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Design

Redesigning Your Logo? 5 Most Common Branding Mistakes to Avoid

November 6, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

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 everyone to understand what it means to have a solid branding system for your company, your non-profit, for your big […]

Filed Under: Branding, Design

Designing with Restraints (or) Why Most Cars Look the Same

October 23, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

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 SUVs parked on the same street. 3 on one side, 3 on the other. At quick glance, I thought […]

Filed Under: Design

Color Trends: “Battleship”

October 17, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

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. They are not. It was easy to point to color trends in previous decades of American culture: turquoise in the […]

Filed Under: Design, Forecasting | Trends

The World Agrees: Emojis are the Best / Worst Thing Ever

October 2, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

Happy and Mad Emoji Faces

Today we are overwhelmed with the written word. Websites! Social media! Emails! Apps! Messaging! I’m going to guess an average adult reads 40,000 words each day. All this flying across multiple screens through each minute of the day. This is unlike anything in human history. Because it is impossible to comprehend such a volume of words, we need a new visual language to enhance what we already have. Emojis allow us to quickly grab attention and communicate emotion in a way that we never could before.

Filed Under: Design, Technology and Culture

10 Fundamental Differences Between Design Gurus and Legit Designers

September 26, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

October 2014 Lebron 12 Shoe

To become legit at anything takes time, passion, and humility. It means caring about something long after everyone around you has lost interest. It may not bring quick fame or fortune, but your gifts have tremendous potential to mend a society and culture that has battered by greed and vanity.

Filed Under: Branding, Design

2020 C8 Corvette, a Harvard Case Study without an Ending

September 23, 2019 By Matt S. Smith, MBA

I really didn’t want to write a blog about a Corvette. As a designer, I respect the Corvette’s beginnings, back in the 1950s and 1960s when we were flying into Outer Space and flying down the roads in Space Age cars. But, I came of age in the 1990s, and by then, the Corvette didn’t […]

Filed Under: Design, Technology and Culture

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