Phillips Design

From NPR’s Fresh Air, April 25, 2011

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.”

And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have.”

— Ira Glass

The following excerpt is from an excellent book titled Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. (Thanks Elizabeth!) The subtitle of the book is A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.

We all know happy talk when we see it: It’s the introductory text that’s supposed to welcome us to the site and tell us how great it is, or to illustrate what we’re about to see in the section we’ve just entered.”

If you’re not sure whether something is happy talk, there’s one sure-fire test: If you listen very closely while you’re reading it, you can actually hear a tiny voice in the back of your head saying, ‘Blah blah blah blah blah…’”

A lot of happy talk is the kind of self-congratulatory promotional writing that you find in badly written brochures. Unlike good promotional copy, it conveys no useful information, and it focuses on saying how great we are, as opposed to delineating what makes us great.”

This is a great  principle to use whether you are writing for a website or a brochure.

Next time you’re eating extruded particulates for breakfast, ask yourself: How do they make these things?

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It’s Your School, Your Family, Your Friends, Your Home, Your History, Your… Community.

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CATLi is the California Transportation and Logistics Initiative, sponsored through the Chancellor’s Office of California’s Community Colleges.  This was a new initiative, sponsored through the U. S. Department of Labor. Read more…

CalCIMA is a non-profit association for the construction and industrial material industries in California.

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Here’s something we’ve never done before… Creating an identity for a church. A fun and rewarding project, for a client that wanted something different. Read more…

REBRAC, also know as Regional Environmental Business Resource and Assistance Centers – was considering a name change. This seemed perfectly logical to us, a simpler name would be a great place to start! (Go ahead, try to say it real fast, five times.)
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