Erika Hall:

Bottom line, get all your hopes, expectations, and assumptions sorted internally before approaching a designer, and then be prepared to have a straightforward conversation once you do.

It’s all common sense, yet pretty uncommon to actually have a client got it all sorted-out before started a project, of course this in the scope of my experience so far dealing with clients, which is only 4–5 years. There’s nothing like the perfect client but it’s part of our job as a designers to work together and solve their problems with smart – sometimes also stupid – solutions, in this business of client service.

Talking about clients make me remember this great quote from Mad Men, which by the way fast become my second “sum of all wisdom” type of thing, after The Godfather trilogy.

You know what my father used to say? “Being with a client is like being in a marriage. Sometimes you get into it for the wrong reasons, and eventually they hit you in the face.”

– Roger Sterling

Kern and Burn interviewed Jim Coudal; don’t know him? Google him.

As curious people who love to learn, the idea of jumping into the deep end of the pool and learning about various businesses is very satisfying.

And:

He ended his talk with a quote from Dan Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness, and said, “The reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals—not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them—we set our goals for the person we are when we set them.” It’s a great point. It encourages us to dream big, and think about what will truly make us happy. Jim, like many other design entrepreneurs, has taken his career into his own hands and now controls his work, and his “destiny.”

He’s one of my heroes alive today in design and also business field.

I read this How to Lead a Creative Life article over at Fast.Co, after pointed out by John Maeda’s post. Here’s a quote – also my favorite from the bunch – from Joichi Ito, director of MIT Media Lab:

The Japanese government once asked me to be on a committee about taxes and information technology. The first thing I said was, ‘Let’s figure out a way to use resources more efficiently to lower taxes.’ And they said, ‘No, no, no—this committee is about using computers to collect more tax.’ So I asked, ‘How do we reduce costs?’ And they said, ‘Oh, there’s no committee for that.’ [Laughs] That’s the problem with large organizations. They create roles and constraints, and sometimes people forget why they’re there.

Read the article it’s a good read. There’s one from David Karp of Tumblr.

Great advice. Here’s a funny bit:

84. Give up PowerPoint for ever.