I have a love/hate relationship with scouring the internet for visual inspiration — sometimes when I’m looking through creative blogs and sites for interesting stuff, I usually come up blank. But if I’m in a pinch and I need very specific reference — then I’ll usually find the inspiration I’m…

Working remotely as a designer is hard, and a new reality for a lot of people right now. It can feel isolating, uninspiring and generally the opposite of the creative vibes you get for free being in a studio environment. Fortunately there are some easy things you can do to…

The muse is almost never there when you need it, so take a systematic approach — Inspiration is a key component of visual design. It’s a reference point that kick-starts the creative process and a starting point for producing beautiful, visually pleasing solutions in response to a well-defined problem. But honestly, how to summon inspiration is a total mystery to me. It’s a fleeting, rarely spontaneous…

I’m not usually a huge fan of generic New Year’s resolutions — things like “eat better” or “workout more” can happen whenever (or never). But at the start of 2019, I wrote myself a couple of Design Resolutions… creative goals I had for my work that could begin when I…

I’ve worked within big creative in-house teams for almost my entire career — immersed in inspiration, deadlines, questionable music and shared illness, and surrounded by people who make me better at my craft by physical association. That all changed when I took my current position as a designer at Help…

I recently read this excellent article by Hudl on their tips for building usable Sketch Libraries — and was relieved to find that I’d been following a similar path in creating our UI Libraries over at Help Scout. So for those of you deep in the trenches, I wanted to…

Okay, it’s not that weird, but a couple of months back Nick showed me a productivity trick on how he reduces distraction on his phone (because this dude lives and breaths minimalism in a super impressive way)… and it had such a profound and measurably positive effect on my mental…

A short guide to effectively presenting your work to clients, bosses and other designers — and how even your best work needs to be carefully communicated. Clients want good design, that’s why they hire you. So why do they come back with design-destroying feedback like “make the logo bigger” or…

As a user, choosing account URLs is hard — like myname.app.com — especially when your usual names are already taken. Sometimes the choice is even enough to deter users from signing up at all — which is why a lot of services, Prevue included, are moving towards auto-creating a random…