What NOT to Say to a Designer and Why
Miscommunications and misunderstandings in design can cause bottlenecks and delay projects—not to mention permanently damage the relationship with your designer. Learning how to talk to a designer so they have the specifics they need from you to complete a project (but enough freedom to incorporate their creativity as well) can cut down on the number of iterations and help build a good relationship for future projects.
Top 10 Add-ons for Adobe Premiere
For video professionals, Adobe Premiere Pro is one of those powerful tools that allow you to bring a vision to life onscreen. And Premiere Pro gives users a large assortment of add-ons that can help expand your options for editing and compositing your videos. Here are the top 10 most useful and most popular Adobe Premiere Pro add-ons, both paid and free.
11 Top Add-Ons for Adobe Illustrator
As a creative professional, you're always looking for new ways to bring your designs to life. Add-ons offer more tools, effects, and workflows to help you do more with your Adobe Creative Cloud apps. While there are countless plugins and add-ons available for Adobe applications, we asked our own design team to share some of
3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 3)
Here comes another question – how can we better learn from the experience we get? Eric Ries, already mentioned above, uses an efficient way to tackle problems. I am talking about root-cause analysis or “five whys.” Imagine that the problem you’ve faced has the same structure as a Russian doll. The “root cause” of it is
3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 2)
John Wanamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” By using carefully designed experiments, you can do a better job than Wanamaker. For example, all professional advertisers today know about conversion tracking and
How to Build a Best-in-Class Creative Team & More (Work Management Roundup)
BWelcome to the Friday Work Management Roundup, where we bring together the week's best reads on productivity and work. This week, we feature articles on how to build an internal creative agency, earn a 4-day workweek, unlock new ideas, and meditate for creativity. Not to mention many more lifehacks and work tips. Read on! How-To Articles: Build
3 Steps to Building Your Own Innovation Machine (Part 1)
Recently, I read an interesting book by Peter Sims, “Little Bets,” which brings up a really important question: can failure, in fact, take us further than success? The answer is: yes, if we know how to deal with it. While interviewing the executives at Amazon, General Motors and Google, as well as successful musicians, architects
3 Tips to Improve Project Management for Creative Teams
When everybody has ideas to contribute, managing a creative team requires you to assume the role of a funnel. Your team pours their ideas out and you need to combine all of them into something that makes sense. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to improve your project management for creative teams.
3 Design Studio Management Challenges (and How to Solve Them)
Design studio management can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to be. As a design studio manager, you need to keep processes streamlined and deliver your best work. Here are 3 common hurdles in your design studio and how to proactively overcome them with the right design project management tools.
The Top 7 Productivity Roadblocks That Crush Designers' Creativity
We asked our own team of designers as well as design experts on social media what they consider to be the top productivity roadblocks, and present them here alongside some solutions and advice for getting past these challenges.
10 Free Online Training Resources for Adobe Creative Cloud
Whether you’re a novice designer or have years of experience under your belt, there’s always new shortcuts, features, and techniques to learn — especially when it comes to complex software like Adobe Creative Cloud. Sharpen your existing skills or learn the ins and outs of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, and the rest of Adobe’s suite
Daily Rituals to Steal From Successful Creatives and Innovators
Walk in the door. Hang up jacket and put on cozy, hand-knit cardigan. Swap loafers for canvas sneakers. Ever since we were children, our brains have thrived on ritual and routine. And while it’s easy to assume that creative thinkers and visionaries eschew predictability and find inspiration in the unexpected, following an established daily routine is
Stressed Out Creative Teams Can Find Help from Automation
In order to remain competitive, creatives must either create more or more effective content. We surveyed more than 1,500 creative managers and individual contributors, both agency and in-house, to better understand the current state of creative teams and investigate their key challenges.
Top 10 Photoshop Plugins for Creative Professionals
Adobe Photoshop supports plugins, which allow you to add more useful features that help you save time and effort. Have a look at our list featuring 10 of the top free and paid Adobe Photoshop plugins that will be useful for all creatives.
How Wrike Helps a Creative Agency Manage Client Logistics & Create Brilliant Campaigns (Case Study)
We were able to catch up with the team at their office in San Francisco, CA and learn about the highs and lows of running a creative agency. Watch the video below to learn more about their creative journey from rock band to film production, and how Wrike plays a role in their success
14 Online Resources to Break Through Your Creative Block
You know the feeling. You sit down to work on a creative project and your brain just goes blank. When creative inspiration is stubbornly elusive, most of us turn to the internet for distraction... only to come back to our project three hours later just as stuck as we were before. But the internet can be