to happen. But I become uneasy when the conversation turns into: Human creativity: pure and original.AI creativity: stolen. Because I have met humans. We borrow constantly. I spent an entire career looking at advertising, typography, illustration, photography, architecture, movies, packaging and whatever else happened to cross my path. Some of it undoubtedly ended up influencing work I produced years later without my consciously knowing where it came from. That isn’t theft. That is having a brain. Now we have built machines that can recognize patterns from enormous amounts of human-created material, and suddenly we’re confronting an uncomfortable question: How much of creativity has ever been completely original? That does not mean ownership no longer matters. Quite the opposite. If an AI reproduces someone’s work, impersonates a living artist, clones a singer’s voice or produces something substantially derived from protected material, we should absolutely have rules for that. And if billion-dollar companies are making money from systems built using creators’ work, artists have every right to ask how that economic relationship should work. In fact, maybe that is where some of the answer lies. Instead of pretending AI can somehow be separated from all the human creativity it learned from, perhaps we should be figuring out better ways to compensate the people whose work helped teach it. Music already has systems for royalties. They are complicated, imperfect and occasionally capable of making grown adults cry, but they exist. So why couldn’t AI eventually have something similar? A portion of subscription fees, licensing income or commercial use could go into royalty pools for artists whose work was part of authorized training collections. Better tracking, fingerprinting, licensing databases and attribution technology could evolve along with the AI itself. Would it be simple? Absolutely not. Neither is anything involving music royalties. But “difficult” and “impossible” are not the same word. Maybe the answer isn’t to stop AI from learning from human creativity. Maybe the answer is to make sure human creativity gets paid when it does. There is another kind of AI use happening too. I have used AI to make ridiculous songs about my four-pound dog getting groomed. No musicians have been replaced. No record label has collapsed. Shanti has not yet demanded royalties. I have used AI to explore ideas, make images, solve production problems and occasionally create something so bizarre that no reasonable human being would have volunteered to make it for me in the first place. It is a tool. A very powerful one. And like nearly every powerful tool humans have invented, it can be used brilliantly, badly, ethically, lazily, deceptively or hilariously. The tool isn’t really the interesting part. The choices are. Maybe Mark Twain understood this long before any of us were arguing about algorithms. Ideas have always come from other ideas. The challenge now is figuring out how to protect the people who create the culture without pretending that culture was ever created in isolation. And if anyone still wants to throw rocks at me after that, please select the small ones. I’m getting older.

Artificial Intelligence. Occasionally HEAVY on the Artificial. I use AI all the time. I use it to brainstorm, organize information, proofread, summarize, research, and help me work through ideas faster. Sometimes it saves me an enormous amount of time. Sometimes it helps me get past a sticking point in seconds. Sometimes it takes a task I really do not want to do and gets me halfway there before I’ve had my second cup of coffee. And sometimes it confidently tries to move Oregon to the East Coast. That actually happened. I was working on a map and using AI to help check locations and pin placements. At one point, it looked at something that was clearly in Oregon and somehow tried to place it back East. Not vaguely wrong. Not a little off. Spectacularly wrong. It was hilarious. It was also a perfect reminder of something I think people need to hear more often: Always check what AI tells you. Not because AI is useless. Not because AI is bad. Not because humans are somehow superior in every situation. But because AI can be wrong, just like people can be wrong—and when it is wrong, it often sounds extremely sure of itself. That is what makes it tricky. A human being will sometimes say, “I think this is right, but let me double-check.” AI will often say the equivalent of, “Absolutely. Here is your answer,” and hand you something polished, neat, persuasive, and occasionally absurd. That polished confidence can fool people. And that is why I think the most important thing to remember when using AI is this: You have a brain. Use it. AI should help you think. It should not replace thinking. Human Flaws Don’t Disappear Just Because the Tool Isn’t Human A lot of people talk about AI as if it somehow exists outside the messy limitations of people. It doesn’t. Even when it is not actively searching the internet in the moment, AI has been built from human-made information, human-written language, human patterns, human decisions, human errors, and human assumptions. If the information out in the world is flawed, incomplete, contradictory, or sloppy, that flaw does not magically disappear just because a computer is packaging it for you. And beyond that, AI can make its own mistakes. It can misunderstand context. It can draw a bad conclusion. It can connect the wrong dots. It can give you an answer that sounds elegant while quietly missing the point. So no, AI is not some pure, untouchable source of truth. It is a tool. A very impressive tool. A very useful tool. And still a tool. The Best Use of AI Is Not to Replace Judgment I think one of the smartest ways to use AI is not to let it make your decisions for you, but to let it handle the tasks that waste your time. That’s where it becomes genuinely useful. There are so many chores in creative work and business that are necessary but tedious: Building an Excel sheet. Organizing information. Sorting lists. Cleaning up data. Creating formulas. Setting up repetitive content. Preparing a spreadsheet that can later be imported into InDesign. That kind of work can eat up a shocking amount of time. If AI can help me build the Excel structure I need so I can plug that information into InDesign, great. That is a wonderful use of AI. It saves time. It removes drudgery. It gets me past the mechanical part faster. But let’s be clear about what that means. It does not mean AI designed the piece. It means AI helped with the setup. The design is still the design. The thinking is still the thinking. The hierarchy, the pacing, the typography, the judgment, the visual relationships, the choices about what matters and what doesn’t—that still belongs to the human being doing the work. That is where experience matters. That is where taste matters. That is where the real job still lives. AI Is the Assistant, Not the Boss I think people get into trouble when they expect AI to be an authority instead of an assistant. Those are two very different roles. An assistant can be extremely helpful. An assistant can gather, organize, suggest, draft, structure, and speed things up. An assistant can take care of the repetitive setup so you can focus on the part that actually requires your skill. But an assistant is not the final decision-maker. You are. Or at least, you should be. That means if AI gives you dates, check them. If it gives you locations, check them. If it gives you a calculation, check it. If it summarizes a source, make sure it actually did so accurately. If it gives you a spreadsheet, review the logic. If it gives you something that feels off, trust your instincts enough to pause and look again. Because if your own common sense is telling you something doesn’t add up, there is an excellent chance that something, in fact, does not add up. This Is Not an Anti-AI Argument Quite the opposite. I use AI because I find it incredibly valuable. I like tools that help me move faster. I like tools that can reduce repetition. I like tools that can help organize the clutter and save me from wasting creative energy on production drudgery. I like being able to hand off part of the setup work so I can spend more time on the part of the process that actually needs me. That is a good use of technology. But the fantasy that AI removes the need for human judgment is just that—a fantasy. The real value of AI is not that it replaces your mind. The real value is that it supports your mind. It gives you a head start. It helps you move. It helps you sort through noise. It can take some of the boring work off your plate. And then you still have to do the part that matters most: Think. So Yes, Use AI—Just Don’t Hand Over Your Brain That’s really the whole point. Use it. Learn it. Push it. Let it help you. Let it save you time. Let it build the spreadsheet. Let it help prepare the information. Let it do some of the repetitive heavy lifting. But always remember that speed is not the same thing as accuracy, polish is not the same thing as truth, and confidence is not the same thing as correctness. Sometimes AI will be brilliant. Sometimes AI will be helpful. And sometimes AI will look at Oregon and start heading for the East Coast. That’s your cue. Check the answer. Use your own judgment. And keep your brain fully engaged. Because the best way to use AI is not to trust it blindly. It’s to trust it just enough to let it help—and then check its work.

My Voodoo Doll is a Colorful Dude There are moments in every creative career when professionalism requires… accessories. Not the glamorous kind. Not a new laptop. Not a Pantone book. Not another beautifully organized set of markers you will absolutely swear you needed. I’m talking about a voodoo doll. Now, before anyone gets nervous, this is a metaphorical voodoo doll. Mostly. Because if you have worked with clients for any length of time, you know there are moments when someone asks you to make the logo bigger after you have already explained why it should not be bigger. Or sends you seventeen rounds of revisions that somehow circle all the way back to version one. Or says, “I’ll know it when I see it,” as though that is an actionable creative brief. And in those moments, you need somewhere for the frustration to go. Not into the email. Definitely not into the email. That is what the doll is for. The imaginary little pin goes in while you type: “Absolutely. Happy to make that adjustment.” Another pin: “Of course. I can explore that direction.” And possibly one very enthusiastic pin when the client says, “Can we just see one more option?” Then something magical happens. You get over it. Because the truth is, being a professional creative isn’t about never getting frustrated. That would be impossible. Creative work is deeply personal, even when you’re being paid to do it. You think about the problem. You develop an idea. You refine it. You make a hundred tiny decisions no one else will ever notice. Then someone looks at it for twelve seconds and says, “What if it were blue?” There is going to be a reaction. When I was younger, client indecision made me much crazier than it does today. I remember one situation where clients could not decide what color they wanted a headline to be. Rather than keep rebuilding the piece over and over in different colors, I made glasses with different colored gels in them. They could literally put on a pair and see the headline through another color. Red. Blue. Green. Whatever we were debating that day. It was probably ridiculous. But it worked. And in retrospect, that was really the same lesson I eventually learned about the imaginary voodoo doll: sometimes you have to find a way to redirect the frustration instead of letting it take over the process. The trick is knowing what to do with it. Over the years, I’ve learned that the best designers develop private ways of blowing off steam. We laugh. We complain to another designer. We walk away from the computer. We mutter things that probably should not be entered into the official project notes. And then we come back. That last part matters. Because the client does not need to pay for our frustration. They need us to solve the problem. Sometimes they are wrong. Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes they are asking for something ridiculous because they do not yet know how to explain what is actually bothering them. And sometimes that terrible suggestion they made leads you somewhere unexpectedly good. That is the strange relationship between creativity and irritation: irritation can either shut you down or push you toward a better solution. The voodoo doll is simply the place where the irritation goes so the creativity can stay. It lets you separate the emotional reaction from the professional response. Pin. Done. Now what is the problem we are actually trying to solve? That is when the job gets interesting again. And by the time the client receives the next round, they do not need to know that somewhere between versions B and C, their tiny imaginary fabric likeness had a very difficult afternoon. They just need to know that you listened. You solved it. And somehow, despite everything, you still made the work better. Every designer needs a voodoo doll. Just never send it with the final files.