Hello, friend!

Thanks for clicking in. We’re back with more thoughts, services, and merchandise.

Workshop this week 👀

There are a couple spots left in Presenting Work with Confidence on April 16 & 17. It’s a full six (6) hours over two days in a small group that will forever improve how you communicate. Intensive, yet supportive. Helps with interviews, lectures, presentations, pitches, whenever you need to get your point across.

Skip your other meetings. You’ll be glad you did. Your colleagues, current and future, will be, too.

It’s not like carrots were orange to begin with 🥕

Any designer — that is, anyone who wants to change how something is done or what gets made — must maintain both a sense of possibility and a sense of history. Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into fatalism or reactivity. And so tempting to roll up to a situation with big ideas for how things should be different without sufficient understanding of or respect for how things got to where they are (see: every change management catastrophe).

So, the exercise I recommend is to always be asking “Why is it like that?” (or “Why do we think about it like that?”). Every time you encounter anything that works really well, or does just the opposite, that’s a learning opportunity. The same goes for stopping to consider labels, categories, methods, metaphors, or any other abstraction so familiar you assume it’s real.

This sounds simple and obvious, but write it on a sticky before a sense of urgency creates unearned certainty.

“Putting facts into nice cleanly demarcated buckets of explanation has its advantages—for example, it can help you remember facts better. But it can wreak havoc on your ability to think about those facts. This is because the boundaries between different categories are often arbitrary, but once some arbitrary boundary exists, we forget that it is arbitrary and get too impressed with its importance.” —Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave

Get a book🫀

We have a limited supply of How to Die (and other stories) by Mike Monteiro at the studio ready to be lovingly personalized and sent to you or someone you have feelings for (any feelings, we don’t judge).

The copies we send out come with a bonus extra sad story tucked in between the pages. Also available through your local bookstore.

If you’re in the Bay Area, join us Monday, May 11th at Booksmith where Mike with by in conversation with Annalee Newitz.

Until next time 🐦

We hope you remain in the good graces of your neighborhood passerines, corvids especially. If we can help you with something, get in touch.

Be safe out there, please. We love you.❤️