Dan Mall Teaches Design Systems, Design Process, and Design Leadership

Emergent Strategy

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

You spent months defining your positioning, your niche, your offer, and your messaging. So how did some of your best clients come from something you never planned?

Legendary management thinker Henry Mintzberg discovered something counterintuitive: real strategy doesn’t always flow from the top down. In his 1987 Harvard Business Review article “Crafting Strategy,” he wrote, “Strategies that appear without clear intentions—or in spite of them—[are called] emergent strategies. Actions simply converge into patterns . . . deliberate strategy precludes learning once the strategy is formulated; emergent strategy fosters it. People take actions one by one and respond to them, so that patterns eventually form.”

This is especially true for creative agencies. You’re not building widgets in a factory. You’re solving novel, tricky problems for clients every single day. The patterns that emerge from solving those problems—the repeatable approaches, the specializations you’re naturally gravitating toward, the service offerings that clients keep asking for—are your real strategy. Yes, the deliberate plan matters, but so does paying attention to what’s actually working in real time.

On July 4th, 1924, a restaurant owner in Tijuana, Mexico was running low on ingredients. Packed with holiday tourists, the kitchen was slammed, so the owner cobbled together the basics he had on hand: romaine lettuce, eggs, Worcestershire sauce, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese. That dish became so beloved that it’s now served in restaurants around the world a hundred years later. The owner’s name was Caesar Cardini, and that improvised creation became the Caesar salad. His strategy didn't come from a masterplan written months before. It emerged from paying attention to what he had, what his customers needed, and adapting in the moment.

Too many early agency owners conflate deliberate and emergent strategies (and tactics) in trying to “set up the basics” for their business. They’re insistent that the first thing they need to do is set up an LLC or make a logo or setting up various bank accounts. They try to set up “business foundations” like choosing a niche or writing a vision or company values. They think launching a website is the pinnacle of launching a business.

Yes, all of those things are great to have, but they can all be emergent. Many agency owners don’t land on a solid vision until after they break $1 million, running their businesses for a few years. For my agency SuperFriendly, it took us 6 years to find our niche. The only true deliberate strategy you need for your agency from day one is how to find someone every week who would gladly pay you to alleviate one or more of their terrible pains.

Audit the three projects you’re most proud of. Look at what you actually delivered, what problems you solved, what your team did brilliantly. Write down the patterns you see. What kept showing up? What did you do repeatedly? What made those projects work?

That’s your emergent strategy staring you in the face. It already exists in the work you’ve done. You don’t have to invent it from scratch. You just have to notice it and double down.

Inbound Is a Trap

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

It’s addicting, I know.

A new inquiry comes into your inbox from a prospect. You offer to get on a call with them so you can figure out how you can help them. Maybe you send a proposal, maybe they accept, maybe you do a great project together.

It‘s a bit different than what you did for your last client, which is different than what you did for the client before that.

But you put it in the portfolio, because the work is good.

Your portfolio has a wide range of “good work.” Some websites, some brand design, some app design, some motion work.

You think it means you’re “full service.”

You’re not. You’re confused. And so are many of your prospects.

This is the trap of inbound, especially before you’re well-positioned. If you don’t already have an established reputation, the chances that inbound requests line up with your sweet spot is slim.

Most agency owners feel the need to field inbound requests just because they landed in the inbox.

You don’t.

The Summit 2026, Belize

Dan Mall — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Three agency owners flew to a jungle in Central America with nothing but a suitcase and a vague sense that their businesses could be more. Five days later, all three had stopped doing the work that made them successful, started building things that scared them, and couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen. One of them printed out a document I wrote for them and put it on his wall. Another updated their LinkedIn title to CEO before the plane landed. The third started interviewing executives in an industry they’d never worked in and, within a month, was sitting across from a chief design officer whose last company sold for $95M.

I built the thing that provoked many of those actions.

The Survey (2012–2025)

When I built my agency, I was fortunate to have worked at and collaborated with dozens of other agencies, so I remixed all the pieces I liked and left out all the pieces I didn’t to form my own. Similarly, I’ve spoken at and attended hundreds of conferences, workshops, and industry events in my career, and I’d slowly be compiling the “if I ever ran my own event” list in my head for years now.

In my program, we cover topics like pricing, positioning, lead gen, sales, and similar topics every week, but I was starting to notice a trend with some of the students who had been building their agencies for a few years and starting to find real traction. They were showing mastery in their craft and industry but gaps in leadership, executive function, and vision, things that are a bit tougher to work on in 90-minute weekly chunks or ad hoc office hours sessions. Noticing this week after week helped me see that I need different vehicles to help my students with different areas of growth. Perhaps there was a way to engage at a deeper level.

Also, pragmatically, not every student needed this. It’s not very beneficial for an agency owner who hasn’t even decided who their target customer is to think long-term about the future of their agency. That’s why vision setting isn’t a part of our core curriculum. I think of it as an advanced-level topic.

I decided to help the students who were ready for it craft 10-year visions for their agencies. It’s something that I didn’t have for my own agency, so I remember the moment of shock I had when planning the 10-year anniversary party and realizing I had no intention of ever getting here. I was determined to help my students design their agency’s end more intentionally than I did mine.

The Bearing (January–December 2025)

For the last year and a half, I’ve been running a coaching program called Make More Money for agency owners scaling from $100k toward $1M. It’s some of the best work I’ve done in my career. But Zoom is only good for some kinds of work. At some point, deep collaborative work requires a different kind of proximity than “let’s hop on a call.”

So I built The Summit: an invitation-only, 5-day working retreat for the students who had made the most progress and were ready for the biggest leaps. It wasn’t a conference. There would be no keynote speakers, conference badges, or networking happy hours. Just deep, focused, personalized work in a place beautiful enough to make you think differently.

I thought the event could accommodate 5 students. I invited 13 who met the criteria: they had to be making at least $250K/year and building for more than 2 years.

Three people earned their way in: Gabby Mérite of Figures & Figures, Benten Woodring of NOOON, and Joey Banks of Baseline Design. They said yes immediately, wired the money, and booked their flights.

One big idea drove the event design. I took it from one of my favorite books—The Vision Driven Leader by Michael Hyatt—which I included in the welcome kit for every attendee:

The future doesn’t happen in the present.

I’ve seen this ring true personally many times. It’s tough to craft a long-term vision at the same desk where you’re responding to website QA tickets. The context switch is too tough. If I was going to help my students see their futures, I knew I had to get them out of their element both mentally and physically.

The Approach (January 2026)

I started designing the itinerary the same way I approach writing a talk, planning a workshop, or scoping a project: with the narrative arc. What do I want the story of this experience to be?

One thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to set the tone very quickly that something very different would be happening here, something that would require hard work and a clear mind.

I mapped Freytag’s pyramid to the 6 days we would be there and came up with themes for each day:

Basecamp
The Trailhead
The Ascent
The Ridge
The Summit
The Descent

My team and I started by making a list of dream venues that would lend itself to this rhythm. As traveling to incredible places in the world is part of my full life, I’m constantly on the lookout for them and have multiple lists of candidates I come across. We looked at venues in St. Lucia, Guatemala, Turks & Caicos, Costa Rica, the Grenadines, the American desert and coasts, the midwest wilderness, and more. I wanted somewhere remote enough that checking email was a bit inconvenient, beautiful enough to shake you out of your normal thinking patterns, boring enough to encourage you to spend time with yourself, affordable enough that everything you needed was taken care of, and available enough to book with a few months’ notice.

Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize hit every mark. It’s The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola’s private resort in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, 1,600 feet up in the jungle, a 2-hour drive from the nearest airport on paved roads that cut through different parts of the country. It’s a 20-room hideaway featuring a creek with natural swimming holes, no AC, no TV, and the kind of quiet that rewires how you think. Coppola bought it because he felt the back-to-nature setting was the ideal place to write. It was exactly what I was looking for.

Em and I decided to spend a long weekend there, for research and scouting purposes, of course. (It also just so happened to fall on my birthday.) Em has a sense for how people feel in a space that I don’t. I typically evaluate logistics; she evaluates whether you can relax here.

We checked out the rooms, ate at all the restaurants, hiked the nearby trails, and met with the concierge about what was possible for a private group. I’m glad we went in person. The dwellings are open-air cabanas with thatched roofs and screened windows. You sleep in and with the jungle. You go to bed listening to the creek, the birds, and the insects. Especially knowing that there were no room air conditioners in a tropical Central American country, we only brought shorts and tank tops.

That was a mistake.

Yes, Belize is hot, but we were in the mountains of the jungle. The nights got cold. To top it off, the days we went just happened to be the coldest days on record in Belize’s history as a cold snap rolled in. The nights dropped down to 40ºF, and even sleeping under 4 blankets wearing every piece of clothing we brought wasn’t enough as we requested a space heater and still shivered ourselves to sleep. Still, we knew that we could tell our guests to pack accordingly and that this would be a great place for The Summit.

We locked in the dates with the reservation staff.

Prep (Day 1: Saturday, February 21)

We arrived the day before everyone else to settle in and have a day of calm and quiet before I had to be on for the next 5 days.

This time around, we booked Francis Ford Coppola’s personal villa, a two-bedroom open-living plan dwelling with a private plunge pool. This turned out to be a great decision as we spent a lot of time workshopping as a group in various spaces around this villa.

Another amazing benefit of staying in the Francis Ford Coppola villa is that it comes with a full-time attendant, the same one that attends to Coppola when he comes to stay. I’m generally not one who likes to be waited on as I find it more annoying than helpful most times, but Osmani was incredible. More about him later.

When we arrived, we unpacked and got full body massages. It was the first massage I had where I got walked on. I thought I was going to snap in half. It was awesome.

That night was the last quiet one for a while. The next five days would belong to everyone else.

Basecamp (Day 1: Sunday, February 22)

Em, Osmani, and I spent the morning prepping and setting up the welcome kits for each person. We’d be working hard over the week, and we needed the right supplies to keep the friction low and the ideas flowing.

First, supplies that take care of the body:

A black Hydroflask to stay hydrated with a custom “Destination begins with desire” sticker on it
Earplugs for blocking out jungle sounds at night
Eyemask
Sawyer Picaridin Insect Repellent Spray
Make More Money branded shirts with a custom quote for each person based on their area of growth

Then the mind:

Each person got a copy of:
- The Vision Driven Leader by Michael Hyatt
- The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
Each person also got a book I hand-picked for them and a few notes and quotes I highlighted.

And finally, I called in some reinforcements from some friends to help us capture ideas at the highest quality. The fine folks at Studio Neat sent us some beautiful Mark Ones, Keepbooks, and Panobooks to capture ideas. Jeff from Ugmonk sent an assortment of Analog Cards of all shapes and sizes to be able to think spatially and HMM clips to keep them together. And our friends at Raen sent us some shades so we could look and feel cool while working hard.

Prior to arrival, we had everyone fill out a survey that included questions about what made each person pampered and cared for. Osmani set off to create some final accommodations: custom requested snacks and beverages in each person’s mini fridge and kitchenette, prepping the chefs for our group’s various dietary preferences and restrictions, etc.

The attendees arrived staggered throughout the day. Benten and Joey landed around the same time at midday and shared a car for the 2-hour drive from the airport to the lodge. When Em and I walked up to welcome them at reception, they were already sitting at bar tables eating lunch like they’d been friends for years. We ordered some ceviche and plantain chips and joined them. Then they checked into their rooms to get settled.

Gabby’s flight got in around dinnertime, and she met the rest of us while we were having dinner at the restaurant. The whole group was together for the first time. I could already feel it clicking.

The Trailhead (Day 2: Monday, February 23)

The official start of The Summit Belize 2026! I woke up pumped.

I had a pretty strong idea for how I wanted to kick things off. I wanted us to do something physically challenging to set the tone that we’d be working hard on this trip. The plan was to do a moderately strenuous 2-mile hike to a big waterfall where I’d teach some vision frameworks and have a few surprises in store, but the weather had other plans as it was drizzling when we woke up and, according to the weather report, didn’t have any indication of stopping until at least the afternoon.

The drizzle was light enough that I considered still going, as the benefit would be a cooler walk due to the rain. The biggest deterrent in my mind was the fairly steep set of 177 steps—yes, we counted when we went during the previous trip—at the end of the hike down to the falls. But it might be doable.

That is, until Em slipped and fell down the waxed first steps outside our villa on the way to breakfast. (We discovered a week later when she went to the doctor after returning home that she sprained her AC joint from that stumble.) Luckily, she was ok aside from the initial shock and some lingering discomfort, but the hike was definitely off that day.

We got to the restaurant a few minutes late for our first official event: what I called “The Ridiculous Breakfast.” In everyone’s itineraries, I had prepped them with this cryptic prompt:

Be prepared to share the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard. It could be a fact, a story, a riddle, etc. It might take you 1 minute to share or half an hour. That’s all I’ll say about that for now.

We each shared our ridiculous contributions between bites. I won’t divulge what anyone said, but the inside jokes that started here lasted the entire week, starting with the oft-uttered response to anything, “That’s ridiculous.”

After everyone went, I revealed my grand design for this seemingly frivolous exercise:

The things you’ve done and will continue to do in your businesses are things that any normal person would consider to be ridiculous: making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars; trying to assemble dozens or hundreds of people towards a shared cause; transforming clients’ businesses so drastically that they change their industries; and more. We started this event by sharing ridiculous things because that’s what we’ll be doing here all week: dreaming up more things that normal people would consider to be ridiculous. You’d be discouraged from doing that anywhere else. But here, for the next few days, I encourage you to do that to the most ridiculous level possible.

After breakfast, everyone gathered their writing and thinking supplies and congregated at my villa where we workshopped all morning against the misty backdrop of the Belizean rainforest. I challenged everyone to think bigger than they normally would about their long-term business futures, not just the next quarter or even the next year but for the next decade. I taught vision frameworks and shared templates for success metrics, company assets to develop, roadmapping, and more. Then I sent them off to anywhere they wanted to go on property to spend time alone imagining and writing down what they saw to could share with the group the following day.

We met back up for lunch. Osmani was our server for every meal, and he was already getting a sense of our individual preferences. We all ordered, and I got the sense that Joey in particular was ordering something that he was more settling for than actually wanted. I whispered to him that, if there was something he really wanted, he could order off-menu and they’d do their best to make it happen. Osmani confirmed with an encouraging nod. Joey asked for a grilled chicken breast and some veggies, to which Osmani suggested some fresh broccoli and carrots from the garden and some mashed potatoes to go along with it. Everyone’s food came out great, but Joey’s plate looked extra delicious. He ordered it for almost every meal, and the rest of us ordered it several times too. “I’ll take ‘the Joey’” became convenient shorthand for the rest of the trip.

For the afternoon, we arranged full body massages for the three of them while Em and I relaxed in the outdoor, solar-powered hot pool by the river.

The Ascent (Day 3: Tuesday, February 24)

Belize is home to 600 species of birds, and more pass through as it’s on the migratory path. I woke up early to do the weekly sunrise bird watching. (I invited everyone to join, but, seeing as the day before was a travel day for them, they understandably passed.) I did the walk earlier that month in my previous visit, but I didn’t have my telephoto lens with me. I corrected that mistake and was ready this time.

I saw beautiful birds, but I was really on the lookout for one in particular: the Northern Pygmy Owl. It’s about 6 inches tall and has a very specific call. I saw it last time but didn’t get a good photo. I was hoping this time would be different.

I met bird watching guide Mark, who I met last time. Mark’s great at spotting birds, and he knows a bunch of different bird calls to see if they’d respond to him so we can find them. I mentioned that I was looking for the owl and he called for it several times. We heard it respond but couldn’t find it anywhere.

I met up with the group for breakfast afterwards. Relaxed, refreshed, and recharged, we were all ready for the hardest day: hot seats.

Here’s how our hot seats worked. For the first 30 minutes, it’s your time. Tell us about your agency. Though they’ve each been in the program for a long time, I was sure that there were details about each person’s agency that the rest of us had no idea about. Tell us about your hopes and dreams. Use as much or as little of the time as you want. No one can interrupt; we listen and we don’t judge. After your time is up, you stop talking and listen while the rest of us challenge, affirm, suggest, and react.

Gabby went first. She taught us about her industry and field and shared some of her hypotheses about where it could go. Gabby has a natural fire for her professional ambition, but I think the magnitude of her energy didn’t match how small the remit of a typical agency is. While the group was discussing, I gave Claude a few inputs to generate some planet-sized missions that could be better containers for Gabby’s aspirations. Once we landed on something close enough, I asked Claude to generate a list of OKRs to be achieved over a decade to measure success. After looking through, a decade felt too short. Not that it wasn’t enough time; more like it felt too short-sighted. Twenty years felt like the right level of ambition. None of the generated ideas were right, but they were enough of a McDonald’s Theory to workshop hiring plans, offer structures, and content marketing ideas.

After breaking for lunch, we did Benten’s hot seat poolside. When I was prepping for the day that morning, Benten’s situation stumped me the most; I wasn’t really sure how to best help him. Benten had explained the prior day how well things were going for him. Revenue was great, profit was great, the team was firing on all cylinders, clients were happy, and the pipeline was full. He also didn’t seem to want much else other than for this to continue long enough that he could build wealth and retire early. That’s one of the trickiest situations for me to coach. Coaching is about maximizing performance. If things are great, perhaps performance has been sufficiently maximized. Like the “destination begins with desire” sticker on the water bottle, if there’s no desire, it might mean you’ve arrived at your destination, and the only work left to do is to figure out how to stay there. I told Benten that in so many words. I learned later at the end of Benten’s hot seat how infuriating that was for him. He ribbed, “Can you imagine me going back and telling my wife that I spent all this money and time to come to this retreat and all Dan said was, ‘Keep on keeping on?’” 🤣

Luckily for all of us, that wasn’t the case. I told Benten that I didn’t think he had a Worthy Goal, to use parlance from Michael Bungay Stanier’s How to Begin. Worthy Goals are thrilling, daunting, and important. I told Benten that it sounded like building and growing an agency was thrilling for him but not daunting or important. He agreed. And then, for whatever reason, he started telling us—again, for the second time on this trip—about these books he read and this museum exhibit that made him tear up. If I had to guess, he was trying to tie “daunting” and “important” to something. I won’t share much more than that—the rest is Benten’s story to tell, not mine—but we uncovered and created a new context where NOOON’s role is partially a stepping stone to where Benten wants to go next in his personal and professional mission. It’s a completely new business that serves a new audience in a way that feels thrilling, daunting, and important to Benten. I asked Claude to do a research project to understand the opportunity space and create a roadmap for getting it up and running, and Benten started working on it almost immediately. He’s a pretty even-keeled guy, but I wish we had a video recording of his session so that everyone could see him light up. It was like one of those time-lapse videos where you see a flower bloom in 10 seconds.

At this point, we had been going for about 8 hours, so I did an energy check-in. We still had Joey’s hot seat to go, so I asked him if he’d still like to do his today or to push to tomorrow when everyone was fresh. He—and everyone else—remarked that they were energized and still had plenty of juice to keep going. We ordered dinner to the villa and moved to the living room to start Joey’s hot seat.

He started very articulate and prepared in talking about Baseline; we all thought he was reading from something! But it was clear to me that there was some ambiguity about the future underneath it that needed to be articulated. I asked him to forget about deliverables and offers for a minute and talk about what success actually feels like. He started connecting dots he’d never connected before, patterns across every engagement he’d ever done that reframed how he thought about his entire business. I told a few stories about how we used to approach similar challenges at SuperFriendly, not to give him a blueprint but to show him what was possible. I could see his wheels turning in real time. He connected it to something he was already sitting on and landed on a direction he hadn’t considered before. We mapped out the 6 most important projects Baseline could ship this year and set deadlines for them. Joey said it was the first time in a while he had a clear picture of what he was working toward.

I have no idea what time we finished, but I know that the moon was up, the stars were out, and we were all starting to fade. We’d been going for at least 13 hours at that point, so it was probably time to call it a day.

I gave them one last prompt for the day: pick some important puzzle to think about right before bed that your subconscious can work on while you’re sleeping. With that, they all went back to their rooms for some well-earned rest.

As I was reflecting on the day while I was dozing off, it struck me just how emergent sessions like these are. I didn’t know where we’d end up with each person, and I certainly didn’t have a deliberate plan to get there. It dawned on me that each person had multiple epiphanies throughout the day and they each needed something different to get there. Gabby needed direction and permission. Benten needed coaching. Joey needed mentorship and producing.

I needed sleep.

The Ridge (Day 4: Wednesday, February 25)

The previous days were very structured, so the remaining days were pretty loose. Out of the hot seats, I encouraged everyone to do what their instincts suggested next. If you need to write, go write. If you need to build something, build it. If you wanna talk something out, come find me and we can workshop or even just rubber duck. You’ve collected a lot of inputs over the last few days; now go express it somehow.

They each did their own thing for a bit. Then they found me and we spent some time workshopping some marketing strategies for each of them.

One of the most important jobs I think a CEO is responsible for is creating a culture that is unique to your company. I love how Seth Godin explains culture: “People like us do things like this.” I think travel is one of the most poignant examples of this: you can directly observe how many definitions there can be for “people like us” and how varied “things like this” can be too. And yet, no matter how many permutations, to them, it’s always “normal.” That’s culture.

So, whenever I travel, I make it a point to experience at least one local thing. How do they dress? How do they talk? Where do they go? What do they do? And probably my favorite question: what do they eat?

We took a field trip to the San Ignacio Market, an open-air market in western Belize’s Cayo District, widely considered one of the most authentically local markets in the country where residents do their weekly shopping for fresh produce, traditional foods, handmade crafts, and household goods. We shopped for souvenirs and had lunch at Cenaida’s: rice and beans, beans and rice—yes, rice and beans is a different dish than beans and rice in Belize—stewed chicken, and more.

After some individual time and a short stint in the hot pool, we got ready for dinner. Osmani organized a private dinner for us at Blancaneaux’s garden, where they grow all of the vegetables and herbs that they use in their restaurants. The evening started with different flavored mules as we got a tour of the garden from the head gardener. We heard about their advanced composting processes, saw all of the different equipment they’d rigged up to protect the produce from the animals and elements, and played some guessing games and taste tests to identify less typical varieties like soursop, annato, and so much more. It was inspiring to hear from someone at the top of their craft.

We sat for appetizers on tree stump chairs by a fire pit, then moved inside for the main dinner. The chefs outdid themselves. Our conversation was quieter and broader than the nights before. Real work was settling and everyone could feel it.

The Summit (Day 5: Thursday, February 26)

Everyone was bummed to miss the sunrise bird walk a few days earlier, so I offered to do it myself. I’m not nearly as good as Mark is at spotting birds, but we could certainly walk around and try. We borrowed a few pairs of binoculars from the front desk and set off around the property to see what we could see. Over the next hour, we spotted a lot of different looking birds! The amazing Merlin app helped us identify what birds we were hearing and seeing.

This being my third time going now, I was getting decent at a few bird calls myself. I nailed the Pygmy Owl call well enough that the Merlin app identified my call as that bird. Alas, despite calling for it, we couldn’t find it anywhere.

I was shooting photos of some hummingbirds and woodpeckers in a tree when Mark walked up.

“Doing your own bird walk today?” he inquired.

“Yep!” I said. “We’re giving it a shot!”

“Nice,” he said. “I see you found the owl!”

Wait, what? I looked to see where he was pointing.

Sure enough, exactly 1 foot to the left of where I was shooting, my Pygmy Owl friend was hanging out! I don’t think I would have spotted it myself had Mark not walked up. My bucket list shot!

The last full day of the retreat was hot. It was 85ºF, a perfect day to do what was supposed to be our first day of The Summit: the hike to the waterfall.

I hate hiking, but I’ll do it for a good payoff. I was dripping sweat along the way, though everyone else seemed to be doing fine. Jumping into the cold river sounded refreshing.

We descended the 177 steps and emerged from the clearing to find a majestic 150-ft. waterfall waiting for us. Some of us found some shade on the rocks while others stripped down to bathing suits for a swim.

A black dog kept bringing sticks to us to play fetch. I’m not much of an animal person, so I threw the stick away so the dog would play with someone else. Big mistake. I realized just after that I was in the game now. We played for about 10 minutes until my dog friend chewed the stick down to shrapnel.

I’m not a strong swimmer, so jumping into a river is still a bit nerve-wracking for me, no matter how inviting it looked on a hot day. I worked up the courage for a few minutes and jumped in. The water was colder than I expected, so I gasped underwater and swallowed a bunch of it. Whoops.

After we had all cooled down a bit, I gathered everyone to do the final structured exercise of the retreat: writing out the story of your agency. I shared a format I used at SuperFriendly to do account planning, mixed with Pixar’s Story Spine. Everyone took out their pens and notebooks to get it all down.

While they wrote, the next luxury slowly materialized. Osmani and his team appeared from the clearing and started to set up a table with food and drinks for us. That’s right: we were having a catered lunch at the waterfall! They made plates for each of us with crackers and various meats and cheeses. We gobbled it up and washed it down with the five bottles of sparkling San Pellegrino they carried down 177 stairs for us to keep us hydrated.

Then the kicker. Osmani said, “Ready for your main courses now?”

We thought the cheese plates were lunch! And we would have all been content with that. But no: Osmani pulled out full size plates, the majority of which were The Joey. We were stuffed, but there was more: dessert! An assortment of fresh fruit with mint was the perfect way to end this treat of a meal.

Sufficiently fed and energized from writing, we packed up and got ready to begin the trek back to the lodge. We trudged back up the 177 stairs, helping Osmani and team and sharing some of the load they brought for us. Just at the top of the stairs, we took a different trail path than we took to get there. At the end of the clearing, our chariots awaited: horse and carriage rides back to our rooms!

Upon returning, Joey opted to shower and do some work on his own. The rest of us decided to jump back in the river just next to the villa. It was pretty cold, so we soon moved to the villa plunge pool. We casually talked around a few topics we hadn’t gotten to yet, mostly around leadership. Joey rejoined, and we discussed hiring and firing, delegation, team management and career ladders, employee retention, and full-time vs. contractor considerations, ops systems. We moved into sales and marketing: advanced pricing strategies, qualifying metrics, content marketing approaches, content strategy pillars, and more.

Gabby and Benten wanted some downtime before dinner and to do some work on their own. Joey and I did some more workshopping at our villa’s long table around evolving his agency’s offers to be more reflective of the higher value they could deliver. Gabby came back halfway through that conversation and joined in.

As it started to get dark, we started to prepare for our final dinner of The Summit. Osmani and two chefs started to set up a grill right at our villa balcony. They put out an amazing spread of three different salads, grilled vegetables, chicken, steak, and lobster, each with their own accompanying sauces.

To finish it all off, the chefs made not one but two cakes (one gluten-free) to celebrate our time there!

It was time for our last ritual to close it down: for each person to read aloud the vision of their agency that they had written, rewritten, and evolved over the last few days. Someone suggested an improvisation over dinner: not only would they write and read the vision for their agency, but each person would write and read a vision for the other attendees. After all, spending this much time together workshopping, they clearly had enough context—and objectivity—to share some valuable perspectives on each others’ trajectories. I loved the idea!

As they all read their stories for themselves and for each other, it was hard for me to not get choked up. It was very apparent how much thought, love, care, and hope was poured into this by everyone.

To close it all out, I gave each of them a small Belizean trinket I picked up at the San Ignacio Market, a symbol and a reminder that “people like them do things like this,” that they’re a special cohort, and they can always lean on each other—and me—to help bring these ridiculous notions to life.

I went to bed with a full heart that night, and I hope they did too.

The Descent (Day 6: Friday, February 27)

Gabby’s flight left early the next morning, so I didn’t see her before she had to head to the airport.

Benten, Joey, Em, and I all had breakfast and headed to the airport together. We packed our stuff into the van, thanked Osmani profusely for making the week so special, and drove off.

At the airport, Benten hopped immediately into the long security line as his flight left soon. Joey, Em, and I were on the same flight, so we grabbed a few snacks and waited together. At the connecting airport when we landed, we shared a final Tex-Mex meal—a far cry from the delicious, clean food we’d been eating all week—before flying back to our respective cities.

The Aftermath

I’d hoped the retreat would be a catalyst. I’d hoped they’d leave energized and clear-headed. What I didn’t expect was the speed.

Within 48 hours of landing, all three had posted detailed CEO-level weekly plans in our Belize Slack channel. Joey already had meetings scheduled to hire a few new folks for his team. Gabby cold-emailed a contact to set up the first of some new strategic partnerships.

Within a week, Benten had conducted vision planning sessions with his entire team. Joey launched a new product. Gabby ramped up content marketing.

Within two weeks, Benten stopped doing all design work and handed it off to his team completely. Joey was evangelizing the new vision for Baseline wherever and whenever he could.

Within a month, a dream client showed up in Joey’s inbox. Gabby was presenting to her clients’ VPs from seeds she’d planted. Benten was deep in research with high-profile interviews for his new initiative.

Within five weeks, Joey had his best week ever at Baseline, both financially and in terms of his own energy. All three had hired or started planning to hire executive assistants. All three dialed up marketing to a level that inspired me to dial up mine. And—my favorite part—the three of them started doing biweekly calls together on their own, a peer cohort that nobody asked them to form.

I can’t take credit for any of that. They did the work. But I can tell you what I gave them.

After they left, I spent a week writing my own version of a vision story for each of them, personalized narratives projecting 20–50 years into the future for their businesses. My note to them: “I’m sure I got a lot of the details wrong. Please use this as a draft you can edit. My intention was to give you a starting point that you can sharpen.”

Their reactions:

Joey: “Printing this out and reading/updating it weekly.”

Benten: “This is insanely beautiful. This is going on my wall.”

Gabby replied with two words and a heart emoji about a detail I included in her story. Maybe she’ll share that someday.

Coppola built Blancaneaux because he needed a place to write what was already in his head. I brought three agency owners there for the same reason. Their visions were already inside them. Gabby didn’t need me to invent her mission. Benten didn’t need me to tell him what mattered. Joey didn’t need me to hand him a strategy. They needed a place with no screens, no distractions, no exit, and a process designed to surface what they’d been carrying around but couldn’t see clearly from behind their desks.

I just picked the location for next year’s Summit.

The Agency Pricing Playbook

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Most agency owners think pricing is one decision. It’s not. It’s three.

Every time you write a proposal, send a quote, or negotiate a deal, you’re actually answering three separate questions whether you realize it or not. The agencies that scale are the ones that answer all three intentionally and strategically.

Question 1: How do you decide what to charge?

This is the part most people think of as “pricing.” But there are fundamentally different ways to arrive at a number:

Start from your costs and work up. Add up what it costs you to deliver—labor, tools, overhead—and add a margin on top. You’ll never lose money on a project, but you’ll leave money on the table every time your work creates outsized value for the client. This works best when your costs are predictable and the work is commoditized. This is commonly known as cost-plus pricing.
Start from the market and adjust. Look at what others charge for similar work and price yourself in range. This is a safe way to enter a new market or establish a baseline, but it anchors you to someone else’s business model. If they’re underpricing, now you are too. This is commonly known as competitive pricing, market pricing, or industry pricing.
Start from the client's outcome and work backward. Figure out what the work is worth to the client—in revenue, savings, speed, risk reduction, etc—and [price as a fraction of that]/posts/pricing-profitable-projects/). If your rebrand helps them close $2M in new business, a $200K fee is a steal. This requires the skill to lead a value conversation with clients who think in terms of return on investment (ROI), but it's where the real leverage lives. This is commonly known as value-based pricing.
Let the results decide. Don’t set a fixed price at all. Take a percentage of sales, a commission on performance, or a revenue share tied to results. You’re betting on yourself and the client takes on less risk, which can make the deal easier to close. The danger is that you can’t control the client’s ability to execute on their end. This is commonly known as performance-based pricing.

Question 2: What is the client buying?

This is the packaging question. The client’s experience changes completely depending on how you package what they're getting.

They’re buying your time. Hours, days, availability, access… however you label it, the client is paying for your attention. This includes hourly billing, day rates, “fractional” roles, and retainers that are really just reserved calendar blocks. It’s simple and flexible, but it punishes efficiency, caps your income, and trains clients to watch the clock.
They’re buying a deliverable. A logo. A website. A slide deck. The client is paying for a defined artifact; the thing itself. They might not have a business outcome attached to it. They just need the asset. This is straightforward to scope and easy for the client to evaluate, but it commoditizes your work if you’re not careful.
They’re buying a transformation. Not the deliverable, but the result the deliverable produces. A rebrand that repositions them in the market. A design system that cuts their engineering costs by 30%. The client pays for the before-and-after, not the artifact. This is the highest leverage because your price scales with the impact, not your effort. It rewards strategic thinking and requires you to understand the client’s business deeply.

These tend to map to how agencies mature. You start selling time, graduate to selling deliverables, then learn to sell the transformation.

Question 3: How does the money get to you?

This is the part most agency owners set on autopilot and never reconsider. The structure of how money flows can change the entire dynamic of the relationship.

Up front. Full payment before work begins. You have zero cash flow risk. The client has maximum commitment. Works best when you have leverage and trust.
Installments. Fixed payments on a date schedule, not tied to deliverables or approvals. The client already agreed to the value; the installments are just how they pay for it. This keeps the focus on the project as a whole, not the individual artifacts.
Milestones. Payment tied to deliverable approvals. Be aware: this tells the client they’re buying the deliverable, not the transformation, no matter what you said in the sales call. Now the client has every right to nitpick, request revisions, and withhold payment until the deliverable is “right,” because that's the deal you made.
Recurring. Monthly or quarterly billing for ongoing work. Smooths out your cash flow, increases lifetime value, and reduces the feast-or-famine cycle. This can sit on top of time, deliverables, or transformation.
On performance. You get paid as results come in: a percentage of sales, a commission per unit, a bonus when targets are hit. You’re sharing the risk and the upside with the client. This can make deals easier to close but harder to predict.
Equity or trade. You accept ownership, stock, or barter instead of cash. This only makes sense if you believe in the client’s upside more than you need the cash today.

How the Three Questions Work Together

Every project you win requires an answer to each question. Here are a few common combinations:

A freelancer early in their career might price from the market, sell their time, and bill monthly. Safe, predictable, easy for clients to say yes to.
A scaling agency might price from the client’s outcome, sell a defined deliverable, and bill in installments. Higher revenue per project, more leverage, and a contract that doesn’t undermine the value conversation.
A senior consultant might price from the client's outcome, sell the transformation itself, and bill on a recurring retainer. Predictable recurring revenue tied to strategic value.
A growth partner might let results decide, sell the transformation, and get paid on performance. Maximum alignment with the client, but maximum exposure to their execution.

None of these combinations are inherently better or worse. The right one depends on your unfair advantages, where you are, what you’re selling, and what your business needs right now.

The Strategic Levers

On top of your three answers, there are temporary moves you can make depending on what you're optimizing for in a given moment:

If you need market share or case studies, you might deliberately underprice for a period to build volume and social proof then raise prices once you’ve established a foothold.
If you have more demand than capacity, you might raise prices during peak periods or for rush timelines, extracting more from each engagement when the market allows it.
If you want to attract a specific caliber of client, you might price high on purpose, using the price itself as a filter for buyers who equate cost with quality.

These aren’t permanent pricing decisions. They’re dials you can turn up or down based on what your business needs this quarter.

The Big Idea

Pricing isn’t a single choice you make once. It’s three questions you answer together, and the answers should evolve as your business does.

Most agency owners default into a combination early—usually market-based pricing, selling time, payable on milestones—and never revisit it. That combination works when you’re starting out, but you can quickly outgrow it as you build reputation.

The unlock isn’t learning a fancier methodology. It’s realizing that you have three levers, not one, and that changing any one of them can change the whole equation.

Vision Pulls, Passion Pushes

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

One thing I’ve never said in my coaching is “Follow your passion.”

Not because passion is bad. But because passion doesn’t know where it’s going. It only knows that it’s going. And “follow your passion” is how agency owners end up three years in with eight different service offerings, no clear positioning, and a growing sense that they’re building someone else’s business by accident.

What I say instead is: “Get clear on your vision. Then let passion do its job.”

Those are two different forces that play two different roles. The words themselves tell you why.

What the words actually mean

Vision comes from the Latin vidēre: “to see.” It’s the act of perceiving something clearly. In the 1200s, the word meant something you saw in a dream or a supernatural experience, a picture so vivid that it felt more real than reality. By the 1900s, it had expanded to mean “statesman-like foresight,” the ability to see something that doesn’t exist yet.

Vision is about sight. It’s external. It’s out in front of you. Ahead of you. A destination. A fixed point.

Passion comes from the Latin pati: “to suffer, to endure.” When the word entered English around 1200, it literally referred to the suffering of Christ on the cross. It didn’t mean excitement. It didn’t mean enthusiasm. It meant pain that you were willing to endure because something mattered more than your comfort. It’s the same root word as “patience.” Patience is literally your capacity for suffering.

Passion is about feeling. It’s internal. It’s a force. It’s fuel.

Vision pulls. Passion pushes.

Picture a lighthouse on a rocky coast and a wave rolling toward shore. The lighthouse is vision: fixed, visible, doing nothing but being seen. The wave is passion: raw energy, pushing you through the water. The lighthouse doesn’t move the water. It doesn’t have to. It just has to be visible. The wave will carry you, but without a lighthouse, you don’t know if it’s carrying you toward the harbor or into the rocks.

If you only have passion, you’re a ship with no lighthouse. The waves will carry you, surge after surge, but you’ll end up wherever the ocean takes you.

If you only have vision, you’re a ship with no wave. You can see the lighthouse, but you’re dead in the water. That’s the agency owner with the beautiful strategic plan collecting dust in a Google Doc somewhere.

How pulling and pushing feel

Being pulled by a vision feels like clarity. You wake up and you know what to work on. You don’t need a motivational podcast to get out of bed. The work might still be hard, but there’s no confusion about why you’re doing it. It feels like walking toward something, the beam from the lighthouse, drawing you in.

Being pushed by passion feels like intensity. There’s energy, but it’s restless. You’re productive, but you’re not sure you’re productive on the right things. You need the excitement to keep going, and when the excitement fades, so does the momentum.

You need both: to be pulled by a vision and pushed by passion.

Where’s the friction?

When you’re being pulled—vision—the friction is behind you. It’s the stuff you’re leaving behind: old clients, old habits, old pricing, the version of your agency you’ve outgrown. It’s uncomfortable, but you’re moving away from it. Every step forward puts more distance between you and the resistance.

When you’re being pushed—passion—the friction is in front of you. It’s everything you haven’t figured out yet. Every obstacle feels like a wall because you don’t know what’s on the other side. You’re running into resistance, and without a clear picture of where you’re headed, you can’t tell if it’s the kind of resistance worth pushing through or a sign you’re going the wrong direction entirely.

Most agency owners think they need more push. They don’t. They need more pull.

You need both forces. But you need them in the right order.

Vision first. Passion second.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Step 1: Get the vision clear enough to see.

Don’t start with “what am I passionate about?” Start with “what am I building?” Be specific. Not “I want a successful agency.” That’s a bumper sticker, not a vision.

A real vision sounds something like this: “In three years, I run a 5-person agency that does brand strategy for Series A startups. We charge a minimum of $50k per engagement. I work four days a week and take home $400k a year.”

That’s a vidēre—something you can actually see. You could moodboard it. You could describe it to someone and they’d be able to picture it.

Test your vision: Can you describe a random Tuesday in 2031 for your future agency? What time do you wake up? What’s your first meeting about? Who’s on your team? What kind of client is on the other end of that Zoom call? If you can’t see it, you don’t have a vision. You have a wish.

Step 2: Use vision to make decisions.

This is where vision earns its keep. Once you can see where you’re going, it becomes a filter for everything.

Should you take that $8k WordPress project from your cousin’s friend? Does it move you toward the vision? No? Then it’s a no. (Unless you’re in the cash reserve building phase, in which case, yes.)

Should you hire a junior designer or a project manager? Which one does a Tuesday in 2031 assume? A project manager, because in the vision you’re not managing timelines anymore. Done.

Should you launch a podcast? Does the 2031 version of you have a podcast? If yes, great. If no, it’s a distraction dressed up as an opportunity.

Vision makes decisions fast because it gives you something to measure against. Without it, every opportunity looks equal, which means every opportunity looks good, which means you say yes to everything, which means you’re back to riding waves with no lighthouse in sight.

Step 3: Let passion pick the how, not the what.

Here’s where passion gets its job back.

Vision is the what and the why.

Passion is the how. How do you get there? Do you build your pipeline through a weekly newsletter, a YouTube channel, or cold outreach on LinkedIn? Do you grow by hiring generalists or by partnering with specialists? Do you establish authority by speaking at conferences or by publishing case studies? Those are all valid paths to the same destination. Passion picks the one you’re most likely to endure long enough for it to work. Which one are you willing to suffer for? Which one are you willing to be patient with?

“What am I excited about?” isn’t the right question when it comes to passion.

Passion is about which suffering you choose because something on the other side of it matters to you.

Writing a weekly newsletter every single Tuesday isn’t exciting. Recording more YouTube videos when your current ones only get a dozen views isn’t exciting. Cold outreach to your 50th startup founder this week isn’t exciting. But if the vision is clear enough—if you can see the thing you’re building—then the suffering has a point. And suffering with a point is the original definition of passion.

Step 4: When you lose momentum, check the vision, not the passion.

When agency owners hit a wall, they often say, “I’ve lost my passion.” Nine times out of ten, that’s not what happened.

What happened is the vision got blurry. You stopped being able to see where you were going, so the suffering stopped feeling purposeful. And purposeless suffering isn’t passion. It’s just pain.

When you feel stuck, don’t try to “reignite your passion.” That's like trying to make the wave bigger. The wave isn't the problem. You just lost sight of the lighthouse.

Instead, sharpen the vision. Go back to that Tuesday in 2031. Can you still see it? Is it still what you want? Has it changed? Get it clear again and the energy comes back, because now you’re not just enduring for the sake of it. You’re being pulled toward something again.

Homework

Write down your vision for your agency three years from now. Make it specific enough that you could describe a random Tuesday in 2031: your schedule, your team, your clients, your take-home pay.

Then look at everything on your plate this week. For each thing, ask: does this move me closer to that Tuesday, or is it just a wave I’m riding?

Cut one thing that’s just a wave. Replace it with one thing that gets you closer to that Tuesday.

Seeing Tuesday is the vision pulling you forward. Doing the work to get there—even when it’s not exciting—is the passion pushing you from behind.

That’s both forces, in the right order.

Be a Matchmaker, Not a Middleman

Dan Mall — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:00:00 +0000

My friend Lauren needs help with her website.

If I stopped there, I’d be doing exactly what most people do when someone they care about needs help.

One of two things typically happens next:

No one responds.
Dozens of people respond. Freelancers, agency owners, Squarespace specialists, Webflow developers, full-stack engineers. People who build $500 templates and people who build $500,000 platforms. Every single one of them “makes websites.”

Both versions are failures.

Not a single one of those responses would tell me who’s actually right for Lauren.

This is the problem with how most people do referrals. They hear a friend needs help, and they either blast it out to everyone or they text the first name that comes to mind. “Oh, you need a website? You should talk to my buddy Dave. He makes websites.” They feel great about it. They helped two people at once.

Except they didn’t. They helped neither of them.

Dave now has to figure out if this is a project he even wants, at a price he can make work, for a person he knows nothing about. And Lauren has to take a meeting with a stranger based on nothing more than “some guy my friend knows.”

All they did was pass a name along. That’s not a helpful referral. That’s being a middleman.

Valuable referrals are matchmaking. And matchmaking means doing the work to understand both sides before you connect anyone. Most people skip the matchmaking entirely and jump straight to the introduction. That’s backwards.

Let me show you what I mean. My friend Lauren actually does need help with her website. So I’m going to build it in front of you, layer by layer, and show you how each new piece of context transforms a generic ask into a precision match.

Layer 1: Who is Lauren?

Lauren runs a salon that specializes in cutting curly hair. She’s not just any stylist; she’s my stylist, and she’s world-class at what she does. She wins awards. She does trainings for other stylists. She’s built a reputation in a very specific niche, and her clients are fiercely loyal because of it.

Now reread the opening line:

My friend Lauren needs help with her website.

It means something completely different now, doesn’t it?

Lauren doesn’t need “a website.” She needs a website that captures what makes her special: her expertise, specialty, the craft of what she does with curly hair. That’s a very different brief than “small business needs web presence.”

Watch what happens to the pool of candidates when you add this context.

The generalist web designers who’ve never touched a beauty or wellness brand—and who don’t specifically care to—disappear. The developers whose portfolios are full of SaaS dashboards and tech startups seem less relevant. The template builders who’d give Lauren the same site they give every small business all blend in.

But something else happens too: the right people move forward. The designer who’s built salon websites and loved every one of them perks up. The person who specializes in beauty brands and knows exactly how to photograph texture, movement, and curl patterns starts listening more intently.

Specificity shrinks the pool. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Layer 2: The Part Most People Are Afraid to Say

Lauren is a busy salon owner. She pours her time, energy, and money into managing and growing the salon… as she should. The salon is the business. The website supports the business, but it’s not where Lauren’s investment instincts go first. Her perception is that she doesn’t have a lot of money to spend on a website.

This is critical context. If I leave it out, I’m setting everyone up to fail.

Without it, a senior designer who charges $25,000 for a website might throw their hat in the ring, have a great conversation with Lauren, put together a proposal, and then never hear back because Lauren would never imagine spending that kind of money on a website and might be too embarrassed to say so. That’s wasted time for the designer. It’s an awkward situation for Lauren. And it makes me look like I don’t know what I’m doing.

Now here’s where most people would see this as a problem. They think that if Lauren doesn’t have a “big budget”—whatever that means—the referral is harder to make. Because the pool is smaller. So she has to “settle.”

I think that’s completely wrong.

The budget context doesn’t limit the match. It reveals it.

Layer 3: The Match Nobody Else Would See

Whether you’re a freelancer, an agency, a solo consultant, or something else, most businesses move through phases. Two of those phases matter a lot here.

There’s a phase of growing an agency where you’re building your cash reserves. You’re focused on making as much money as possible. Every project needs to pay well because you’re trying to build a financial cushion to create the space to scale. When you’re in that phase, you evaluate opportunities almost entirely on revenue. “What does it pay?” is the first and sometimes only question.

Then there’s a different phase, one where you're establishing your reputation and building your positioning. You’re trying to become the go-to company in a specific area. But claiming you’re the go-to isn’t enough. You need proof. You need work you can point to that shows you’ve actually done this and done it well. Without that, the clients you want to attract have no reason to believe you. In this phase, you’re not optimizing for the biggest check on every project. You’re optimizing for the right projects: the ones that build your portfolio, your reputation, and your network in the niche you’ve chosen.

These are very different people with very different needs, even if they have the exact same skills.

Lauren’s project is not the right fit for a person or a team building cash reserves. The budget doesn’t match their goals. They’ll either pass on it, or take it and phone it in. Neither outcome is good for Lauren, or for the agency.

But for someone starting to build a position as the go-to web designer for salons and beauty professionals?

Lauren’s project could change everything.

Think about what this project actually offers.

Lauren is an award-winning, well-connected stylist in the curly hair world. She knows other salon owners. She goes to industry events. She does trainings where she’s in rooms full of other professionals in the beauty space.

If a web designer does exceptional work on Lauren’s site, Lauren doesn’t just become a happy client. She becomes proof that you can do this work, and she’s in rooms full of your ideal clients every month. She trains other salon owners. She speaks at industry events. When someone in her world needs a website, she’s the person they ask. That’s not exposure. That’s a distribution channel you couldn’t buy.

For this designer, Lauren’s project isn’t a budget job they’re settling for. It’s a launchpad. They might even be willing to do the work at a lower rate, not because they‘re undervaluing themselves, but because they understand the strategic value of what they're getting.

That’s the right person for Lauren.

Not someone who makes websites. Not even someone who makes good websites. Someone for whom this specific project, at this specific moment in their business, is exactly the opportunity they need.

The Introduction

My friend Lauren does need help with a website.

And now you know everything I know. You know she runs an award-winning salon that specializes in curly hair. You know she’s deeply connected in the beauty industry. You know her budget reflects where her investment priorities are right now. And you know that for the right person—someone building a position as the go-to web designer for salons and beauty professionals—this project isn’t small. It’s strategic.

Are you that person? Do you know that person? If so, please DM me, and I’ll connect you with Lauren. Not because you “make websites.” Because this is your match.

And the next time a friend asks you for help finding someone—before you fire off a name or post a generic ask—do what I just did here. Be the matchmaker, not just the middleman. Learn enough about both sides that you could explain to each person why the other one is the right match.

If you can’t do that yet, you’re not ready to make the introduction.

And that’s okay. A thoughtful introduction next week is worth more than a lazy referral today.

Can’t Lose

Dan Mall — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Vince grew up playing basketball long before he became a football star, but his last streetball game was the day his father died.

Vince was seven. He came home from the courts to find his father on the apartment floor, dead. The knife wounds in his chest looked unusual. The police filed a report. They found a stash of guns in the apartment. Another dead Black man in Oakland; chalk it up to escalating gang violence.

The system took Vince. He didn’t have much to bring with him aside from a few clothes and the fairy tales his dad told him at bedtime. Foster care, a case number, and a series of homes that ranged from indifferent to hostile. He stayed the longest with Regina and Ornette, but it was far from perfect. Ornette was in and out of jail, and Vince would often come home to find Regina strung out on the couch. A cycle of run-ins with the police threatened to land Vince in juvie, but an officer, sick of locking up kids, tried a different approach: he brought Vince to Coach Eric, a local high school football coach with a reputation for converting troubled boys into strong men.

Coach was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man who always wore a windbreaker. His jaw was like a closed fist and his voice could fill a room without raising itself. People in that small Texas town worshipped him. Players, parents, boosters orbited him like he was generating gravity.

Vince recognized the model right away. He’d seen it in Oakland on street corners. Coach didn’t deal or run a set, but the physics were the same: find someone lost, make them feel found, then point them wherever you want them to go.

Coach saw the same thing in Vince he saw in all his star players: the powerful combination of anger and potential. He kept him every day after practice, making him do extra reps. Drove him home when no one else would. Stood on the field at sunset and said, “I’m not going anywhere until you do it perfectly, son.”

Coach had a philosophy and mantra. He said it before every game. It was painted on the locker room wall. His boys knew it by heart. It was about football and it was about everything.

Coach worked on Vince the way water works on stone: constant, patient, reshaping. He taught Vince that a leader’s job wasn’t to be liked but to bend the game until everyone in it was living inside his vision. That commitment without compromise was the highest virtue. That anyone who asked him to soften was asking him to lose.

“You’re a weapon,” Coach said watching Vince throw forty-yard spirals into the dying light. “You’re the most dangerous thing on that field and you don’t even know it yet.”

Their first season together was rough. Despite Vince’s raw talent, the team was still learning how to show up together. They played for the underfunded school on the east side of town. On the west side, they had everything: money, facilities, tradition, the weight of a winning legacy. The east side wasn't supposed to compete with any of that. Their flash of brilliance only came at the end of the season when they beat the cross-town rival in the final game and knocked them out of the playoffs. They carried the momentum to the next season, as Coach molded them into soldiers, destined to win battles. The next season, they won seven straight.

A sports writer from the nearby big city had been following the team’s unlikely run. They were an underfunded school on the wrong side of town, the team nobody gave a chance, with the coach known for turning nobodies into contenders. The writer put Coach Eric on the cover and called him something that landed on Vince like a thunderclap:

The Kingmaker.

Coach dismissed it. The team ribbed him about it. Someone taped the cover to his office door. He tore it down, but not before Vince memorized the word.

That season, Vince led his team to a state championship. For the final play, he threw a sixty-three-yard prayer into the end-zone lights and the whole town erupted. Coach found him on the field after, grabbed him by the facemask, and pulled him close, their eyes both wet.

”You're going to change the world one day, son.”

Three weeks later, Coach was gone. His wife got a job in Philadelphia, so they quickly packed up their things and moved. Vince heard about it from a teammate who heard about it from a booster who saw the moving truck on a Tuesday morning.

The next season was supposed to be a coronation and a victory lap. The east and west schools merged into one school with a super team—the Panthers—and Vince was the undisputed starting quarterback, the best player in the state. College scouts circled. A scholarship felt inevitable.

But Coach Eric wasn’t there anymore. Without him, the season unraveled. The chemistry never came. The new coaching staff didn’t know how to handle Vince’s anger. They didn’t even know it was there, because Coach had channeled it so seamlessly into the game that it looked like talent. Without the channel, the anger leaked. Sideline blowups. Missed reads. A fistfight with a teammate that cost him a one-game suspension.

They didn’t even make the playoffs. Vince’s high school football career was over halfway through his senior year. Vince could sum up his anger in one word: Panthers. Everything went wrong when he became a Panther. The word caught in Vince’s throat. He didn’t know yet why that word stung differently than any other loss. It was a specific kind of torment, like being stabbed repeatedly in the chest. He wouldn’t understand for years why the pain was so distinct, not until a memory surfaced that had been locked behind a door in his mind since he was seven years old. A memory of unusual knife wounds. Like claws. Like panther claws.

The scholarship offers dried up. Coaches who’d circled like vultures didn’t return his calls. The narrative shifted overnight: character concerns, inconsistency, needs development. Vince sat in his bedroom and felt something harden inside him. The anger wasn’t new. It had been there since Oakland, since the apartment floor, since the first foster home. Coach hadn’t removed it. He’d compressed it into something denser. Without Coach to channel it, the compression continued on its own—tighter, hotter, a core of fury with no release valve and no one watching.

Directionless, Vince hung around town for a couple of years, working the odd job to pay rent: hardware store clerk, stock boy at the big box retailer, cashier at the Alamo Freeze. One day, a local newspaper headline caught his eye: “Football Coach Killed in Invasion.” The article mentioned seventy-four official casualties, one of which was Eric Taylor, husband, father of two, and celebrated football coach. He was visiting his daughter at NYU and crushed by a falling piece of debris from a collapsing high-rise. They called it the ”Battle of New York.“ Something about aliens pouring through a wormhole above the Empire State Building.

The incredulous details blurred together as Vince felt the anger rise. His thoughts flashed back to his father’s fairy tales of a mystical nation that was so powerful that they could have easily won—or even have prevented—this battle. But they didn’t. Because they didn’t exist. Or worse: they did but chose not to act. Someone else needed to.

Vince decided to enlist that day. As he filled out the application, he found himself writing “E-R-I…” in the first name field. Though subconscious and not entirely intentional, it did feel like a fitting tribute to the only man who showed him how to win by being a weapon, a soldier.

He finished the field: “E-R-I… K.” For the Kingmaker.

Erik excelled at Annapolis. He graduated at the top of his class. MIT for grad school. Then the SEALs. Then straight to Afghanistan, where he racked up confirmed kills like it was a video game—that’s what his handlers said later—and earned a slot in a Joint Special Operations ghost unit, the kind that dropped off the grid to commit assassinations and topple governments. He worked with the CIA to destabilize foreign regimes during election cycles. He learned how thrones changed hands.

The military loved him because he was no one. That was his gift, the thing the foster system had accidentally perfected in him. He had no fixed identity, no permanent allegiance, no self that couldn’t be shed and rebuilt for the next mission. He could walk into any room, any country, any culture and become whatever the situation required, because underneath the performance there was nothing to contradict it. No hometown loyalty. No family name. No legacy pulling him in a direction he didn’t choose. Just a void where a person should have been, and the void made him the most effective infiltrator the unit had ever produced.

He kept a record of his kills. Not on paper. On his skin. A raised scar for every one, deliberate, ritual, a ledger carved into his own body. His fellow operators noticed. They gave him a name for it. He let the name gather around him like scar tissue, didn’t fight it, didn’t correct it.

The memories came back in pieces. In the dead hours between deployments, in the silence of forward operating bases in countries he wasn’t officially in, the stories his father told him at night began to reassemble themselves. Not fairy tales. Intelligence. His father wasn’t telling bedtime stories. He had been briefing him—a seven-year-old child—on the most important secret in the world.

A hidden nation. Not metaphor, not myth, but a real place, masked behind the appearance of poverty, technologically advanced beyond anything the rest of the world could imagine. An African kingdom, never colonized, never conquered, protected by warriors and a king who drew his power from a god. A panther god. A nation built on a metal so powerful it could have stopped the aliens over Manhattan. They could have saved Coach Eric and seventy-three other people and every other person who had ever died because power chose to hide instead of act. Where were they when worthy revolutions never had the firepower to fight their oppressors? Where were they when colonizers carved up the continent? Where were they when a seven-year-old boy in Oakland came home to find his father dead on the floor?

Wakanda.

Home of the Panthers.

He learned that his father had been a prince of that place who had come to Oakland to help his people—not the people behind the mask, but the ones outside it, the ones in the streets, the ones in the foster homes—and Wakanda sent someone to kill him for it. Panther claws in his chest.

Erik was the orphan prince of a nation that pretended he didn’t exist: raised in the colonizer’s foster homes, sharpened by the colonizer’s football coach, trained by the colonizer’s military. And the thing that made him dangerous—the emptiness, the ability to be no one, the void that let him infiltrate anything—was the very thing they’d created by abandoning him.

There was a throne that could be won by combat. And Erik was of royal blood. Coach wasn’t the Kingmaker. Erik was already in line.

He thought back to Coach’s mantra: the one painted on the locker room wall, the one the boys used to say back like a congregation, the one that was about football and about everything. He’d carried it out of Texas and through Annapolis and across every continent where he’d left a scar. It had never stopped being true. It just stopped being about a game.

Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can’t lose.

He’d been many things. A case number. A placement. A weapon. A soldier. Vince. Erik. Each one a role he played until he outgrew it and stepped into the next. That was the gift: the void, the emptiness, the ability to become whatever the mission required. Every role had been preparation. Every name had been a costume.

It was time for the final role that Wakanda—and the world—would come to know him as:

Killmonger.

The Real Pricing Problem

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

After coaching hundreds of agency owners, I can tell you that pricing problems are almost never market problems. The market will always pay premium prices for work that delivers measurable results.

Pricing problems are confidence problems. They’re systems problems. They’re “I’ve never actually calculated the ROI I deliver” problems.

So here’s your homework this week. Do one thing:

Go back to your last three clients and ask them this question: “What changed after we worked with you?” Get specific numbers about revenue, customers, churn, efficiency… whatever matters to them.

Then look at what you charged and ask yourself: was it at least 10% of the value we delivered?

The gap between those two numbers is exactly how much money you're leaving on the table.

Papa Bear Pricing

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

If you’ve studied value pricing before, you’ve probably come across the idea of Goldilocks Pricing.

The idea is simple: always give clients three options—large, medium, and small (in that order)—to choose from. It’s your first chance to demonstrate your creativity to a prospect, it employs price anchoring, and it combats their need to get additional options from competitors.

I endorsed it in my Pricing Design book as my go-to pricing framework.

As I’ve taught it over many years, I’ve noticed an interesting tendency, likely brought on by the name itself. Many of my students assume that the goal of Goldilocks Pricing is to nudge prospects toward the middle option. Too cheap feels risky. Too expensive feels like a stretch. The middle options feels just right.

I’ve heard pricing gurus teach this too.

But the goal of any pricing framework is not to use psychological tricks to push someone toward one option. It’s to give your prospect as many ways to succeed as possible within their given constraints.

So I’ve changed my tune. I no longer endorse Goldilocks Pricing.

I suggest Papa Bear Pricing instead.

The problem with “Just Right”

In the original fairy tale, Goldilocks tries all three options and picks what’s “just right:” not too hot, not too cold, not too hard, not too soft.

But Goldilocks isn’t the role model we make her out to be. The moral of this story isn’t “find what’s comfortable.” It’s that Goldilocks was a snoop and a thief, which made her almost get freaking eaten by bears!

The real heroes of this story are the bears. Papa Bear liked piping hot porridge. Mama Bear loved a soft bed. Baby Bear had a cute little chair. None of them seemed to envy what the others had. They lived in peace until Goldi came along and committed a felony.

If you think your job is to find what’s comfortable for a client, you’re missing opportunities (for them and yourself). Your job is to help them make at least one fundamental decision they wouldn’t have made without you. That’s uncomfortable by nature. If a client wants comfortable, they should keep doing what they’re already doing, and they don’t need you for that.

Sleep researchers will tell you that what feels “just right” when you first lie down isn’t always what your body needs. The bed that felt perfect at 25 leaves you wrecked at 45. As the stakes get higher and the problems get harder, you need more support, not more comfort.

Turns out Papa Bear’s bed may have the most long-term benefits, which is exactly what you want to give your clients.

How to do Papa Bear Pricing

Papa Bear Pricing starts in your early conversations with a prospect.

One of the most important things to uncover is their biggest hopes and dreams. Most sales conversations skip this entirely; they stay focused on the immediate project and miss the bigger picture.

You also need a sense of what they expect to spend. You can ask about their budget, though I don’t recommend it anymore. I think it’s better to research standard market rates.

Here’s a real-world example. A law firm wants a new website. Your research tells you the average custom law firm website goes for around $10K. As you talk, you learn their bigger goal: become the go-to law firm for the construction industry in the southwest U.S., largely by acquiring smaller firms already in that space.

Now you have all the ingredients for Papa Bear Pricing.

Option 1: a full rebrand (renaming, new identity, matching collateral), new website, two-year content marketing calendar with copywriting, new sales materials, trade show collateral, and internal communications campaign. Everything they need to become the go-to player in a new industry. You’re pitching the bigger goal, not just the new website they asked for. You price this at $100K. That’s 10× more than what they expect to spend, but the value is easily 100×.
Option 2: a website redesign. Exactly what they came for. You price it at $20K. That‘s 2× their expected budget, but you’re confident you can deliver a website for them that’s twice as good as the average law firm website.
Option 3: a 1-week website sprint where you customize a Squarespace template for them. You price it at $5K. That‘s half what they expected to spend.

A few things worth noting:

Option 1 should be where you put your best foot forward. Pitch them the world. Show them what‘s possible. They won’t know unless you tell them. It should also be orders of magnitude higher than Option 2, making clear that what they initially wanted is just a piece of a bigger vision.
Option 2 gives them exactly what they asked for, but now it’s anchored by Option 1, which changes completely how it lands.
Option 3 is intentionally less that what they want to spend. This protects you if they say you’re too expensive. You gave them something smaller than their budget. Who does that?! An expert like you, that’s who.
Together, the wide range signals that there are many ways to work with you.

With Papa Bear Pricing, which option are you nudging them towards? There are 2 answers:

The top one. The Papa Bear option should sound so sweet to them that they’d be fools not to want it. They might not be able to afford it or afford it right now, but it should be something they’d jump on immediately if money weren’t a factor.
Any of them. Every option should be something you’d be excited to deliver, incredibly valuable for them, and very profitable for you. If an option doesn’t check these three boxes, don’t present it.

Comfort is overrated

Clients who are serious about their results almost always find a way to the top option. It might not be right away or all in one chunk, but working with an expert always exposes possibilities that return multiples.

Stop engineering your proposals around the option you think they’ll pick. Start engineering them around the option that actually solves the problem, and trust that the right clients will meet you there.

Be the Papa Bear. Make the big bed. Let them decide if they’re serious.

The One Question You Must Ask When Interviewing a Freelancer

Dan Mall — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Over the decade I ran my agency SuperFriendly, more than 700 freelancers passed through our network.

Which means I’ve interviewed a lot of freelancers.

Across that time, one question proved more revealing than any résumé, portfolio, or rate sheet:

What do you need most in this season of your life?

That answer told me everything. I assumed the response would always be money.

And often, it was. People talked about buying homes. Paying off debt. Building savings. Starting families.

But just as often, the answer surprised me.

Some wanted new opportunities: different clients, different industries, different problems to solve.

Some wanted mentorship: they felt stuck and needed someone to help raise their ceiling.

Some wanted leverage: something different, stronger, or better to put in their portfolios and résumés.

The answers were as varied as the people we talked to.

Here’s the lesson most agency owners miss:

Your job isn’t just to pay people well.

Your job is to match your employees and freelancers to opportunities that fit where they are right now and where they want to be.

Paying them well is table stakes.

There may be something they want more. That kind of alignment is what creates great work, long-term relationships, and repeat collaborators.

If you want better outcomes from freelancers and employees, stop asking what they do.

Start asking what they need.

The $100K Trap Nobody Warns You About

Dan Mall — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

When agency owners hit $100K in revenue, they typically start to optimize the wrong thing.

They look at their numbers and think, “I need to get more efficient. Tighten operations. Systematize delivery.“

They’re not wrong. But they’re not right either.

Here’s what I’ve watched happen dozens of times:

An agency owner hits $100K, gets serious about “running a real business,” and spends the next 18 months building systems for a company that doesn’t exist yet. Elaborate SOPs for a team of two. Project management setups designed for 50 clients when they have 8. Pricing models with 17 variables.

Meanwhile, revenue flatlines. Usually dips too.

The trap is mistaking infrastructure for growth.

I see this a lot with agency owners who finally get a little breathing room: some cash in the bank, a few months of runway. Instead of using that calm to sell without desperation, they treat it like permission to stop selling and start tinkering. Brand refresh. New service lines. Overhauled systems.

Six months later, they’ve burned half their runway and still have the same pipeline problem. Just with a nicer logo.

If you’ve been losing projects to competitors because your clients “liked their designs a little better,” then improving your craft is a real problem to solve. Oliver Gareis’ Typography & Layout Masterclass is the perfect way to do that. It’ll help you strengthen the fundamentals of typography, grids, visual hierarchy, spacing, rhythm, and much more. By the end of the course, you’ll be a designer who makes more intentional decisions, develops a recognizable visual style, builds confidence in your work, and attracts more aligned clients as a result.

This isn’t a sponsored post. I’ve long been an admirer of his work and I’m more than happy to share it so we can have more beautiful design in the world. Use my code DAN20 at checkout for 20% off.

If your outreach is working—even a little—pausing and building infrastructure is the wrong move.

When something is working, don’t stop doing it. Do more of it!

Too many agency owners use success as a signal to let off the gas and try to coast off the momentum. But if you do plan on growing and scaling, the best time to accelerate is when you already have momentum. It’s significantly more difficult to do that from scratch.

What about all that infrastructure you’re tempted to build? That Notion OS you fantasize about having? The automations you could wire up? The new website you want to launch that none of your prospects actually asked for?

Don't solve problems you don’t have yet.

By all means, find a little time to fix some things that are slowing you down. But remember: process gets forged by doing the work, usually during the work, not by theorizing in advance. There’s a fine line between the systems you need now and the systems you need later, and most agency owners can’t spot when they’ve crossed it.

The systems you build before you need them usually get torn down anyway, because you built them for a business that doesn't exist yet.

At $100K, you can’t optimize your way to $500K. You have to sell your way there.

The systems come after the revenue that demands them, not before.

I don’t know of many agencies that have gone out of business because their operations were messy. I know of many agencies that have gone out of business because they didn’t bring in enough revenue and create enough profit.

Are you building infrastructure because the business demands it or because it feels more comfortable than selling?

If you’re honest and the answer stings a little, hit reply and tell me what you’ve been building instead of selling. I’ll tell you whether it’s actually premature.

Why You Should Start an Agency

Dan Mall — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, I came across a great article from Jamey Gannon called “Why You Shouldn’t Start an Agency.”

With the exception of the line, “When you become an agency owner, you stop being a creative,” I agree with just about everything she wrote.

You have just as much of a chance of maximizing your income as a solo freelancer as an agency owner. Sometimes even moreso. The math doesn’t lie. A high-level, solo freelancer keeping 90% margins will almost always out-earn an agency owner drowning in payroll, overhead, and Slack fires.

If you’re starting an agency to get rich, there are faster or easier ways. Become an investment banker. Learn anesthesiology.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t great reasons to start an agency. Here are a few.

You want to run a business

An agency is one of the easiest businesses to start.

You don’t have to carry inventory. You don’t have to buy supplies, other than a computer. You don’t need certifications or permits. You just do a thing for a person and they pay you. Or even better: they pay you, then you do the thing.

And it’s usually profitable from day one. Most people complicate it as they go along.

You want to build something bigger than yourself

A freelance practice dies with you. An agency can outlive you.

There’s something powerful about building a thing that has its own momentum. Its own culture. Its own reputation separate from your name.

You don’t have to want generational wealth to want this. Some people just want to create a place where talented folks can do their best work. A machine that creates opportunity for others.

You want a forcing function

Nothing exposes your weaknesses like having people depend on you.

When you’re solo, you can hide. You can avoid the stuff you’re bad at. You can tell yourself stories about why you haven’t figured out sales or systems.

An agency rips those stories away. You get better at everything… not because you want to, but because you have to.

Or you don’t, and the whole thing falls apart. There are real stakes.

There’s a reason people climb mountains. It’s not for the medal. It’s for the knowing. Can I do hard things? Can I handle pressure? Can I build something real?

An agency answers those questions. I scaled my agency mostly because a mentor challenged me to see if I could.

If you’re competitive, building an agency is a good way to see what you’ve got. Some people need that answer more than they need the easy path.

You have an unfair advantage

Winning at agency building comes down to one thing: having way more demand than you can supply. The agency owners who figure this out create leverage. The ones who don’t crack this struggle.

Here’s an example. Your parents were dentists. They dragged you to all the dentist conventions as a kid. Their social circle were all dentists. You know that world inside and out.

Then you grew up and became a designer. You have a million ideas for things dentists need. Websites, branding, office design, trade show graphics.

You would crush it if you started an agency that serves dentists. What an unfair advantage.

You love doing stuff for people

Maybe you just love helping people. Maybe you love helping people who help people. That’s your heart.

An agency puts you on the front lines of that every day. Your team does stuff for clients, so you get to do stuff for your team too. If service is your happy place, you’ll love running an agency.

Money

Wait, what?

I know. I said earlier that you can maximize your income as a solo freelancer just as much as you can as an agency owner.

You can.

But the ceiling isn’t the same.

The richest freelancer in the world is probably an elite lawyer or surgeon billing $5K an hour. Maybe they clear $5M or $10M a year. But they’re still capped by their time.

The richest agency owner runs a holding company… an agency of agencies. That person makes 8 or 9 figures. And probably works very little.

Freelancers have income. Agency owners have equity.

It’s not even close.

The bottom line

Don’t start an agency for the money. It can work, but it’s the worst reason.

Start one for the game.

Why You Can’t Have Nice Things

Dan Mall — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

This is why you can’t have nice things.

It’s not because you’re lazy.

It’s not because you’re unlucky.

It’s not because the system is rigged.

You can’t have nice things if you don’t know what you want.

And if you don’t know what you want, you’ll settle for whatever shows up.

Most people struggle to articulate what they actually want. That single failure quietly sabotages their careers, relationships, health, and money.

When you can’t name what you want:

You chase goals that impress other people
You say yes to opportunities you don’t enjoy
You confuse motion with progress
You mistake “busy” for “fulfilled”

Life fills the vacuum. And it usually fills it with obligations, not intentions.

Most people don’t decide what they want. They inherit it.

Here’s why desire is so hard:

We’re trained to want results, not experiences. Money. Titles. Status. Rarely things like calm, autonomy, or time with people we love.
We confuse options with freedom. More choices don’t create clarity. They create paralysis.
We borrow goals from louder people. Parents. Bosses. Influencers. Society. Other people’s dreams are easy to adopt and hard to live with.
We’re afraid of choosing “wrong.” So we avoid choosing at all. Non-decisions feel safer than irreversible ones.
We’ve never been asked the right questions. We open conversations with strangers by asking, “What do you do?” Not, “What do you want your days to feel like?”

My favorite line in one of my favorite books—The Vision-Driven Leader, by Michael Hyatt—is:

Destination begins with desire.

If you don’t define what “nice things” mean to you, you’ll spend your life collecting things that don’t fit.

If you want a life filled with the things you actually want, start here:

Trade vague wants for specific preferences. “I want success” → “I want Black Ivory Coffee every morning when I wake up.”
Define your “enough.” Without a finish line, every mile feels disappointing.
Separate admiration from aspiration. Just because you respect it doesn’t mean you want it.
Design days, not dreams. Your calendar reveals what you value.
Accept that clarity requires exclusion. Every yes is a no to something else. That’s the point.

We’ve been trained by society to be ashamed of wanting.

That if we exceed some arbitrary threshold of what’s acceptable to want, we’re being too greedy.

We haven’t earned it.

We don’t deserve it.

Nonsense.

So we censor ourselves from saying it. Which makes us shy away from even thinking it. Which accidentally makes us forget that we can even want at all.

Change that today.

Today, say what you want. One thing. Anything. Any small thing or huge thing that you refuse to be judged for.

Say it to your journal. Say it to yourself. Say it to a loved one. Say it to the internet on social media.

And if you have nowhere better to say it, say it to me.

Message me what you want.

I’ll reply with 3 words of permission:

“Go get it.”

Positioning by Vertical, Horizontal, and Diagonal

Dan Mall — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 10:00:00 +0000

How many slices does a pizza have?

Most people would say 8.

That‘s the typical answer. But it’s not the only one.

A normal pie cut gives you 8 slices. A tavern cut can have 24. A strip cut might have 6–10. A quad cut has 4. No cut at all? That’s 1 slice. (You animal.)

Pizza can be cut a lot of different ways. Your agency can be positioned differently too.

The most common positioning slice is by industry. That‘s called “vertical positioning.”

Examples:

We help law firms.
We work in healthcare.
We specialize in real estate.

This is the easiest and most obvious slice. That’s why so many agencies stop here.

But you could also slice by what you do. That‘s “horizontal positioning.” You narrow by solution instead of industry.

Examples:

We make accounting software.
We run Instagram campaigns.
We build content management systems.

A third way to slice: who you work with. This is “diagonal positioning.” You focus on a role or type of person.

We work with influencers.
We help moms.
We partner with authors.

The real fun starts when you start combining slicing techniques. What would it look like if you sliced vertically, horizontally, and diagonally?

Examples:

We help law firm leaders become authors with AI.
We help moms in healthcare run Instagram campaigns.
We build content management systems for influencers in real estate.

These sound like a mad-libs exercise gone wrong. That’s a good thing.

When you look closer, the markets are actually considerable:

There are roughly ~600K law firm partners in the U.S. If even 10% of them wanted to grow their personal brands by write a book, that’s 60,000 potential law firm partner clients you could help become authors.
There are about 1M people who fit the description of “female healthcare professionals active on Instagram who have children.” If 10% of them want to be serious about business on Instagram, that’s 100,000 potential moms in healthcare clients you could help run Instagram campaigns.
Of ~2M licensed real estate agents in the U.S., let’s say 10% actively create content. That’s 200,000 potential real estate influencer clients you could build content management systems for.

Any one of those is more than enough to build $1M+ business.

And that‘s just vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. What if we took inspiration from other kinds of mathematical directions? How could you slice to a unique niche by ray, secant, or tangent?

Yeah, a triangle pizza slice works, but isn’t it more fun to have a piece of pizza that‘s sliced like a star, a spiral, a hendecagon or a möbius strip?

Here are some other ideas for slices you can use to make your agency unique:

By buyer psychology
By CEO Enneagram
By employee count
By culture type
By zodiac sign
By geography
By ecosystem
By blood type
By churn rate
By risk profile
By exit intent
By time zone
By maturity

The clearer you are about who you help and what you help them do, the easier it is for you to find the right clients—and for them to find you.

That‘s why the agency that “helps bankrupt mechanics find love” stays in business longer the ones that “make websites.”

John Langdon

Dan Mall — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 10:36:00 +0000

I learned earlier this week that my college typography professor and friend John Langdon passed away.

I’m gutted.

I majored in Digital Media. I was learning all the emerging technologies at the time: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, Director, ActionScript, Lingo, Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, Maya, and so much more.

But I also found out about this thing called “graphic design” that I had never heard of before. As I researched it more, it seemed important to learn about in addition to all the cool software and tech.

Unfortunately, I had very few Graphic Design classes as part of my Digital Media curriculum. Somehow, I convinced the college to let me do an independent study in typography. The professor they assigned me to was John Langdon.

John wasn’t the inventor of ambigrams—words, typically logotypes, that can be read in two or more orientations—but he popularized them. Many ambigram fans know about them because of the ones John created for the book Angels & Demons. (Author Dan Brown named the protoganist—played by Tom Hanks in the movies—Robert Langdon as a hat tip to John’s contribution.)

Because John designed so many ambigrams, he could write and draw right-side-up, upside-down, backwards, forwards, mirrored… any way you could imagine.

There was no pretense in learning from John. We sat across from each other at a desk with a piece of paper and a pencil between us. No slides or computers. He’d teach me about typography and draw what he was talking about. He drew everything upside down so I could read it. And he’d ask me to draw stuff back to show that I was learning what he was teaching.

His lessons were always simple and lasting. Here‘s one I’ll never forget. He was trying to teach me how to look at letters as shapes. So, he gave me a homework assignment to set any uppercase character in Franklin Gothic Roman at 400pt. Then below it, a caption in ITC Century Italic at 20pt. The job of the caption is to make you relook at the character above it in a different way.

I picked the letter “G” and wrote the caption, “Another failed recycle logo.” I was very proud of this work, and John loved it too.

Eight years later, I literally used same exact concept when I was working on the Grammarly identity, with the exception of replacing Century with Sentinel, a more modern redrawing of the same underlying ideas. Grammarly used it for a decade. Of all the work I’ve done for any client, the Grammarly logo is the one my kids brag about to their friends—“my dad made the Grammarly logo”—because they all use the app at school.

I can trace all of this directly back to John.

John taught me that geometric sans serifs have simple letterforms because the shapes are simple, and that’s why the alphabet chart we all learn in school often uses it. That‘s the same exact rationale I included in my pitch to Crayola to change their corporate typeface from Cronos to Darden Studio’s Omnes. Crayola’s been using it for the last 13 years.

I can trace that directly back to John.

(And yes, type nerds: I know Omnes is more of a rounded grotesque sans rather than a geometric sans, but the analogy helped me make the case for a typeface with simpler letterforms for a revered children’s brand.)

After college, John and I kept in touch frequently. He hired me to animate some of his letterforms and help him with some brand work. I hired him to draw some logos for me. We never charged each other for any of that.

One of my favorites connections was when we were looking for someone to draw a logo for Typedia. I knew John would be the perfect person. The logo came out amazing. John wrote an incredible play-by-play of the process.

About 9 months ago, I got a note from John, offering some of his unsold paintings to former students for the low low price of just paying for shipping. I was more than happy to scoop up one of my favorites: his Love painting.

John had a tremendous impact on my career, education, and life. I’m so grateful to have known him.

2025 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 09:03:00 +0000

Continuing the tradition from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2025.

Runway

The word of the year I chose for 2025 was “Runway.” I couldn’t really explain it much when I chose it, and I can’t really now either.

It was mostly a feeling, albeit a vivid one. At the beginning of last year, everything felt… tight. Like there wasn’t enough room anywhere. Like I was boxed in. That was certainly the case financially, feeling like every month was barely above breaking even. Work-wise, I felt stuck too. I wasn’t really working on anything I really wanted to; mostly the stuff that I felt I had to.

The people around me weren’t the right people. I felt stuck in outdated ways of thinking, old models, and things I didn’t believe that everyone around me seemed to.

But I do know that I built some runway, somehow. I know some portion of that was making some brave choices about how I wanted to be spending my time, even though it was new and I didn’t know how it’d pan out. I know another portion of that was completely liquidating the IRA I started two decades ago as an employer-matched 401K and rolled over many times as a way to give me more time to build my new business without worrying about cash. Yet another portion was taking every opportunity I could to do the things that make my life feel full.

(More on all of that below.)

I still can’t describe it well, though I have a new feeling now:

Accomplished.

I’m ready for what’s next in 2026.

The life I want to live

I organized last year’s year in review post by the kind of life I want to live. I liked that, so I’m repeating that format again this year. I find that if I’m doing these things, I’m generally living a full life:

Photograph the wonders of the world
Eat at Michelin-starred restaurants
Play basketball
Buy rare sneakers
Hire a personal chef/house manager (new for 2026)
Attend 3 Eagles home games and 3 Sixers home games (new for 2026)

Photograph the wonders of the world

The world is incredible.

Since I started traveling 2 decades ago and picked up photography again seriously a decade ago, the combination of these things has been one of my favorite things to do.

My goal was to travel about once a quarter. I doubled that in 2025.

This year I visited:

Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Phoenix, AZ
San Francisco, CA
Boise, ID
New York, NY
Chicago, IL
West Virginia
Chandler, AZ
Palm Springs, CA

I took 21,960 photos in 2025, 24% more than the 17,739 photos I took in 2024.

I made a small but important upgrade this year. I had been shooting with a Canon EOS R since 2020. It was my first experience with a full frame mirrorless camera since I was shooting with a Canon 6D Mark II, so I bought the R used in case I didn’t like it for whatever reason. Five years and a hundred thousand images later, I think it was safe to say that I shot with it enough to know that I was sticking with it.

A few of the buttons and dials were getting a little finicky, so I investigated a few repairs. I learned that R had been discontinued in June 2023. I rented the Canon EOS R6 Mark II for a few days and immediately loved it. It was pretty close to the R that I was used to, but everything was improved. Better ergonomics, no 4K video crop, two memory card slots, better autofocus, in-body stabilization, better sensor, and a lot more. I found a great price on eBay and bought my first brand new full-frame mirrorless camera.

I haven’t looked back since.

Some of my favorite shots of the year:

I organized a few group photo shoots this year, like cherry blossom meetups in Washington D.C. and Central Park.

I took Sidda and Char for a few day road-trip through Arizona to see the other-worldly landscape and have some fun.

Horsehoe Bend

Antelope Canyon

As has now been my annual tradition for the last five years, I took a few days to photograph fall foliage changing. This year, I went to West Virginia with a few old and new friends.

Sunrise at Lindy Point

Elkala Falls

Foggy sunrise on Spruce Knob Lake

My brother invited me to celebrate his birthday with him this year. He and his friends are avid golfers, and all he wanted this year was to play as many rounds as we could in two days. I’ve never played before, and the group was kind enough to not be too visibly annoyed at how much worse I was than all of them.

(I learned that I’m awful at driving, but my short game’s not bad though!)

I had a blast, and I can definitely see how addicting that hobby can be.

I’m also reminded that I don’t have to travel far away to get glimpses of the amazing world. Here are some shots from the Philadelphia Flower Show, right in my municipal backyard. One of these photos actually won an honorable mention in a local photography competition! While I have zero professional aspirations for photography, I love the affirmation that this is a serious hobby I can get better at over time, which is exactly what a competitive person like me loves.

For travel in 2026, I’ll be taking a few of the top students in my coaching program to a remote location (TBA) to spend a few days workshopping some long-term visions for their businesses. More info on that soon.

My family also has a tentative trip planned to Japan to see the cherry blossoms there, although we may have some other conflicts that may push that trip back to another time.

Eat at Michelin-starred restaurants

One of my rich life goals is to eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant at least once a quarter.

This year, I was just under that. I collected 4 new stars across 3 restaurants: Birdsong, Lazy Bear, and Clover Hill.

Lazy Bear photos by the awesome Kim Wouters

That brings my lifetime total of Michelin stars to 38.

Some quick internet sleuthing says the average foodie has somewhere between 15–40 stars, while “Michelin sickos” are closer to the 80–250 range.

I aspire to be a Michelin sicko in my lifetime.

One notable tidbit here is that all of my Michelin-star experiences this year were paid for by someone else. One was a industry event, the second was a sponsored event I hosted, and the third was a business expense for people interested in growing their agencies. I have more ideas like this for 2026 where I can mix business with pleasure.

(Drop me a line if you wanna collaborate here in 2026.)

That said, this goal isn’t just about Michelin stars. It’s a fantastic shorthand for the level of excellence my palate would like to experience, but it’s not infallible. Michelin awarded stars to Philly restaurants for the first time ever this year. Incredibly deserving are Provenance (went last year), Friday Saturday Sunday (haven’t been in a few years), and Her Place Supper Club (haven’t been).

Notably missing from that list is Royal Sushi, my favorite restaurant in the world. If there’s any Philly establishment that’s a shoo-in for a star—more than one in my opinion, as I’ve eaten at 2- and 3-star restaurants that don’t touch what Jesse Ito does—it’s Royal. Most of the explanation is credited to how incredibly difficult it is to get a reservation, but that sounds like even more of a reason to be on the list than not. Michelin is supposed to award the best restaurants in the world, not the best restaurants in the world that are easy to get into. We already have that. It’s called Yelp.

The best dishes I’ve had all year were at Royal Sushi, by far.

Hotate uni: seared scallop, sea urchin, chive, seaweed butter

Filefish with liver

Aguachile: scallop, spot prawn, smoked trout roe, red onion, cucumber, avocado tomatillo

Mirugai: geoduck clam, konyakku, nori butter rice, zucchini, leek sauce, sea urchin, bachelor button

Caviar toro

Bibimbap

Tartlet: caviar, goldeneye snapper, king salmon, fatty bluefin tuna, spot prawn, yuzu cream, hanaho, mushroom

Saba battera oshizushi

Some new restaurants I ate at this year: 1906, Cafe La Maude, Stir, Taqueria El Farolito, Emmett, Upland, Sushi Zero, The Social on Eighth, Percy, Kin, The Farm & Fisherman Tavern, Maman, Yakiniku Toraji, The Dearborn, dancerobot, Canaan Valley BBQ, Roots, Murphy’s Law Irish Pub, Born & Bred, Chubby Cattle, Uchi Philadelphia, Louie Louie, and Newtown Bagel Co.

Emmett

Kin

The Hoagie Room at Pizzeria Beddia

Laser Wolf

Royal Izakaya

Uchi Philadelphia

Same goal for 2026: a Michelin-star restaurant at least once a quarter.

Play basketball

The more I play basketball, the more I enjoy it.

My goal for 2025 was to play about once a week, which is what I’ve averaged for the last 4 years.

I played 57 times this year, which is slightly above my goal!

This year, I also found a way to play with a few different groups of people, which is always a great challenge. Playing with the same people and same courts, you start to know what to do and get a little complacent. Playing with new groups definitely keeps the skills sharp.

For one of those groups, the place we played at for the last two decades closed their doors this year. End of an era for sure; lots of good memories there. A bunch of us literally grew up together with that place as the through-line. We’ll have to find a new place to play in 2026.

I organized a basketball game again this year at Figma’s Config conference for the third year in a row. Nick Pattison and his team at Primary cooked up some sick merch for us!

I played in a game organized by the folks at Showit’s Spark conference. They designed custom reversible jerseys for everyone with one side inspired by Sixers’ jerseys in my honor!

Now these are my kind of conference after-parties!

Basketball goal for 2026: play at least once a week.

Buy rare sneakers

I got some great new sneakers in 2025. I wanted one each quarter, and I ended up slightly above average.

Air Jordan 1 Retro High Utility “Stash” Black/Anthracite-Sail-Off Noir
Air Jordan 1 “Camelia” Purple/Infrared/White (custom)
Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG SP Union LA Chicago Shadow
Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Shattered Backboard”
Nike Zoom LeBron 2 Beast

One of the different things in my sneaker game this year is that I got 2 pairs as gifts! My team got me a custom painted pair to match my new website, and I received another pair as a thank you from a designer I gave some career advice to and made some connections for.

Custom Air Jordan 1

Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG SP Union LA Chicago Shadow

Same sneaker goal for 2026: about one per quarter.

Hire a personal chef/house manager

This is a new one for 2026, one I’m kinda scared of.

As evidenced above, I like delicious food. But I don’t like eating out all the time, mostly because my body can only handle so much rich food at a time. So, as much as I appreciate fine dining, I also like eating simple, clean food at home.

I cook dinner for my family on Mondays and Wednesday and Em cooks Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a Friday night family ritual of either getting Poke bowls or Chipotle, or both. We play weekends by ear.

I like to cook more than Em does, but we both definitely agree that it’s so time consuming. We’ve optimized grocery ordering and pickup and prep and cleaning as much as we can, but it’s still too big of a chunk. We’re both growing more cognizant of what we want to be spending our time on, and cooking is not in either of our Zones of Genius. Doing takeout more is an option, and even if we could afford it, it doesn’t leave us feeling the best.

The solution is a personal chef, one who can have the different kinds of meals a family of four needs and wants ready when we need and want it. We flirted with the idea a few years ago, and even found a great chef who wanted to leave the restaurant world for something a bit slower. Unfortunately, we were on wildly different pages about how much we wanted to pay and how much they needed to make.

Having a personal chef seems like such a luxury. It feels extravagant. Decadent. Like sleeping on a bed of caviar every night just because I can.

I think of myself as someone who has money to afford some luxuries, but I don’t think of myself as rich.

I’m slowly reframing that.

Yes, many rich people are excessive. And many rich people are also people who value their time and energy and optimize for doing as much of the things they want to do and as little of the things they don’t want to. I’m starting to see how this kind of “extravagance” can actually be savviness.

Maybe it’s not that rich people get to do anything they want. Maybe the outcomes are actually the inputs. Maybe focusing on what they do best and outsourcing the rest is what made them rich. This has been a no-brainer for me when I’ve hired contractors to do things I could do myself but really shouldn’t be doing, like bookkeeping or building websites. Why is cooking any different? Or laundry? We already have a cleaning crew do our house every 2 weeks.

I’m slowly coming around to a new frame on this, and I’d like to try and make it happen in 2026.

Attend 3 Eagles home games and 3 Sixers home games

Philadelphia is a great sports town.

The Eagles won the Super Bowl last year and in 2018. Joel Embiid was the league MVP a few years ago, and Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecomb are one of the most exciting backcourts to watch in the NBA today. The Phillies are consistently division winners and playoff contenders every year. We’re getting a WNBA team in 2030.

I had a goal of having season tickets every year to the Sixers and Eagles. But I only went to one Sixers game last year and no Eagles games. If I’m honest, I think the season tickets thing was mostly about status.

I’ll start smaller. Bring it back to the root: enjoy watching the incredible athletes on my home teams for the sports I love.

Hit me up if you wanna join me for a few Philly sports games in 2026.

Work

Many of the things that make my life full cost money to do, so I can’t talk about them without talking about what makes them possible: work.

That word has meant different things for me over the last few years:

In 2022, I shut down my agency SuperFriendly and did a bunch of different things for work
In 2023, I launched Design System University and consulted with a bunch of different teams on their design systems.
In 2024, I consulted primarily with one company (The New York Times) and did some freelance work with half a dozen clients.

In 2025, work finally felt different for me in a lot of good ways.

Make More Money

At the end of 2024, I teased this:

In early 2025, I’ll also be start a group coaching program for freelancers, small studios, and agency owners that want to take their service businesses to the next level of income and reputation. I’m still working on the core of the program, so I don’t have a lot of details to share about it yet, but the general shape of it will be a combination of instruction, discussion, practice, and review so I can get specific, tactical, and actionable with everyone in the program.

If you’re interested in a program like that and can commit to spending a decent chunk of money (probably a few thousand dollars) and time (probably 3-6 months) investing in your business, subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send out details once I have them to share. I’m committing to spending a good chunk of my 2025 helping designers level up financially and professionally.

On January 21, 2025, I hosted a Zoom call with 5 freelancers and agency owners—my early access group—and we just talked about business. No curriculum, no structure… just conversation. We met 7 times and talked about positioning, pricing, scaling, sales, lead generation, and systems. I tried to help them by answering as many questions as I could from my experience running an agency.

On March 14, 2025, I sent an email to my newsletter audience to soft launch my new Make More Money group coaching program. I explained who it’s for, the curriculum, the pre-order price and time commitment, and included 3 testimonials from people in my early access group. I got my first 3 paying customers that day, 2 more later that week, and we were off to the races.

My initial plan was to launch the program with a standalone video course, but I decided it wasn’t important enough to delay launching. So I called it a pre-order and figured once the video course was done, I’d announce the official launch and raise the price. But no one seemed to be complaining that there wasn’t a video course. So, one day in September, I decided I’d tell the next prospect the full price, and I started charging the full price to everyone from then on. I quietly launched the full video course on November 19: 42+ hours of training around purpose, positioning, pricing, lead generation & prospecting, sales, and operations.

I spent the rest of the year doing basically only two things:

Finding people who are a good fit for my program
Coming up with as many ways as possible to make the experience as transformative as possible for my students

I ended the year with 80 students enrolled in the program.

We’ve had 8 Money Makers of the Month since Apri:

April: Gabby Merite of Figures & Figures
May: Galo Naranjo of Motusmade
June: Joey Banks of Baseline
July: John Rodrigues
August: Jenny Lu
September: Tanish Jindal
October: Matias Gonzalez of Leidox
November: Celeste Fabros of Euflora

We’ve had 6 guest speakers talk to the group about various topics:

John Saunders of 5Four Digital showed us how to build an agency that runs on SOPs
Brad Hussey taught us how to use email as a primary lead generation tool
Tsili Pines and Amie Pascal of NoCo showed us how to do strategic planning
Mamie Peers of Red Pencil let me interview her about how she hires agencies as a CMO
Crystal Vitelli showed us why every agency needs producers

I have big plans for what’s coming in 2026, but that’ll be its own set of posts.

I’ve generally always loved what I do for work, and this might be the most fun year I’ve had. I’m spending a ton of time and energy in my sweet spot: teaching, sharing what I know and have, pushing people to their potential, and creating new ways to help.

Brand identity for Make More Money

Since I shut down SuperFriendly, I’ve struggled with the idea of feeling like I had to do lots of different things to make ends meet. 2025 was the closest year I‘ve gotten to being able to focus my attention on one income-generating activity as I’ve had in a long time. I’m working hard to ensure that Make More Money is the only thing I’m working on in 2026.

Other than Make More Money, I did two other things in 2025 to bring in some cash:

Private design system coaching for a company that sent 24 of their team members to learn from me virtually for 12 weeks
A content sponsorship

Outside of that, I did some pro-bono client work for friends and family:

I creative directed the website for Philly’s new restaurant dancerobot, designed and built by Jonas Leupe and NOOON.
I creative directed the brand and website for Multiply Management, a branch of my brother’s company specifically to help nurses have enough money for retirement. Site designed and built by Jonas Leupe.

Design System University

Design System University has largely been on autopilot in 2025. Most of that is due to the fact that I personally don’t do much around design systems any more. I don’t have an agency that works on design systems with clients. I don’t consult with design system teams any more. I’m flattered when I’m tagged in design system posts and messaged about them, but there are now so many people who are much closer and well-versed with design systems than I am at this point.

I’m confident that our DSU courses still hold up though. While each a few years old, I tried to design all of them in a way that the principles still ring true even if the technologies and approaches evolve, and I’d stand by that today.

I have a small team on DSU that keeps it going. The Design Systems 101 course still sells every day, and the newsletter goes out to 15K+ design system enthusiasts every week.

Still though, a founder and CEO who’s losing touch with the main subject main isn’t the greatest strategy for any company. In 2026, I may look to find a new owner for DSU, one who really loves the space and wants more of an active community to share it with. Drop me a line if that’s you.

SuperFriendly

In October of 2024, I got an email from Peter Kang, co-founder of Barrel Holdings to see if I’d be interested in selling SuperFriendly, as it seemed like a good match for some plans they’d been hatching. I’d read a lot of Peter’s writing about agencies previously and was happy to have that conversation with him. We talked, met up for dinner and drinks, inteviewed some folks for the new team, and drew up some paperwork a few weeks later to make Barrel the new owner of SuperFriendly and me a profit-sharing board member.

In February 2025, Peter, Barrel co-founder Sei-Wook Kim, and new SuperFriendly CEO Jon Sukarangsan came to my house, covered my tables in post-its and my TV with rollout strategy decks, and we officially kicked off SuperFriendly 2.0.

We set a few revenue targets and my involvement was pretty minimal in joining quarterly board meetings and making introductions where applicable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough revenue coming in for Barrel to continue investing and decided to stop the new SuperFriendly’s operations in September of 2025. Peter shared more of the context on his blog.

As you might imagine, my feelings about this are… complex. I think I have some healthy and appropriate separation around it. I celebrated and grieved the SuperFriendly that was mine and I ran for a decade after I shut it down in 2022. I’m sad that Barrel Holdings’ SuperFriendly that I was a small part of had a 6-month false start. Those feelings are very different; I didn’t and don’t process them nearly the same. It’s easy for me (and others) to Monday-morning quarterback what coulda/shoulda/woulda happened, and Peter and I have done some retrospectives together about it.

Maybe we’ll see a new version of SuperFriendly sometime in the future

Pricing Design

One thing I’m thrilled about from 2025 is relaunching my Pricing Design book!

I originally published it with A Book Apart in 2016, my first foray into writing a book, developing with an editor, and working with a publisher. Because it was all friends, everything went swimmingly. I received quarterly royalties for 8 years since then.

In May of 2024, I received an email from the leadership at ABA that they’d be closing their doors soon and returning book rights to the individual authors. This coincidentally lined up with my personal strategy at the time to create, own, and distibute as much of my own intellectual property as possible.

I worked with Jonas Leupe to create new paperback and Kindle editions. We also published a new website where you could read the book in its entirety or get a free PDF emailed to you. I also took the opportunity to learn how to narrate an audiobook and produce an Audible version.

Overall, I’m glad to have this back in the world! Here are a few nice things people have said about the book:

I’m experienced in working for myself and this gave way more clarity in how to price by value. Great for beginners in freelance and the experienced.

This book gave me confidence to set realistic prices for my freelance business.

The best guide on pricing I’ve ever read.

This website

Last year, I said:

I… committed to taking this site seriously as an important part of my business by refining my branding and positioning, tightening up the information architecture and content strategy, and hiring a team to take over the production of the site.

…this will hopefully be the last post you read on this version of the site. That’s right: the new site is almost here.

Last January, I teased the new art direction and even shared a bit about the new content strategy.

And then… nothing.

For 11 months.

I’m sorry.

Yes, I’m still working on the new site. I hired someone and the design and build are 99% finished. The only thing left is to migrate all the content over, which isn’t an easy thing. Still, it’s close and I won’t overhype it until I’m a bit closer to the finish line.

In the meantime, I still did a lot on this current site.

I published 51 articles in 2025, 4% less than last year’s 53 articles.

My top three most popular posts this year:

I will continue moving content over to the new site when I can. And someday, hopefully soon, I’ll flip a the switch and tell you about it.

Who coaches the coaches?

I run Make More Money as a coaching program because I believe in the value of coaching (especially as a separate style from other learning models). I think coaching is one of the biggest unlocks you can have. It’s all about maximizing performance. You can get a coach to help you with any area you want to improve in: sleep, business, flying helicopters, eating better, etc. All world class athletes have coaches. If Steph Curry—the greatest basketball shooter in history—has a shooting coach, we have no excuse.

At the end of 2024, I signed up for the Uplevel coaching program from Smart Coach by Ross and Jessica Johnson. It was a 6 month mastermind that helps established coaches scale online coaching programs.

I initially signed up to scale my design system coaching, but my coach Meleah helped me see the opportunity right in front of me for coaching design freelancers and agency owners. She helped me craft the offer, figure out pricing, write scripts and systems for different scenarios, determine priorities, set realistic and ambitious goals, hold me accountable, and so much more. I could not have launched Make More Money without her.

In October 2025, I enrolled in Dan Martell’s Elite Business Coaching. I’ve known of Dan for a long time. We talked briefly in 2012 when he was looking to hire a designer/coder for one of his startups. I read his book Buy Back Your Time in 2023 and it changed a lot about how I work. Over the last two months in his program, I’ve learned a ton about sales, marketing, how to coach, delegation, mindset, program dynamics, and so much more that I’ve been able to implement already.

Distribution

Going into 2025, I was pretty intentional at studying how effective my own distribution is, as opposed to utilizing others’. I needed some benchmarks.

In 2024, I spoke at 5 conferences, did 4 guest talks for other people’s communities, and appeared on 12 podcasts.

In 2025, I spoke at 1 conference, did 1 guest talk for someone else’s community, and appeared on 1 podcast.

But I hosted 2 of my own events and redirected all the rest of that time and effort to my existing audience. I taught and coached within my own program every week except 3; that’s 49 times.

And that doesn’t even count office hours I did with my students. If you do want to count those, I did 136 office hours in 2025, and I feel so much more helpful in these sessions than I do in more public venues because of the level of depth we can cover.

867 people downloaded the free PDF of my Pricing Design book. Around 600 people come to the site every month and stay for an average of 7 minutes.

772 people have taken my free email course on how to get clients.

611 people have downloaded my free projects spreadsheet that has 10 years of data about client projects.

I also needed to look at some of the biggest distribution vehicles I have where I do most of my content marketing: namely, social media.

At the beginning of 2025, my audience size was a little over 160K people across all of my channels. Like most people with a sizable audience, the default strategy is to grow it. Why? Honestly, mostly inertia. It’s easier to keep doing it than stop and rethink.

So that’s what I did… even if only by default.

Midway through the year, I read Million Dollar Coach by Taki Moore and stumbled across his idea of The Five Ones:

[The Five Ones] is the fastest way to get to a million dollars a year.

Color me intrigued. The idea is simple:

Pick one target market.
Pick one product.
Pick one conversion tool.
Pick one traffic source.
Do this for one year.

It echoed something I’ve heard before from Alex Hormozi: One Avatar, One Product, One Channel.

I thought I had already been doing this, but hearing it again landed differently. The piece that was still fuzzy for me was “one channel.”

Like a lot of people, my approach to social media has been “be everywhere a little bit.” Ironically, that’s the exact opposite of what I teach my students, where the advice is closer to: “be somewhere specific, a lot.”

I understand why this is difficult. It’s difficult for my students for the same reason it’s difficult for me:

Because it’s scary.

Still, I have less of an excuse than most. I’ve seen firsthand many times how narrowing focus creates leverage in products, positioning, and growth.

Time to do it scared.

At first, I framed it as, “Which single channel should I go all-in on in 2026?”

But I’m realizing I don’t specifically need one channel more than I need one anchor, one place where original thinking lives, and everything else has a clear supporting job.

But which one?

Let’s take inventory.

Channel	2024 audience	2025 audience	% Change	Content Posted	2025 Reach
Newsletter	58,400	68,000	+16%	62 issues	4.2M emails delivered
X	45,100	47,100	+4%	~300+ posts	2.3M impressions
LinkedIn	45,295	53,116	+17%	~300+ posts	3.2M impressions
Instagram	6,243	7,026	+13%	85 posts	~707K views (estimated)
YouTube	6,250	7,729	+24%	2 videos	46K views

Across all channels, my total audience grew to roughly 183K people by the end of 2025, an increase of about 22K people (~13%) year over year.

That sounds impressive until you look at it honestly.

At this scale, that’s not hyper-growth. Hyper-growth would mean adding hundreds of thousands or millions of people. I’m not doing that, and realistically, I’m not trying to. At this stage of my business, I don’t think the constraint is reach.

It’s conversion.

More specifically, it’s how much work it takes to turn a conversation into revenue.

My primary sales mechanism is selling by chat, i.e. starting conversations with people who are already warm enough to engage. I don’t rely on funnels or automated closers. Revenue happens through conversations. That means the job is my content isn’t to “close” anyone; it’s to make those conversations feel warm, expected, and worth having.

Instead of asking, “Which channel gives me the most reach?” I think a more relevant question is, “Which channel most reliably reduces sales friction per unit of effort?”

In other words: which channel makes it easier to sell when I start a conversation?

For fun, I had my friend ChatGPT write a weighted scoring model that blends all the factors: conversion ease, growth, reach, and effort.

My newsletter wins by a mile.

It gives me repeated, long-form exposure to the same people over time. It lets me articulate my point of view fully, without compression or algorithmic distortion. And it creates familiarity before I ever reach out to someone directly.

I’m betting that‘ll show up downstream as:

Faster replies
Shorter conversations
Less explaining
Less convincing
Greater willingness to commit

LinkedIn came in second, largely because the way I use it already resembles short-form newsletter thinking.

YouTube is a bit of a wildcard because there’s not enough data there. But conceivably, it could be more of a trust accelerator than a growth engine, a place where people can hear me think out loud, which turns out to matter a lot when sales happen through conversation.

Instagram and X, by contrast, don’t justify original effort for me anymore. That doesn’t mean I’ll disappear from them. It means I’ll mostly treat them as downstream distribution, not primary thinking surfaces. Specifically with X, it’s not easy to walk away from a 47K person audience after almost 19 years of active daily use, but the payoff just isn’t there.

Once I reframed everything around sales friction instead of reach, the strategy became obvious.

In 2026, my primary creative effort will go into original thinking for my newsletter. Everything else will either reinforce it, distribute it, or support the sales motion it enables.

That means:

The newsletter is the anchor
YouTube and the podcast (coming soon 👀) reinforce trust
LinkedIn maintains visibility and recognition
Instagram and X receive repurposed content, not original effort

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. The goal is to be clear, consistent, and recognizable in the places that actually move the business forward.

Expect a much tighter newsletter game in 2026, because it’s the most effective place to anchor the thinking that supports how I actually sell.

Everything else will earn its place by doing a very specific job.

Time and energy

Hours-wise, I worked 1,634 hours, about 31 hours/week. The distribution of my effort generally broke down like this:

Projects	Hours	Hours (%)
Make More Money	580	36%
Operations	527	32%
Marketing	355	22%
Pro-bono client work	65	4%
Design System University	47	3%
SuperFriendly acquisition	40	2%
Sponsorships	19	1%

Tasks	Hours	Hours (%)
Marketing	440	27%
Direction	242	15%
Coaching	240	15%
Design	205	12%
Time Off	156	9%
CEOing	150	9%
Sales	141	9%
Admin	48	3%
Skill Set Development	11	1%

(For a detailed description of the revenue breakdown, check out the 2025 info on my Salary & Income page.)

This is the first year in a long time that these tables tell mostly stories I like:

I’m working on one primary project; the others are just a little bit, and mostly for fun.
All client work is pro-bono. This is exacly the way I want it.
The stuff I want to do takes up most of my time and attention. The stuff I don’t want to do takes up just a little bit of my time and attention.
My top three tasks are marketing, direction, and coaching. Things I should be doing and want to be doing.
I took more time off than I worked on my business.
Design is only 12% of my time.
Sales weren’t as high as I wanted them to be. That I’m only spending 9% of my time there is a good explanation.
I spent 1% of my time trying to get at least 1% better.

A few goals around my work time and attention for 2026:

Drop “Design” to 10% or less of my time.
Eliminate “Admin” work completely.

Home & family

My running theme for the last few years around home and family remains the same: the more I share publicly, the more what’s private becomes more important. I’ll only share a little here.

Sidda’s 14 in 9th grade and Char is 12 in 6th grade. They’ve both been into school and community theater for the last few years and did 4 plays this year between the two of them: Legally Blonde, Jr., Shrek Jr., Beetlejuice Jr., and Peter Pan Jr.

They both picked up some sports this year. They both did jiu jitsu, and Char won 1st place in a tournament in February. They both play indoor field hockey, and Sidda did outdoor field hockey as well. Char also did a short stint of tennis lessons for a few months. They’re both avid readers, and, because of their ages, a lot of the TV- and movie-watching are trending towards coming-of-age stories.

Sidda Mall

Charlie Mall

Em has her own channels where she shares what she’s up to, so all I’ll say here is that she’s doing awesome, as usual.

Health, wellness, and self-care

I finished Invisalign this year! My teeth are a lot straighter. A nice side effect of that is that I’m more inclined to take care of my teeth, so I’m flossing and brushing twice a day. Now I compliments from my dentist about my oral hygiene at my regular checkups.

I still drink a lot of soda though. I say I’m gonna quit every year, but I’m afraid of the few weeks of withdrawal headaches. Maybe 2026 will be the year I do it.

I joined a stretching gym this year. They describe it as “yoga, but we do it for you.” It feels awesome every time I go, but I definitely don’t go as often as I should or could.

Books

Here‘s what you should know about my reading habits.

I abandon books liberally. At the first moment I’m no longer interested in a book, I stop reading it. I’ve done this in the first chapter of a book and I’ve done this in the last chapter of a book. When I abandon a book, I have no judgment about whether of not the book is good. It’s simply the wrong fit for me at that moment. I set it down and move on.

My star rating system:

★★★★★ = a nonfiction book that literally makes me make immediate changes in my life or a fiction book I fully enjoyed
★★★★☆ = a nonfiction book that is going to change the way I think or act very soon or a fiction book I enjoyed
★★★☆☆ = the book was fine but didn’t add anything new to my life
A book would get lower than ★★★☆☆ is probably one that I already abandoned

In 2025, I read or attempted to read:

~~Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss~~ (abandoned)
That Will Never Work, by Marc Randolph ★★★☆☆
Ready, Fire, Aim, by Michael Masterson ★★★★☆
~~Creative Directions by Jason Sperling~~ (abandoned)
For The Culture, by Marcus Collins ★★★★☆
~~Batman: Resurrection, by John Jackson Miller~~ (abandoned)
Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, by Jeremy Egner ★★★☆☆
Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard ★★★★☆
The Way to Wealth, by Benjamin Franklin ★★★☆☆
DCeased, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
No Bullsh*t Strategy, by Alex M. H. Smith ★★★★☆
DCeased: Unkillables, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★☆
~~Professional Troublemaker, by Luvvie Ajayi Jones~~ (abandoned)
~~The Five Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom~~ (abandoned)
~~How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell~~ (abandoned)
DCeased: Dead Planet, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
Rejection Proof, by Jia Jiang ★★★★☆
Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins ★★★★☆
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson ★★★★☆
The Science of Scaling, by Benjamin Hardy ★★★☆☆
$100M Money Models by Alex Hormozi ★★★★☆
~~Play Bigger, by Al Ramadan~~ (abandoned)
~~How We Grow Up, by Matt Richtel~~ (abandoned)
Million Dollar Coach, by Taki Moore ★★★☆☆
~~The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt~~ (abandoned)
How Basketball Can Save the World, by David Hollander ★★★★☆
Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield ★★★★☆
Freelance and Business and Stuff, by Amy and Jen Hood ★★★★☆
Scale with Purpose, by Jason Blumer & Ian Vacin ★★★☆☆
How to Decide, by Annie Duke (currently reading)
Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madsen (currently reading)
Rich Girl Nation, by Katie Gatti Tassin (currently reading)

Relationships

When I read The Algebra of Wealth last year, one line in particular stuck with me:

An obsessions with career and money (beyond what you could ever spend) begins to diminish what is the source of real satisfaction: relationships.

I have this line tightly tied up to each one of my full life goals: who would I like to share this with?

From travel to photography to food to basketball and everything else, I paid special attention this year to who I wanted to experience all of those things with. That is definitely a focus I will carry forward.

West Virginia fall folliage photography crew

Getting burritos at Figma Config

Basketball after-party during Spark

Jonas Leupe

Lazy Bear dinner crew at Figma Config

Basketball crew during Figma Config

Jan-Paul Koudstaal

Dinner with Celeste Fabros and Max Pete

Wil Reynolds and Alex Hillman during our quarterly mastermind

Nick Pattison

Joey Banks

Clover Hill dinner crew after AIGA NY event

SuperFriendly reboot dinner at The Hoagie Room at Pizzeria Beddia with Peter Kang, Jon Sukarangsan, and Sei-Wook Kim

Korean BBQ with Make More Money students

Golf crew for Jon Mall’s birthday

Basketball with Peter Kang

Central Park cherry blossoms photography crew

Mom and me

Ice cream stop during Arizona road trip

Em and me poolside in the Dominican Republic

2026

I’m fond of this African proverb:

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

I’m ready to go far.

My word for 2026 is “Together.”

Wishing you a wonderful start to 2026!

A Guide to Working in Public

Dan Mall — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Working in public is one of the highest-leverage strategies for agency owners today.

Why?

Because it allows people to join you.

“Joining you” can take many forms. It could mean:

Hiring you
Following your work
Buying what you sell
Following an account
Rallying to your cause
Aligning to your thinking
Supporting your mission
Rooting for your success
Taking a role on your team
Paying attention to your ideas
Subscribing to your newsletter
Helping you when you’re stuck
Reaching out to start a conversation
Referring you to someone they trust
Sharing your work with their network
Adopting your frameworks or language

All of these outcomes start with the same decision: working in public.

What is working in public?

Simply put, working in public is when you let people see the process, not just the polished output. It’s about making the decisions just as apparent as the deliverables. Bonus points if you can share them real-time as opposed to at the end.

Whatever you’re doing, you’re on a journey. People can’t join you on the trip if they only find out about it after you’ve returned.

I’m constantly encouraging agency owners in my Make More Money program to work in public more. Nearly every day, I see a Slack post or DM that says, “Just sent this proposal to a client! 🤞” Usually, I have dozens of suggestions as to how it could have been made better, but I—as well as everyone else in the community—didn’t have a chance to help because we found out about it after it was sent. At best, we could provide input for next time, not this time.

Sharing what you’re doing while you’re doing it invites others to opt-in.

How, where, and when to work in public

Does working in public mean firing up a livestream 24/7 and letting people watch you design, write emails, and send invoices?

Yes.

But that’s only one form of it (likely the most transparent form). Like most things, there are levels.

A good place to start is my “Say, Do, Say” framework. Whenever you can, say what you’re about to do, do it, then say what you did, ideally with a link or reference to what you did so people can see it.

I suggest doing this daily, at the very least.

If you work in tech, this format may seem familiar to you. It’s very close to a daily standup ritual that’s baked in to most agile software development practices. Daily standup is a great example of working in public.

The next piece is deciding what you want “public” to mean. Yep, you get to pick! For you, “public” could mean:

Your coworkers
Your family
Your social media followers
An Instagram group
Your clients
Your newsletter subscribers
A Slack or Discord community
A subreddit
Your city
Your country
The whole world

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Pick the version of “public” that has the highest concentration of people that you would want to join you.

Because I like to practice what I preach, I like to say what I’m going to do a lot to my social media followers. And a decent subset of my posts are essentially updating them on what I’m doing that I said I want to do. For example:

Aligning beliefs

Especially when your version of working in public is targeted at social media followers, it’s easy to be distracted by platform metrics. But working in public isn’t not about likes or views or comments.

It’s about finding people like you, who believe what you believe. These are the people you want to join you on your journey.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram, you may have seen me post screenshots of my fitness tracking after basketball games. Actually you might not have seen it, because they are, by far, the worst performing posts I have. Very few views, almost no likes ever, a reply or two every once in a while.

But I still post them religiously. Not for the engagement, but because I’m working in public. In last year’s annual review, I talked about how much I enjoy playing basketball and a few goals around it for this year. I write about business using basketball metaphors, like Shoot Your Shot and Big For Nothing. Despite the lack of platform engagement, basketball in one of the first things people who know me from the internet talk to me about. That’s real engagement.

This happens for me in so many other areas too. Someone sent me sneakers as a thank you for some career advice I gave them. Someone took me to a Sixers game as a way to get dedicated time with me to pitch a business idea. I took a photography trip mostly with people I’d only met on the internet.

And also, some people have also told me they can’t be friends with me because I believe in God. Others have told me they “hate my brown face” and that I need to “stop everything and get a haircut.”

Good, bad, and ugly, because I keep myself accountable by working in public, I’m able to find people who like what I like and believe what I believe, people who can join me on the missions that I’m on.

Working in public isn’t a marketing tactic. It’s a relationship strategy.

It gives people a way to understand how you think, decide if they agree with you, and figure out where they fit.

Some will follow. Some will hate. Some will support. Some will leave. Some will buy. Some will block. Some will work with you. Some will DM. Some will quietly cheer from the sidelines.

You’re not trying to convince everyone. Working in public makes it easier for the right people to find you… and easier for them to say “I’m with you” when the moment comes.

Don’t Sell Time. Sell Insurance.

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue) are popular buzzwords for good reason.

Recurring revenue can change a business. It helps solve some of the biggest problems agency owners deal with:

Financial stability. You know what you’ll make next month without having to sell again.
Reliability. You can plan longer-term hires, tools, and cash flow instead of reacting.
Valuation. Predictable revenue makes an agency easier to sell, or easier for you to keep running

When I sold my agency SuperFriendly, we didn’t have any recurring revenue. That was partly because the agency was already shut down, but also because that wasn’t how we ran it. Looking back, I could have sold it for much more if it already had recurring revenue in place.

So it makes sense that agencies chase retainers, one of the most common forms of MRR.

The problem isn’t retainers themselves. The problem is how most retainers are sold.

The most common retainer trap

Most agencies sell retainers as blocks of time.

The moment you sell time, you create a problem. Time by itself isn’t valuable. We all have the same amount of it. You can’t buy more of it. You can’t really sell it. What matters is what you do with that time.

So you explain what you’ll do with the time. And what does that usually become?

Maintenance.

“We’ll do maintenance for X hours per month.”

But let’s be honest. Most modern websites don’t need 10–20 hours of real maintenance every month. Not forever. Not consistently. Not really.

What happens next is predictable:

You invent work
You track and report hours
You defend invoices
You manage expectations
You argue about edge cases

All to protecting yourself from the consequences of selling time. (It’s also why I think calling yourself “fractional” does more harm than good.)

Here’s the key pattern most people miss:

If your retainer requires complicated rules, you already lost.

Rollovers. Caps. Overages. Ranges. Points. “Use it or lose it.”

These aren’t smart pricing systems. They’re guardrails built around a flawed unit of sale.

A better retainer model: selling insurance

There’s a simpler and more honest way to think about retainers:

As insurance.

People don’t buy insurance because they expect to use it every month. They buy it because not having it is too risky.

Insurance is built to be something you ideally never need, except in rare or serious cases.

That’s not a weakness of the model. That’s the entire point.

Insurance math

Insurance companies do handle claims. That includes real work, vendors, and labor.

What they don’t promise is constant or guaranteed work for every customer.

They sell coverage, not capacity.

They can do that because demand is predictable across many customers, even if it’s unpredictable for one customer.

Insurance companies rely on:

Actuarial tables
Historical loss data
Probability distributions
Risk pooling across millions of customers

They don’t guess. They don’t renegotiate or reassess every month. They don’t worry about whether one customer “used what they paid for.”

They know—with high confidence—roughly how many claims will happen, how big they’ll be, and how much work they’ll require overall.

The system is designed around probability, not fairness per customer.

Compare that with typical agencies. Agencies sell retainers as if:

Every client is entitled to full utilization
Every month
Whenever they want

Which would put the operation out of business almost instantly.

Like insurance companies, agencies are already running a risk pool. But unlike insurance companies, they refuse to realize, acknowledge, and/or admit it.

Instead of planning across all clients, they promise time to each one. Instead of pricing for probability, they price for entitlement. Then they spend the rest of the relationship apologizing.

Insurance companies don’t apologize when nothing happens. Agencies do.

That’s the difference.

Fairness in the wrong place

Look at how retainers are usually explained. Everything is about being fair:

Fair if the client doesn’t use all their hours
Fair if the work takes less time than expected
Fair if nothing urgent comes up

Insurance doesn’t work like that.

You don’t get a refund because you didn’t crash your car. You don’t get rollover claims because it was a quiet year. You don’t get bonus coverage because the insurer had spare capacity.

Retainers fail when fairness is measured in usage instead of risk.

Not using your insurance is a sign that things are going well. Can your client say the same of not using their retainer?

What great retainers actually sell

Great retainers aren’t about selling tasks. Or hours. Or deliverables.

Great retainers sell three things:

Priority. When something matters, you’re first.
Preparedness. Someone already understands your system, context, and risks.
Reduced downside. Fewer fires, faster recovery, less exposure when things break.

None of those map cleanly to hours.

Availability vs. Coverage

Another common retainer pattern: agencies tend to talk about availability instead of defining coverage.

That’s why clients assume:

You’re always “on”
You’ll squeeze things in
You work on their schedule

Insurance doesn’t promise availability. It defines coverage.

Clear triggers. Clear limits. Clear exclusions.

No negotiation every month.

When retainers feel heavy, it’s usually because availability was vague and coverage was never defined.

Reframing retainers

Stop calling it maintenance. Stop selling time. Stop building elaborate rule systems to defend yourself.

Start selling protection.

Protection from what?

Business risk.

Lost revenue. Lost leads. Lost credibility.

Like insurance policies, the best retainers are the ones people pay for and hope they never need.

Which is exactly why they keep paying.

How to pitch insurance

Here’s a starter script you can use to pitch insurance to your clients:

Hey { CLIENT NAME },

With your site launch a few months away, I was thinking about how we might reduce risk for you going forward without adding more process or overhead.

What usually causes the most damage in high-stakes moments like launches or exec reviews isn’t the issue itself; it’s the delay. A platform change or third-party update exposes something no one could have predicted, and fixing it turns into a round of approvals, scope questions, and quotes.

We started offering protection plans last year to remove that friction. If traffic drops, a deploy goes sideways, or an external change creates urgency at the worst possible time, you’re not pausing to figure out next steps. You have clear coverage and priority when it matters.

Most months, you won’t need anything at all, because it’ll be our job to make sure of it.

It’d only be about 10% more than your current plan with us, and we could add it on immediately.

Can I show you how it’d work on our call on next Wednesday?

No hourly math. No maintenance theater. No “on-call” guarantees.

Just insurance.

For your client and your business.

Finding Models

Dan Mall — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:00:00 +0000

When you first build a design agency, the value proposition is pretty simple:

“I do work, they pay me.”

It’s a great start.

Until you realize that’s what everyone else figured out too.

So what reason do clients have to work with your agency as opposed to anyone else’s?

When an agency owner gets to this point, it usually kicks off some noble solo expedition to invent some proprietary process, machete in hand, hacking through untouched jungle, convinced that originality means inventing everything from scratch. When done in a vacuum, it usually results is some vague alliteration like “Design, Develop, Deliver” that looks like what everyone else does anyway.

The better, simpler way is to acknowledge that there’s no such thing as originality. Everything is a remix. Far from throwing in the towel, this mindset can actually open you up to borrowing from existing models that already work, as opposed to burdening yourself from having to invent from scratch.

The value of models

Simply stated, a model is an example you can follow or imitate, which is a great way to learn. Fashion models wear clothes so you can see how they might look on you without having to try them on yourself. Some workout videos have models who demonstrate the exercise so you know how to do it properly. Recipes often use photos to model how your dish should turn out.

By the same logic, business models let you “try on” proven structures before you commit to them. They reduce risk and shorten the learning curve, because you’re building on what already works instead of guessing your way through it.

Here are some models that I used liberally and referenced constantly while I was building my agency SuperFriendly:

The Hollywood model

Movies are made by assembling specialized teams of directors, writers, actors, and crew, and more, brought together specifically for each film. They work together for years toward a singular, excellent purpose, and then disband. This was my primary inspiration for building SuperFriendly as a network of hundreds of freelancers as opposed to a team of full-time employees. We even had Directors and Producers at the core of every account to follow the model very closely.

The Super Friends

The Super Friends were DC Comics’ ensemble of iconic heroes—led by Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman—who joined forces to fight threats too big for any one hero to handle alone. We borrowed the entire motif even down to the company name.

Pixar Braintrusts

After reading Creativity Inc., we borrowed Pixar’s idea of Braintrusts. Here’s how Ed Catmull describes Braintrusts in the book:

The Braintrust, which meets every few months or so to assess each movie we’re making, is our primary delivery system for straight talk. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another… the Braintrust watches [a version] of the movie and discusses what’s not ringing true, what could be better, what’s not working at all. Notably, they do not prescribe how to fix the problems they diagnose.

For every project we did, we allocated money specifically to hire a group of outside experts to consult with our project team about holes and opportunities they saw in the work somewhere along the way.

Teaching hospitals

Teaching hospitals are medical centers that treat patients while also training the next generation of doctors, meaning experienced physicians supervise residents and interns as they learn, practice, and refine their skills in real clinical environments. This directly inspired our apprenticeship program, and using the teaching hospital model help our clients quickly become at ease to the fact that apprentices would be working on the projects they paid good money for.

Basketball

The fluidity of a 5-person team that has to flex and adapt constantly was a big inspiration in how we ran our processes. I wish I had David Hollander’s How Basketball Can Save the World back then:

In the ideal state of basketball, there are no silos, but rather human flexibility and interchangeability. At any given moment on the court, you might find yourself in an entirely new situation—new facts, new circumstances—that you need to solve. To say, “That’s not my job, that’s not my position” is insufficient. You need to be and do whatever is required in that new time and place. There’s no manual or answer key. There’s just a unique challenge that you and your teammates have to solve together. The solution? You need to be it, whatever it is. Adopting a position of positionless-ness is the best preparation for whatever comes your way.

Why, how, and where to find your own models

One of the first things I do when helping an agency owner grow their business is ask them to identify the specific of their rich life and/or worthy goal, as I’m a firm believer of beginning with the end in mind. What happens every time is that the owner starts to reveal to themselves the details of the sometimes-scary M-word:

Their mission.

They realize it can be bigger than just, “I do work, they pay me.”

For some, that might be living a certain lifestyle, like taking 2 family vacations a year or starting to build a formidable wine cellar. For others, it’s about accomplishing something, like reducing homelessness in their town or being able to fund their kids’ college tuitions without any debt.

Once you start to hone in on your mission, you start to seek out people who have already accomplished the same mission. This is where models become really useful. If you wanted to climb Everest, you might at least want to have a phone call with someone who previously climbed Everest so they can help set your expectations.

If you can’t find a 1:1 model, you might find look for someone close enough. If you wanna to be the most dominant force in pickleball history, you might look to Serena Williams as a model. She did it for tennis, but you might decide that the model is close enough. So, the steps she did in regards to tennis, you do the equivalent with pickleball: the workouts, the prep routines, the specific coaches, the eating habits.

How and where do you find good models? It’s not like there‘s a book where you can look up your business and find a bunch of useful models.

You find it in your fascinations. In your unfair advantages. What do you nerd out about? What do you have a lot of experience with?

I became a designer because I saw Toy Story when it came out and decided I wanted to be an animator. So I went to school for animation and accidentally discovered design. I started an agency a decade later. I wasn’t looking for models then, because I already had them from studying Pixar years earlier.

I’ve played basketball since I was 6. I watch a ton of movies. I read comic books growing up. The models already existed in my head; I just needed time and the right opporunity to connect some dots.

Here are a few prompts to connect the dots for your own models:

What did you spend time doing as a kid?
What do you spend your time doing now outside of work?
What do you know a lot about, especially that others don’t?
Who and what do you admire?

When you use and infuse your personal models into your business, you truly create something unique. A web design studio inspired by UFC will be very different than a web design studio inspired by Buckingham Palace.

What models have you used lately?

Buy Stuff

Dan Mall — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Lots of people today will tell you resist Black Friday. To opt out. To be a minimalist. To transcend consumerism.

Not me.

I think you should buy stuff.

Treat yourself. Live your rich life. Not because you need more things.

But because we all could use more practice feeling like a person who actually gets what they want.

Buying things isn’t a moral failure. Most “don’t buy anything” messaging is just repackaged guilt. Your rich life is allowed to include nice things.

Indulging isn’t responsible. It’s a signal to your brain. When you give yourself permission to enjoy life, you reinforce a core belief: I am someone who gets to have nice things.

Intentional spending is self-care and self-improvement. People love to preach about discipline. But discipline without joy becomes a prison. Giving yourself joy is leverage.

Most people under-spend on the things that make their life feel richer:

The trip. The tool. The comfort. The upgrade. The convenience. The thing that makes everyday life 10% easier or 20% happier.

You don’t need to justify your pleasure with productivity.

You can buy something just because you want it. That’s enough.

I’m not selling you anything today. No discounts. No bundle. No product.

Just an invitation:

Go buy something that makes you feel rich.

Big or small. Useful or purely fun.

You work hard. You earn money. You’re allowed to enjoy it.

Reply and let me know what you bought today that made you feel more rich. I’d love to celebrate that choice with you.

How To Bootstrap a Freelance Business From Scratch In 2025

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Here’s how you bootstrap a sustainable freelance business from scratch in 2025:

First, do anything (legal) that people need help with for as much money as possible. Save enough cash that you could live for 3–6 months without getting paid. That might take 1 project, or it might take a year.

However long it takes you to do that, once you do it, go all in on your niche. Pick one audience, and do as many things as you can for that audience with the goal of eventually narrowing it down to one service they all want most.

Refer away any work that’s outside of that audience.

If that audience won’t hire you without experience, offer to do work for free for them for 3–6 months. Do as much work as you can for your audience in that timeframe that you build up a portfolio of at least 3 projects that prove you know how to do valuable things for this audience. Because you’re doing these projects for free, you call the shots. That means every project you do should be portfolio-worthy.

With at least 3 amazing projects in your portfolio that are perfect case studies of what you do for your target audience, you should have enough evidence to charge the next client in your audience some amount of money that you start to regenerate your depleting cash reserve. Clients usually like hiring people who have done before what they need done, and you have evidence that you can do it.

At this point, every project you do should be exactly what your target audience wants, which further deepens your expertise, which brings you more clients just like them, with further deepens your expertise.

It will probably take at least a year to get to this point and more likely a few years. But you can get there if you follow this process.

Soon enough, you’ll have bootstrapped, cash-flowing business as the go-to expert in your niche.

Pick a Niche Like a Puppy

Dan Mall — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Let’s say you want a puppy.

You want something warm and cuddly that brings comfort and joy into your life.

There are hundreds of dog breeds. How do you choose?

You might start with some research. What dog breeds are there? What are the differences between them? Which one might suit you, your home, and your living situation best?

You can’t know the best one for sure, but you can make some reasonable hypotheses. You know you’re allergic to dander, so you probably want to stay away from dogs that shed. You want a dog as partially a forcing function to get you outside more, so you lean towards high-energy breeds that need a lot of walking.

Your criteria helps you eliminate some breeds and shortlist others. From your shortlist, you look at some photos online, read some stories, and watch some YouTube videos and Instagram reels. You can’t put a finger on why, but some just light you up more than others.

You narrow down to three choices to go investigate further. You find some breeders or visit a shelter. You browse a row of dogs that all fit your criteria, but one in particular keeps catching your eye. Something about the way he seems to smile when you look at him. You know dogs don’t really smile, but you swear this one does. Your heart seals the deal; he’s the one for you. You don’t know it for sure, but you feel it. You pick him. Or did he pick you? It’s hard to tell.

You bring him home and introduce him to his new bed, toys, and all the stuff you got for him. You imagined a Disney moment, but it’s more like dropping an alien into a new world. He seems overwhelmed, and he just hides for a long time. His whining is already getting on your nerves. He pees all over your nice stuff.

You second-guess your decision. Are you really ready for a dog? You probably are, but maybe he’s not the right one. Would the shelter take him back? There was that other puppy that looked just as cute…

Even though it’s hard to stop thinking like this in this moment, you know these are irrational thoughts. First-week jitters. You’re irritated, but you’re also prepared for it and knew this might happen.

Eventually, he starts to settle. He tests you the first few days. He cries less each night. A few weeks later, you really see his personality show up. You hate how much he barks but you adore how much of a goofball he is. You cackle when he gets the zoomies. You stick to the training. He learns how and when to use the bathroom outside. He learns when bedtime is and goes automatically.

Months become years. You know him well and he knows you. You anticipate each other. You annoy each other. You love each other. You’re best buds for life.

Let’s say you want a niche.

You want something warm and energizing that brings clarity and direction into your business.

There are hundreds of niches. How do you choose?

You might start with some research. What niches are there? What are the differences between them? Which one might suit you, your skills, and your business goals best?

You can’t know the best one for sure, but you can make some reasonable hypotheses. You hated your first jobs in healthcare, so that one’s out. You want a niche partially as a forcing function to push your graphic design skills, so you learn towards industries that tend to be data-heavy.

Your criteria help you eliminate some niches and shortlist others. From that shortlist, you look at case studies, read founder stories, and watch YouTube videos and LinkedIn breakdowns. You can’t put your finger on why, but some just light you up more than others.

You narrow it down to three choices to investigate further. You find some communities and talk to potential buyers. You make a list of niches that all fit your criteria, but one in particular keeps catching your eye. Something about the way the problems line up with your strengths. You know no niche is perfect, but you swear this one feels close. Your intuition seals the deal; it’s the one for you. You don’t know it for sure, but you feel it. You pick it. Or did it pick you? Hard to tell.

You introduce your new offers, content, and positioning. You imagined immediate traction, but it’s more like starting a business from scratch. The market seems overwhelmed and slow to trust. No one responds to your outreach. The silence already gets on your nerves. Your early experiments flop.

You second-guess your decision. Are you really ready to niche down? You probably are, but maybe this isn’t the right one. Is it too late to change directions? There was that other niche that looked just as appealing…

Eventually things settle. The niche tests you for the first few days. The confusion dies down each week. A few weeks later, your voice in the market shows up. You hate how inconsistent the leads are, but you adore how aligned the good ones feel. You laugh when your content finally “gets the zoomies” and starts spreading. You stick to your weekly commitments for content, outreach, and user research. You learn what your audience needs and when. You get wise to season buying cycles and slow periods.

Months become years. You know your niche and your niche knows you. You anticipate each other. You annoy each other. You help each other. You grow together. The longer you run your business, the deeper you go in your niche. You’re best buds for the life of your business.

Big For Nothing

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 10:00:00 +0000

My brother and I played basketball together every day growing up. We'd play in our backyard, and we’d also go to friends’ neighborhoods and play in pickup games.

Every so often, we’d meet someone who seemed to have all the goods. 6'5", muscular, all the right gear on, etc.

And then we’d see them play.

They’d lose the ball, miss easy layups and blocks, get pushed around, and other atrocities that would make us roll our eyes.

We had a name for this:

Big for nothing.

As if to say: what’s the point of all that height, all that muscle, all the gear, if you don’t use it?

I meet people who are big for nothing outside of basketball all the time. The most incredible designers and engineers, working at companies who underpay and underappreciate them. People who have 6-figures saved but feel like they can’t afford a vacation. An aunt who’s offered to introduce them to someone who could change their life but they’ve never capitalized on the offer. A pro camera you got as a gift but is sitting unopened in your closet.

Where do you have incredible unfair advantages that you're not taking advantage of?

Shoot your shot.

Don't be big for nothing.

Peerless

Dan Mall — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

It’s always been hard for me to find a community of peers.

I know that comes from many of the same things I’ve long considered superpowers and unfair advantages.

My dad is from Pakistan and my mom is from the Philippines. I can’t find solid census data, but the best I’ve seen estimates there are anywhere from a few thousand to a million people in the world who are mixed Pakistani-Filipino (or “Pakipino,” as a high school friend once called it). If that’s true, that means I represent somewhere between 0.0009999% and 0.1% of the global population.

I grew up geographically close to my dad’s side of the family and am the second youngest of all my cousins, my brother being the youngest. Some of my cousins are my parents’ age, so I was always “the mature kid.” To this day, I’m still most comfortable around people slightly older than me.

That wasn’t a problem in school, since everyone’s grouped by age anyway. But as I got older, the gap widened.

My wife and I got married at 24 when most of our friends were single. We had our first daughter at 27 and our second at 29; our late-twenties friends weren’t even thinking about kids yet. Now we have teenagers while most friends our age are still changing diapers.

The same thing happened professionally. I got my first design job at 20. I was a design director at 27 when most of my peers were in their thirties and forties. I started my own company at 28 and racked up a decade of entrepreneurship before 40. I never talked about my age publicly until I turned 40 because I saw how differently people treated me once they knew.

Age cuts both ways. While I’ve often felt ahead, I’ve just as often felt behind.

I feel late to the personal brand and content game. Like it or not, follower counts create tribes. I’ve been on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms for almost two decades, but I only started treating them as assets recently. People who started when I did have exponentially more followers… not my tribe. People with my follower count are younger and/or newer to the game… not my tribe either.

Financially, I’m good but not yet where I want to be. People with my years of experience talk about 7-figure stock portfolios and 8-figure exits. People with my net worth are 25. Of course, I know logically that I don’t know this for a fact without looking through people’s bank accounts and P&L’s, but sometimes perception is reality. I’m pretty good at keeping that at bay, but, when it seeps in, it hits hard. It bruises my ego, and my self-esteem follows.

I’ve joined coaching programs and communities that seemed targeted at people like me. But most of them focus on mindset and consistency; the right advice for most and the opposite of what I’m looking for.

I’m in rare air personality-wise too. INTJ’s are 2.5% of the population. Aquarius are 6%. Enneagram 5’s are 7%.

These things make me who I am, and I love them. I fight hard for independence and autonomy and still long to be part of the group. Story of my life.

“Stand out,” they say.

“Be yourself,” they say.

“Entrepreneurship is lonely,” they say.

Where are experienced, ambitious entrepreneurs who need support and help getting to—and staying in—the 2-comma club?

The Easiest Way to Calculate ROI

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

One of my go-to techniques in teaching freelancers and agency owners how to make more money is value pricing.

That’s just a fancy way of saying that you expect compensation for the change you’ll deliver, as opposed to charging for other things like time, deliverables, materials, etc.

The most common question—and, sometimes, objection—I get about pricing this way is this:

But how do you calculate the ROI (return on investment)?

I’ll share the fancy math in a future post, but there’s an easier way anyway:

Calculate it after the project is over.

Trying to calculate it before is a prediction. You’re not a fortune teller.

But wait… how can you price a project if you calculate it after?

You calculate the ROI of the previous project.

And you use the ROI of the previous project to sell the next one.

The script looks something like this:

Prospect: “$50K for brand identity sounds expensive. Why would that be worth it for us?”

You: “For my last 3 clients, they each saw anywhere from a $100K–$300K increase in revenue through new customer signups after the new brand identity launched. Based on what we’ve talked about so far, I suspect my work could have a similar effect for you. All three founders directly attributed growth that to my work. Happy to introduce you to them if you’d like.”

In short, don’t try to predict the future.

Instead, describe the past.

Then convince your prospects that your past could be their future.

Where Do You Find the Time?

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I read about 20 to 30 books each year.

People often ask me:

“As a busy business owner, husband, and dad, where do you find the time?”

I find it far away.

One of the basketball leagues I play in is about an hour from my house. I don’t mind the long drive. I love basketball. And I also get two hours in the car to listen to audiobooks.

I have curly hair that takes a long time to wash and keep healthy. So I use a waterproof speaker in the shower and listen to books and podcasts. That gives me another hour a few times a week.

I don’t like going to the gym. Lifting weights doesn’t excite me. But I do love reading and learning… way more than working out.

So I trick myself. I go to the gym to listen to a book. The workout becomes an excuse to do something else I actually enjoy.

A friend told me they had a rule: they could only watch TV while walking on a treadmill. They lost a lot of weight by watching a lot of TV.

People think time hides close by… in little breaks, tighter schedules, or being more disciplined.

But I’ve found it lives far away. In the car. On the road. In the quiet.

Sometimes I fill that time with books. Other times, I don’t. I just drive, think, and let my mind wander. It’s not about using every minute. It’s about using the things I have to do to help me do the things I want to do.

When I leave my house, I leave behind the noise, the pings, the distractions. And what I find instead is open, quiet time.

We all have time. We just don’t have enough to do everything. So we try to choose what matters most. But that’s not easy.

I make it easier by building forcing functions into my life. When I drive an hour to play basketball, I can’t multitask. When I’m in the shower, I can’t scroll. The distance helps me focus.

A friend once told me they wrote a book by buying train tickets to small towns two hours away. They’d write for two hours on the way out, explore, eat lunch, then write again on the way back. The travel wasn’t just part of the plan; it was the reason they got it done.

When someone asks me where they can find the time, I give them my best recommendation:

Far away.

No Mo PTO

Dan Mall — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

If you’re reading this as soon as it hit your inbox, I’m not around.

I’m currently driving from my house just outside Philadelphia to West Virginia for my 4-day annual photography trip to capture fall foliage. (Last year was Stowe, and the year before was the Adirondacks.)

I didn’t have to check in with a boss. I didn’t have to file for PTO (paid time off). I just picked dates when the color was forecasted to peak, blocked them off on my calendar, and invited some friends.

Some couldn’t come. They were out of vacation days. Or work was too busy.

That’s when it hit me again: the biggest benefit of running my own business isn’t the money. It’s freedom.

Freedom to take time off without asking permission. Freedom to decide what “busy” looks like. Freedom to build my work around my life, not the other way around.

That’s also the #1 reason I created Make More Money. That’s my 3-month group coaching program for freelancers and agency owners ready to niche down, raise prices, and build a design business that runs on purpose.

Yes, I help my students increase revenue. But the real goal is helping you design a business that gives you choices.

One of my students decided to join me on this photo trip. They decided this yesterday. I love that they could.

If you want the freedom to take a 4-day trip whenever you want—or whatever version of freedom matters to you—this program is for you.

Apply to join here.

If That Clown Can Do It

Dan Mall — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Em and I lived in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia in 2009. We had just gotten married the year before and moved into a 2-bedroom row home.

Like many young couples, we talked about kids. But we weren’t sure. Were we ready? Did we have enough money? Would we be good parents?

On our frequent neighborhood walks, we saw young girls pushing babies around in toy strollers. Some looked barely older than teenagers themselves. We whispered to each other: If they can raise kids, maybe we could too. It might be difficult. It might not be perfect. But it was possible.

Years later, I worked on a giant rebrand. The company spent almost a billion dollars. I was just one small part of a big team that included about 30 different agencies. At the first meeting, we spent an hour on introductions. I felt intimidated.

Then I looked around. I assumed a 9-figure project would be run by middle-aged suits. But most people there were in their late twenties, just like me. And I thought again: if they belong here, maybe I do too.

They say comparison is the thief of joy. That can be true. When we compare ourselves to people we admire, we only see what they have that we don’t. That hurts.

But comparison can also be a helpful reference point. Don’t compare yourself to heroes. Compare yourself to peers… or even people you detest. Think of the kid who runs a million dollar agency as their first job right out of school. The stooge who landed your dream client. The buffoon who got lucky with equity at the right startup at the right time and retired at 35.

Instead of being jealous, use it as fuel. Tell yourself:

If that clown can do it, you can too.

Yep, it’s judgy. It’s immature. A little mean. It doesn’t see people for their best selves. And it can be a very useful technique.

Comparison doesn’t always have to break you down. It can build you up. Change “why not me?” to “why not me too?” Comparison can shows that the door is open, even if someone you don’t respect walked through first.

The trick is to turn anger into action. Don’t sit in envy. Use their success as the map, not the prize. Let it remind you:

If that clown can do it, you can too.

I ❤️ NY

Dan Mall — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I was in New York the past two days, speaking at an AIGA NY event about scaling from $200K to $1M and meeting some Make More Money students in person for the first time.

While walking through a touristy stretch, I texted my daughters to see if they wanted souvenirs. My 11-year old asked for a classic “I ❤️ NY” hoodie. My 14-year old said, “I want anything like fire js feel the vibe.” (The pressure!)

In two and a half minutes of shopping, I got a master class in sales.

The moment I touched a hoodie, the shop owner was beside me.

“What size?”

“Small,” I said.

Before I knew it, the hoodie was in his hands and then quickly in a basket. The sign above read “$50.”

“We have everything,” he said. “What t-shirt would you like?”

“No worries. I’m looking for something else.”

“Take your time,” he said as he scurried off.

I spotted pajama pants: 2 for $15.

“If you like those, I’ll bring the hoodie down to $45,” he reappeared.

Done. Hoodie + pants = $60.

As we walked to the register, he pitched everything we passed: mugs, lighters, t-shirts.

“You don’t know anyone who needs a t-shirt?”

“Nobody I’d buy one for,” I winked.

“No problem. Look around. We have everything,” he encouraged.

At the register, I tried: “$50 for these?”

“No, $55.”

“Ok, fair.”

I tapped my Apple Watch.

“Cash?” he asked.

“I only have $20 cash.”

“Ok, that’s fine.”

I handed him the bill. He punched it in; my balance showed $30 instead of $35.

“I gave you a discount,” he said.

I paid the balance via Apple Pay. He handed me my bag.

“My friend, are you happy?” he asked.

“I am,” I said. “Are you?”

“I am,” he said.

We shook hands, and I left.

The Right Size Project

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Most freelancers and small agencies dream about The Big Job™:

A big-name client.

A big paycheck.

Work that makes you feel proud.

For some, that’s $5,000. For others, it’s $50,000. Or even $100,000.

It’s the kind of project you brag about. The one that finally makes your friends and family say, “Oh, now I get what you do.”

But here’s the truth:

Even if a big project landed in your inbox today…

You might not be ready for it.

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Size matters

If you take on a project that’s too big for you, you risk failing.

Big clients don’t just want beautiful work.
They want results.
They want to see real money come back from what they pay you.

That’s called ROI: return on investment.

I use one simple rule:

👉 Deliver 10× ROI.

That means if a client pays you $1,000, you should create at least $10,000 in value for them.

If you can create $1M in value, you can charge $100K. (10× ROI.)

Can you deliver $1M of value to a client?

I’m not talking about “in theory.”

Not some hand-wavy “timeless design is priceless” harangue you’d put on your About page.

But $1M of value that your client—and their CFO—can see show up in their P&L (profit & loss statement).

If not, can you deliver $100K of value?

What about $10K?

If you’re even uneasy about that, have no fear:

I’ll walk you through how you can be confident about it.

A $1K project that delivers 10× ROI

Imagine your client sells a $100 product.

Here are 2 simple ways you can deliver $10K of value for them.

Bring them $10K

If you help them sell 100 more of those, they make $10,000.

Making the most beautiful website doesn’t always lead to people buying.
If no one visits the site, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.

To a paying client, a beautiful website that gets traffic is more valuable than a beautiful website.
And a beautiful website that gets customers is even more valuable than a beautiful website that gets traffic.

And here’s the real kicker:
For most clients, an ugly website that gets customers is more valuable than a beautiful website that doesn’t.

More than just making sure the grid is tight and the fonts are popular, you could:

Improve their SEO so more people find the site
Run ads that bring the right buyers
Ask a friend with a podcast to promote the product

If you help them sell those 100 items, you’ve delivered $10,000 of value. And you’ve earned a $1,000 fee (10× ROI).

Save them $10K

Value isn’t just about making money.

It’s also about saving money.

Say your client pays $10K a year for web hosting. You find a way to cut that cost… maybe by switching to a cheaper provider.

Maybe you just so happened to have a coupon for a free year of hosting because it was in the goodie bag from the last conference you attended. You look into your client’s hosting requirements and discover that this free host supports everything your client needs. You migrate their site, test it out until nothing’s broken, and help them cancel their old hosting.

Voilà: you’ve just saved them $10K.

If you save them $10,000 in hosting fees, you’ve delivered $10,000 of value. And you’ve earned a $1,000 fee (10× ROI).

Why only 10%?

You might wonder: if you made them $10K, why not charge $5K instead of $1K?

Two reasons:

First, it’s easier to convince a client to give you 10% than 50%. If your friend bought a pizza pie, it’d be easier to ask for 10% of their pizza than 50% of their pizza. It‘s harder to convince someone to give up more of what they have than less.

Second, 10% implies that you’re not solely responsible for the outcome. It signals that you only play a part in the success. In the case of selling 100 products for the client, you couldn’t have brought in $10K if the client didn’t make the product in the first place. Maybe you needed to work with their in-house copywriter for the website copy. Maybe you needed to build on top of their existing brand assets. Whatever the case, 10% signals that it’s something you couldn’t have done without them. And, especially if the client believes that you’re responsible for more than 10% of the outcome but are only taking 10% of the bounty, they’ll see you as generous and more than fair, which is great equity to have in the bank of your relationship with them.

Do the reps

Many freelancers and agency owners skip the hard work of practicing creating and articulating their value.

They jump straight to chasing big jobs.

For good reason: practice is difficult.

It’s easier to chase the biggest possible project and think it’s the shortcut to financial freedom.

But charging $10K for something that only creates $5K in value isn’t just unsustainable.

It’s stealing.

It’s leaving the place worse than you found it.

The design businesses that win long-term are the ones who scale into bigger projects only after they’ve proven they can create real, outsized results on smaller ones.

Start with a $1K project that delivers $10K of value.

Then practice seeing if you can figure out how to deliver $50K of value, because then you can confidently charge $5K.

You’ll learn how to sell 500 products instead of just 100.

You’ll start asking your clients what they spend $50K on, so that you can help them save it.

You’ll realize that earning and money and saving money aren’t the only things that are worth paying for.

You’ll see that more intangible things are valuable, like speed and friendliness, and you’ll figure out how to quantify those things.

You learn by working on a lot of things, and talking to your clients about them before, during, and after your work.

A former client once told me they referenced our 20-page strategy deck every day in standup for a year after we delivered it. It allowed them to not hire a creative director for a year, which means it saved them somewhere around $150k–$250k. We charged them $10K when we were charging $10K/week, but with this context, we could have charged $15K–$25K and still have it be a 10× ROI for the client.

So, the next time a similar client came around, we didn’t charge $10K for a week of work to make a deck. We charged $25K for the ability to not hire a creative director for a year—even though it was still a week of work to make a deck. Same deliverables, same time, different story.

Eight years later, I sat in a boardroom with VPs and pitched them on establishing an enterprise design system practice that would save them $20M–$40M. They showed me graphs and charts about how their current annual goals were to unlock $250M of incremental demand. I didn’t know how to help them do that. I had ideas but no proof or experience. The project was bigger that what we knew how to achieve. We didn’t win that work.

A year later, we earned $960K from one client because we helped them raise $45M in their Series B round. That’s a 46× ROI. Again, we weren’t solely responsible for the outcome. That’s why we only charged what ended up being 2% of the value of the opportunity. It’s the same skill and principles of making a strategy deck that subs for creative direction, as well as helping a client sell a hundred $100 products in a $1K project.

If we had tried to sell a $960K project nine years earlier, we wouldn’t have known how. It wouldn’t have been the right size project for us at that time. We wouldn’t have been able to deliver 1× ROI, much less 46×. We wouldn’t have been ready for it.

Ladders for project growth

Here are some project price benchmarks for you to assess the right size projects for you:

Can you deliver $10K of value? Price your projects around $1K.
Can you deliver $50K of value? Price your projects around $5K.
Can you deliver $100K of value? Price your projects around $10K.
Can you deliver $500K of value? Price your projects around $50K.
Can you deliver $1M of value? Price your projects around $100K.
Can you deliver $10M of value? Price your projects around $1M.

Of course, your mileage may vary and there’s a lot of nuance missing, but hopefully this gives you a reference point.

Overall, here’s the framework for growth:

Start with projects where you can guarantee 10x ROI.
Use those projects to build proof, confidence, and reputation.
Move up the chain only when you know you can create bigger value.

That’s the game.

Not chasing prestige. Not chasing the biggest paycheck.

It’s about matching the project size to the value you can deliver. And then climbing, one step at a time.

Keep doing the right size project.

One day, the $100K project will be the right size for you.

The Cashdollar Technique

Dan Mall — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

When I was a mid-level designer working at an agency, we needed to hire a new creative director. My boss and I discussed how important this hire was for my career growth, and he promised to heavily prioritize my requests and opinions in our search process.

We narrowed it down to two people, and we scheduled their interviews one day after the other.

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The first person came in. We asked lots of questions about his work and what he would do in tough spots. He gave smart answers and showed good work. After he left, I felt like he could be a great leader for me.

The next day, our second candidate came in. We asked our first question. He calmly responded, “If it’s ok, I made a short presentation that I think will answer that question pretty well. Is it ok if I plug in my laptop and walk you through a few slides?”

I knew in that moment we had found our next creative director.

It was 17 years ago when Chris Cashdollar quietly took charge of the room, and eventually our team. From that first interview through the year and I half I spent working with him, Chris—or Cash or Cash Money or C-Money, as we sometimes called him—showed me what real leadership looked like. C$ won the role—and my heart—by being more prepared than everyone else. The work always wins. Smart, articulate people can always impress. But the person who shows up with the sketch or the prototype quickly rises above.

Cash used a framework I recognized almost two decades later in the great book The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson:

Teach for differentiation
Tailor for resonance
Take control of the sale

This past week, one of my students tried it out for the first time, a very different way than they were used to field an inquiry from a prospect. From their debrief:

The big change was how I led the conversation, felt confident, a little nervous, but then things felt different. It's incredible how things change when a potential client puts a lot of trust in you. No pushback at all. This client was basically letting me talk and the nodding like agreeing with me. If they see you as the only person that can do the job, then it’s a much easier negotiation.

Preparation isn’t flashy. But it’s often the difference between being considered and being chosen.

Thoughtful responses are table stakes. what makes you stand out is how much work you do before you walk into the room.

I Wouldn’t Do It For A Million Dollars

Dan Mall — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Years ago, my agency received an RFI (Request for Information) in our inbox.

The project sounded fun and right up our alley. We sent the info they requested and said we’d respond to the RFP (Request for Proposal). Not long after, they told us we were shortlisted as one of their final candidates.

A few weeks later, the RFP showed up. We worked on our proposal and booked a time to present it in person.

When we got to their office, we checked the sign-in log. We spotted our competition: two huge consultancies. (Funny thing: they had both hired us before to teach design systems to their teams.)

The presentation went great. They loved everything: our work, our team, and our plan.

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The curve ball

Just as we were about to leave, they threw us what they literally called a “curve ball.”

They showed us new brand assets and asked us to apply them to their website as the final step of the proposal process.

(Holy spec work, Batman!)

We didn’t love that request. But we didn’t want to lose the chance either. So we split the difference by writing what we called “a reverse case study.”

Here’s how we prefaced it in the document:

This is the case study we would write for this project after the fact. The research and data is fabricated to weave a better tale of how this may have played out in real life. Please enjoy our fiction!

We mapped out a fake process and mocked up a few element collage-style interface ideas… just enough to hint without committing. Then we packed it all into a 55-page PDF proposal with three pricing options: $1.2M, $800k, and $350k.

They loved and chose the top option with all the bells and whistles.

I got 99 questions, but…

After a few weeks of radio silence, we finally got word…

…that we had 3 days to answer 99 questions in a document their IT department sent along. We took it as an annoying but good sign that they’re doing their due diligence with us. After all, if they weren’t interested in working with us, they wouldn’t even be asking, right? RIGHT??

We asked for a call to talk it through. Nope; they wanted it written, with no wiggle room in the deadline. We rushed to get it done.

I also sent a separate email to our main contacts titled, “Working on working together.” It was my polite way of saying, “This is starting to feel weird.”

We smoothed it out on a call. Things felt okay again.

Then the good news came: we won the project!

They said we were “universally loved.”

“A refreshing break from the rest.”

It felt like a massive win.

Money talks

Next up: contracts.

We met their procurement team and brought in our lawyer. Over lunch we hit a surprise snag: price. I thought we had settled that.

They wanted everything in the $1.2M option but said projects over $1M meant longer reviews and delays. So we removed some scope and gave them a few options between $750k and $950k, with a payment schedule of 50% up front and the remainder paid monthly throughout the duration of the project.

They countered with essentially the original top option for $880k, with 50% up front, 15% halfway through, and the remaining 35% paid upon receipt of the final deliverable.

We countered with $950k with 75% up front and the remaining 25% at the halfway point.

We got on the phone to talk it through.

After a few days, their counter was $1M for the original top option with 25% up front, 25% at the end, and regular monthly payments throughout.

One rule I always keep: payments should be tied to dates, not milestones. I’ve done enough projects to know that milestones move—for lots of reasons—and I want them to be able to because that‘s the nature of high-stakes projects. But just because milestones change doesn’t mean that scope does. And if scope doesn’t change, neither does the price. And if price doesn’t change, I should be able to project cashflow for it. So, any project where a payment is tied to a milestone makes it riskier. And if a project gets riskier, the price goes up.

We made a final counter: $950k for the top option, with 50% up front and the rest paid monthly.

They agreed. Phew.

Counter productive

As a matter of policy, we always start with our GSA (General Services Agreement). I think it’s a very even agreement, with both parties having an equivalent level of checks and balances. I like starting with most terms being mutual. For example, if they get to terminate with 30 days notice, we get to terminate with 30 days notice. That’s the way I wanted every project to be, and starting with an agreement like that felt like the right first step.

We passed 5 versions of contracts back and forth for 2 months. And they kept getting worse:

We lost the right to terminate the project for any reason at all.
Deliverables were only “done” when they said so, with no rules for what “done” meant.
We had to indemnify them, but they wouldn’t indemnify us.
We had to obtain very strict data compliance certifications even though we assured them we’d be touching no customer data.
If we didn’t hear back from them about a deliverable within 5 days, that deliverable would be considered rejected.

Through all the contract negotiations, this was the biggest sticking point in the end:

Their biggest fear was that we’d deliver a product that wasn’t complete or of adequate quality to them, which is why they wanted all of the work to be subject to their full approval.

Our biggest worry is that they wouldn’t be able to agree on approving anything and we’d be contractually obligated to work on this project forever.

We offered these fixes:

Timebox the project. That would incentivize both parties to work fast together.
Define approval ahead of time. We obligate them to short approval cycles and we would commit to correcting anything they didn’t approve within a short timeframe.
Financial incentives and consequences. We reduce the final payments the faster they approve stuff, or they pay us extra if their approvals are slow.
Go back to the original fee. We’ll accept their approval terms if the project price goes back up to $1.2M.
Stronger termination rights. Let’s make termination terms mutual.

After sending the email, I started to realize that, even if they agreed to one or all of these things, it wouldn’t solve the problem: we’d be forced to work in a completely different way than we know how to be successful.

Not to mention: this whole process had been extremely draining. Were we really ready to sign on for 12 more months of this?

Before we had a chance to think too much about it, we received their latest contract revision: a redline saying that, if the project went late, we’d pay them $1,000/day for every day past the term.

This was the worst option yet.

We wanted them to move faster. This let them drag their feet—and make money off it.

If we accepted this, they were ready to sign and get started.

We talked internally and gave the client a call.

The end

Seven months from receiving the initial RFI, we told them that we were bowing out of the project.

Their main boss wasn’t on the call.

Minutes later, we received a phone call from him. He told us that he was at his kid’s baseball game and yelled obscenities and insults at us until we decided to hang up.

They couldn’t pay me a million dollars to endure more of that.

The Hidden Policies That Hold You Back

Dan Mall — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 11:00:00 +0000

We all have shrouded policies in our heads… little rules that tell us how far we’re allowed to go.

You can learn every trick, tool, and skill. But if your rules say certain kinds of success are bad, your brain will stop you from winning.

Most people don’t fail because they lack talent.
They fail because their secret rules say things like:

“Success makes me greedy.”
“Selling makes me sleazy.”
“Money makes me selfish.”
“Working with friends ruins relationships.”

And since your brain doesn’t like breaking its own rules, it keeps you stuck.

You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your beliefs.

If you think salespeople are sleazy, then being good at sales would make you sleazy. So your brain holds you back.

If you think money is evil, then earning more makes you evil. So your brain stops you from creating wealth.

If you think friends and work don’t mix, then you’ll never get close to clients. You’ll miss out on trust and referrals.

If you think leaders are bossy, then leading makes you unlikeable. So you stay quiet.

If you think ambition is selfish, then chasing goals feels wrong. So you sabotage your own progress.

You can’t fight your mindset. But you can change your mind.

Try this instead:

“Sales is sleazy” → “Good sales means helping people.”
“Money is evil” → “Money can be a tool to do more good.”
“Working with friends is risky” → “Strong friendships make business better.”

Success doesn’t just require new skills. It requires new beliefs.

The Serenity Prayer for Design Businesses

Dan Mall — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:00:00 +0000

You’ve probably heard of the Serenity Prayer:

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Most design freelancers and studio/agency owners live the inverse.

They:

Try to change the things they can’t: like trying to get a client to buy something they don’t want, or the fact that some prospects just don’t value design as much as you want them to.
Ignore the things they can: like pricing better, setting stronger boundaries, marketing consistently, or replacing bad-fit clients.
Lack the wisdom to know the difference: so they burn energy wrestling with the immovable and leave easy stuff on the table.

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A free 6-day email course for design freelancers and agency owners who need revenue fast—without a funnel, large audience, or fancy pitch deck.

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When things are going well, it feels like everything is and was in your control.
When things are going poorly, it feels like nothing was in your control.
Neither of those things are true.

Being the boss means you’re responsible for choosing the right battles and avoiding the wrong ones.

The wrong battles

Here are some things you can’t change no matter how hard you try:

Economic shifts
Algorithm changes
Leads ghosting you
Competitors stealing your ideas
Clients losing funding mid-project
A prospect’s nephew doing it cheaper
Emergencies, whether yours or your clients’
The fact that projects don’t always go according to plan

I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s the way it is. Don’t waste your energy and move on.

The right battles

Here are the things you can change:

Your daily habits: how you spend time, what you measure, where you focus
How you price your work and structure your payment terms
The way you manage your pipeline to avoid feast-or-famine
Your positioning and the reputation you build in your niche
The systems you put in place to reduce decision fatigue
The marketing you do consistently (or don’t do at all)
The clarity of your proposals, contracts, and scopes
The help you hire—or fire—so you don’t burn out
Who you pitch and who you stop chasing
What you say yes or no to

These aren’t always easy, but they are available to you. They’re the difference between running a business and being run over by one.

The wisdom gap

The hard part isn’t making the changes. It’s knowing which bucket a problem belongs in.

Before you burn a day (or a week) on something frustrating, ask yourself:

Can I actually control this?
If yes, is it worth the effort right now?
If no, what can I adapt or change instead?

Every hour spent fighting the immovable is an hour stolen from fixing the things you can control.

The prayer, rewritten

So maybe the real prayer for running a design business goes like this:

Grant me the serenity to accept the clients, markets, and circumstances I cannot change,
the courage to change the pricing, boundaries, and habits I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference—before I waste another ounce of energy.

What a Zombie Comic Taught Me About Business (and 4 Other Surprising Books)

Dan Mall — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 11:00:00 +0000

The last 5 books I read taught me more about business than I expected.

Including a zombie comic book series.

Here's what each one unlocked:

1. Die With Zero by Bill Perkins

Key Idea: Stop maximizing your net worth. Start maximizing your life experiences.

This book hit me like a cold shower:
What’s the point of dying with millions in the bank if you never spent any of it on meaningful moments?

Your money’s worth more at 35 than 75.
Your time with your kids is worth more when they're 8 than 38.

Perkins reframes the game:

“The goal is not to die rich. It’s to live richly.”

I’ve always been a spender—and felt embarrassed about it.
This book flipped that guilt into a question I now ask often:
“Will this buy me a story worth telling?”

2. Rejection Proof by Jia Jiang

Key Idea: Rejection is a skill. You can train it.

Jia Jiang didn’t just study rejection. He chased it.
For 100 days, he made bold, unreasonable requests just to hear “no.”

But here’s the twist:

Most people don’t say no. They just need a reason to say yes.

This book reminded me that fear of rejection is usually louder than rejection itself.
If you want something, ask for it.

3. DCeased series by Tom Taylor

Key Idea: Even superheroes can’t outrun death. But they can choose how to face it.

A zombie virus spreads through screens and social media, stopping even the most powerful superheroes in universe in their tracks.

Yes, it’s a comic book series.
Yes, it belongs here.

Because it’s not just about saving the world.
It’s about what you choose to save when the world is ending.

“What would you do with your last day?”

This book made me think more about legacy than most business books ever have.

4. No Bullsht Strategy* by Alex M H Smith

Key Idea: Strategy isn’t a deck. It’s a decision.

Smith’s writing cuts like a knife. He breaks it down to this:

“A strategy is what you say no to.”

If you’re spread thin, this book is the mirror—and the machete—you need.

5. Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard

Key Idea: Business can exist to serve people and the planet, not just shareholders.

Chouinard built Patagonia into a $3B company by breaking the rules.
He skipped the IPO.
Gave away the profits.
Prioritized nature over margins.

And it worked.

“How” you grow matters just as much as how much you grow.

This book reminded me that your values can be your strategy.

The unexpected pattern

These books don’t belong in the same category.

But together, they make a point I apparently need to hear right now:

Breakthroughs come from questioning what's "normal."

Normal says more money comes from more offerings.
Normal says business books have to be serious.
Normal says save everything for retirement.
Normal says don't ask for what you want.
Normal says track employee hours.

Normal is overrated.

Interesting, successful businesses can be built by people who read zombie comics for strategy advice.

What are the last 5 books you read, and what pattern jumped out at you that you didn’t expect?

Reply and let me know.

Selling Fractions

Dan Mall — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I hate the term “fractional.”

If you’re unfamiliar, “fractional” is a term people use to describe how others might work with them. You’ve probably seen people call themselves fractional CTOs, fractional CFOs, fractional creative directors… fractional anything.

The term took off in the 1990s in executive consulting circles. Over the last five years, it’s exploded, driven by remote work, the gig economy, and the rise of flexible, part-time leadership roles at early-stage startups.

But what does “fractional” actually mean? More importantly, what does it signal?

Let’s start with the obvious: the definition.

“Fractional” means you’re selling a slice—a fraction—of time is for a fraction of the price.

Clients save money; you stay flexible. Sounds like a win-win, right?

The Soham Parekh test

You may have heard about Soham Parekh, the engineer who quietly worked multiple full-time jobs at the same time… three, four, maybe five.

Outrage followed. How could someone deceive so many startups? How could he take full salaries and give only a sliver of his time?

Parekh’s strategy ultimately failed, partially due to of poor performance.

But what if he was doing well? What if he was working with 4-5 companies, and each was getting what they expected of him?

What if he had called himself a “fractional engineer?”

If the companies knew they were only getting a portion of his time—and still got the results they expected, of course—would this have been a scandal at all? Would the narrative have changed?

Instead of being seen as a fraud, he might’ve been seen as scrappy. Entrepreneurial. Efficient. Frugal.

Or, he might have been seen as a freelancer. Or a contractor.

That’s the power of language. “Fractional” isn’t just a label. It’s expectation-setting. And in Soham’s case, it’s the absence of a label that broke trust.

Which begs the question: what expectations do these words actually carry?

“Fractional” is shorthand

Titles are typically shorthand expectation setting.

In practice, people use “fractional” to mean one of two things:

“I’ll do what a full-time person would, but I’m doing it for multiple companies. Don’t worry: you won’t notice any downsides because of it. But I want to make sure you know.”
→ This is about managing capacity across commitments. It’s professional polygamy.
“You don’t need someone full-time in this role. There’s not enough work to do. So, I’ll accept less compensation than you would pay someone who does this full-time, and I will do less work than someone working full-time, and we’ll both be ok with that because it’s appropriate in this scenario.”
→ This is about tailoring the offer to fit the need. It‘s an appeal to affordability.

These two meanings aren’t interchangeable, but the word is. So when you say “fractional,” your client may be hearing something completely different than what you intended.

That’s the real risk: “fractional” tries to communicate clarity, but often creates confusion.

“Fractional” is relative

Like most titles, “fractional” only makes sense in relation to something else.

“Senior” only means something if there’s also “junior.”
“Designer” signals you’re not the engineer or product manager.

So “fractional” means: not full.
Not the full person, not the full time, not the full commitment.

Which begs the question:
What does “full” even mean?

The farce of full-time

When we say “full-time,” we usually mean:

40 hours/week
One W2 employer
Consistent availability
Loyalty, dedication, and attention

But in reality:

In tech, people often work more than 40 hours all the time and rarely get paid overtime.
U.S. law doesn’t prohibit holding multiple W2 jobs. (Employers who try to obligate you to exclusivity—especially without incentivizing it financially or otherwise—is almost always exploitative.)
People ghost their full-time employers with no-shows, side gigs, or “quiet quitting.”

So why does “full-time” still hold so much emotional weight?

Because we’ve confused employment with time ownership.

We’ve accepted a model where your value is measured in hours served, not outcomes earned.

Until it isn’t.

You get paid for 40 hours.

You work 60 hours? That’s your problem.

You work 20 hours? You owe us PTO.

In essence, “full-time work” really means “minimum hours expected before we start judging you.”

When “fractional” flourishes

Let me be clear: I’m not here to bash the word altogether.

If you’re finding great clients and making great income by using that language, by all means: keep on keeping on! Go get that bag. I’m fully in your corner.

For great fractional work to happen, these conditions usually need to be true.

You:

Are great at what you do
Have a high opportunity cost
Set and manage clear expectations
Are probably seasoned in your career
Typically achieve outcomes faster than your peers
Can juggle multiple clients without compromising results

Your client:

Respects your boundaries
Values outcomes over hours
Can’t afford to hire a full-time leader
Doesn’t need to hire a full-time leader
Doesn’t expect on-demand access 24/7
Can move forward with asynchronous or part-time support

When those conditions are true on both sides, fractional work can be an ideal setup. You deliver meaningful outcomes without burning out. They get exactly what they need without overextending.

But that alignment is rarer than people think.

And when it’s not there? That’s where fractional starts to fall flat.

When “fractional” falls flat

Here are 5 scenarios when fractional work isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

1️⃣ Centering time, not value

You’re telling people how much of you they’re getting, but not what they’re getting.

Would you hire a fractional heart surgeon? It’s accurate; each patient gets a fraction of their attention and time. But adding the “fractional” part makes it sound worse, not better.

Why isn’t Elon Musk known as a fractional CEO, even though he’s the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and holds equivalent leadership positions at other companies?

High-value contributors are defined by impact, not availability.

When you work with a high-value professional making impact, how much time they put in is the least of your worries.

2️⃣ It‘s “part time,” rebranded.

Let’s be real: some folks say “fractional” because they’re in between jobs. That’s fine; sometimes we take what we can get.

Calling it “fractional” can feel like trying to make it sound more desirable than it is.

It’s a reframe that avoids the negative connotations of “part-time” as the kinds of retail and food service jobs you may have had before you were a “professional.”

But that’s ego rearing its head.

If you’re using the term to signal a specific working model, that’s great.

But if you’re doing it because you think it makes you look more valuable than a part-timer? Think again.

3️⃣ It makes you sound cheaper than you are

Saying “I offer a fraction of the hours at a fraction of the price” signals that they’re getting a discount.

But “a fraction of the time for a fraction of the price” isn’t a discount. It’s a reduction in scope.

A real discount is when you get the full thing at a fraction of the full price.

Is that what you’re offering?

If so, you might be giving away too much.

If not, your “discount” may not be as appealing as you think.

4️⃣ It invites price shopping

“Fractional” signals budget-friendly. That’s an appealing idea, and it’s just as risky for you.

To many prospective employers, the word “fractional” makes it sound like the biggest value is being inexpensive.

Once you’re framed as the affordable option, you enter a race to the bottom.

There’s always someone more available, more desperate, or more willing to say yes.

5️⃣ Every hire is a fractional hire.

Even someone who works 40 hours/week is only giving you a fraction of their week.

The only “non-fractional” hire would be someone who works 168 hours/week.

Better than full-time

I don’t hate the term “fractional” because it’s inaccurate.
I hate it because it often undersells the people who use it.

The value a great professional delivers is clarity, strategy, and leadership.

The value a great fractional professional delivers is clarity, strategy, and leadership.

Not half clarity, a quarter strategy, or a third leadership. Those things aren’t measurable in hours. Half clarity is unclear. A quarter strategy is confusion.

If you can deliver clarity in 10 hours instead of 40, that’s not a smaller version of the job.

That’s a better version.

If you’re doing high-value work in a limited-time package, don’t call yourself fractional.

Call yourself what you are:

A multiplier.

Balancing Curiosity With Positioning

Dan Mall — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I love this question from designer Jan-Paul Koudstaal in response to my previous newsletter issue.

What if part of the fun of running a design business is not knowing what‘s next?

To which I say:

If it’s fun for you, keep doing it!

The double-edged sword of surprise

JP doesn’t mince words:

I’ve designed websites, apps, even posters and magazines for NGOs, a national park, agriculture, eCommerce, even the Dutch government — and honestly, I love the surprise of it.

Like JP, many business owners love running a business that brings them things they couldn’t have predicted. That joy is often the reason people go independent in the first place.

Others, however, hate surprise in business. One of the biggest things I hear that my students?

Stability. A steady stream of income and clients.

I don’t think everyone needs to have a narrow positioning. Narrow positioning isn’t mandatory.

It’s a solution to a problem: people don’t have enough specific proof that you can help them and therefore don’t hire you.

If you don’t have that problem, you don’t need that solution.

Narrow positioning reduces ambiguity for your prospects—and for you. If you’re fine with the ambiguity (and so are your prospects) then there’s nothing wrong with staying broad.

Low price, high volume

JP asks:

Is there a way to stay open, say yes to the unexpected, and still build a clear, recognizable position?

Yes! Two main ways:

One way is to not need a lot of clients. If you can keep demand much higher than supply—even two clients waiting when you only need one—you don’t need hyper-focus to thrive.

Another way is best demonstrated by brands who don’t narrow at all by who they serve but still seem to have a clear, recognizable position:

Walmart offers groceries, electronics, clothes, and more for virtually anyone who shops.
McDonald’s serves meals for all ages, tastes, and budgets in nearly every country.
Motel 6 provides basic lodging for anyone traveling almost anywhere.

What do they have in common?

Being the lowest-cost provider, deployed at scale.

Clearly, this works! Walmart has been the highest-grossing company in the world and has been for 13 straight years. They don’t narrow at all; anyone can shop at Walmart.

If you want to stay open but have a recognizable position, doing high volume of a low-priced offer would absolutely work.

But “low price, high volume” sounds like the opposite of what so many business owners want. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a studio owner wish for “a small handful of clients who pay really well”…

After all, who wants to be the Walmart of design?

Get a life

I love JP’s question because they’re challenging provocations, but also because of who’s asking it. He’s as talented, humble, and smart as they come. So when I say this next part, it’s with the deepest admiration and respect:

Get a life!

(I kid, I kid.)

Look at JP’s Instagram. it’s full of design, music, pizza crawls, family trips, travel, and more.

And that’s the point.

Management consultant Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”

American economist Milton Friedman said, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business: to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.”

If you get variety and range from your business, that’s awesome. But for many of us, business is the hardest place to find that.

An easier strategy, in my opinion? Run the most profitable business you can spend your money and time buying variety elsewhere.

Maybe the question isn’t how to keep curiosity in your business, but whether business is the right container for it at all.

Great Gig. Not For Me.

Dan Mall — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

When I teach positioning—generally the exercise of narrowing and specifying who you serve and how—I get a common question from my students:

Is this demographic/audience/segment narrow enough?

What they generally mean is: is it good enough to pick “moms” as an audience, or does it need to be more specific, like “moms in Toledo” or “moms over 45“ or “neurodivergent moms?”

Here’s a litmus test to help you figure out if you’re positioned narrowly enough:

Can you confidently say no to a great gig that doesn’t fit?

Imagine you saw this post on LinkedIn:

Global sportswear brand seeks designer for limited-time campaign.

6-week project

$25,000 budget

Work with our internal team on a digital campaign for our newest basketball line

Starts in two weeks

Interested? DM me.

What’s your gut reaction?

“Whoa, $25k for 6 weeks? I’m in.” → You’re prioritizing money.
“That’s a great gig… just not for me,” → You’re prioritizing fit.

Well-positioned businesses prioritize fit over finances.

How to evaluate fit over FOMO

Here’s some criteria a well-positioned business would use to evaluate this opportunity:

Audience Fit. Is this the exact audience you’ve chosen to serve?
Problem Fit. Does the work match the specific problems you solve best?
Expertise Fit. Will this project showcase your specialty and strengthen your positioning or dilute it/distract from it?
Future Fit. Does this open doors in your chosen niche, or pull you back into generalist land?

In the case of that example post, here are the words a well-positioned business would assess first:

“Global sportswear brand” → Is that the audience I serve?
“Limited-time, digital campaign” → Is that what I typically deliver?
“Limited-time, digital campaign” → Does that fit in with the projects I already showcase/send to prospects?
“Limited-time, digital campaign for global sportswear brand” → Will hearing that prove to future prospects that I intimately know how to solve their problem?

Notice what’s not on that list:

$25k
6-week project
Starts in 2 weeks

If the project doesn’t fit your position, those details are irrelevant. It wouldn’t matter if it were $250k and started whenever you wanted.

Because a well-positioned business has the ability to confidently say, “That‘s a great gig… just not for me.”

The real positioning test: how fast can you say “no?”

So, back to the original question: are you positioned narrowly enough?

If your answers to “Is this my audience?” and “Is this what I deliver?” are yes more often than no, your position is probably still too broad.

For example, an audience of “business owners looking to grow” doesn’t filter anyone out. Almost every business owner wants to grow? Narrow further.

Your positioning should create clear boundaries so you can quickly separate the “ins” from the “outs.”

If you make websites for dentists, inquiring podiatrists should quickly receive a “Sorry, I’m not the person you’re looking for” response.

(Bonus points for “…but here’s someone who is.” Ironically, that person has a strong position. Learn from them.)

A narrow-enough position should quickly help you to know that engagements that are perfect for you. How?

Because they sound like they were written for you and no one else.

Remember When We Agreed That…

Dan Mall — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite and most powerful phrases to use with clients is:

“Remember when we agreed that…?”

Remember when we agreed that we’d only launch with 4 articles?
Remember when we agreed that a darker color palette would be more appropriate for this brand?
Remember when we agreed that it was ok to not see much traction for the first year?
Remember when we agreed that your team would write all the content?
Remember when we agreed that you’d trust my design decisions even if you disagreed with them?

This phrase surfaces accountability, which starts with a shared understanding. If you’ve agreed on something—whether in a conversation, a contract, or a Slack thread—it makes sense to revisit that agreement when memories fade or priorities shift.

Controlling scope

Early in my career, I used this phrase as a polite way to say no.

If the contract said five templates and the client asked for six, I’d say, “Remember when we agreed on five templates?” It helped me enforce boundaries without being a jerk.

But over time, I saw the real power of the phrase.

It wasn’t about controlling clients.

It was about being a better professional.

Facilitating agreement is difficult

To say “Remember when we agreed that…” you first have to actually agree on something.

Design is deciding. But too often, designers decide, and then just tell the client. There’s no real agreement; just an announcement.

Why? Because agreement takes more effort. You have to slow down, have a conversation, and align.

The more I coach design business owners, the more I see this gap: they’re great at making decisions but struggle to bring the client along.

It’s a skill. And like all skills, it gets better with practice.

How to document agreements

Even when you do reach agreement, people forget.

So write it down.

Email or Slack is often enough

A quick message can work wonders:

Me: Hey Jason! Just documenting that we agreed to add animation to the About page, and that shifts launch from Monday to Friday. Sound right?
Jason: Yep!
Me: Great!

Disclaimer: This isn’t legal advice; ask a lawyer for that. This is about relational clarity.

Use no-cost change orders or addendums

When email feels too casual but a full contract feels like overkill, use a change order or addendum. These are short docs that modify the original agreement.

But sometimes, anything that feels like a contract implies that you have to renegotiate money. To combat that, I often use a no-cost change order. That one word—“no-cost”—eases nerves and signals that this won’t affect the price.

I love seeing how tools like Fathom and Fireflies.ai—Granola is my favorite—have made note-taking part of every meeting again. AI can remove the bias of “who wrote what.”

When you share notes, add a quick check:

Hey Kim! Here are my notes from today. Can you confirm they’re accurate, especially the part about dropping CRM integration from this phase so we can launch a week sooner?

Becoming a time traveler

These tips might feel nuanced minutiae, but they help prevent the two most common freakouts I’ve seen in 20+ years of client work:

When clients don’t know what’s coming
When clients don’t remember (or like) what already happened

Both are time problems. So you have to become a kind of time traveler to help them navigate it.

Before they panic about the future, show them they future.
Before they rewrite the past, say: “Remember when we agreed that…?”

It’ll save both of you a lot of headache.

Independents’ Day

Dan Mall — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Today in the U.S. is Independence Day, the holiday Americans celebrate to mark their freedom from British rule. It’s a federal holiday, so most people are off work. There’s usually fireworks, grilled meat and veggies, and the collective permission to do nothing. It’s great.

But if you’re a design freelancer or agency owner, I’d suggest you also start celebrating something else:

Independents’ Day.

If you’re like most business owners, there’s a reason you chose the hard path of running your own thing. Bigger than “make more money.” Broader than any single mission or niche.

You wanted freedom.

When you work for someone else, they usually decide how you spend your time. Your compensation fits into a salary band. Your tasks are assigned. Your time is budgeted.

So you started your own business because you didn’t want that or didn’t want that anymore.

But maybe it feels like a lateral move to swap one boss for several clients.
Your “salary band” became “market rates.”
Instead of submitting a timesheet, you’re reconciling QuickBooks.
You swapped the structure of employment for the structure of obligation.

And that’s fine. That’s real. That’s business.

But let’s not confuse it with freedom.

Liberty Toasts

Shortly after gaining independence from Britain, early Americans were eager to express their newfound freedom in ways previously suppressed under royal rule. One of the most joyful forms was the Liberty Toast, a ritual where people raised their glasses to, well, anything they wanted.

After a reading of the Declaration of Independence, a “toastmaster” would begin with noble tributes: to national heroes like George Washington or Thomas Paine, to self-governance, to liberty itself.

But as the drinks flowed, so did the, um, creativity.

Some real-life examples recorded or passed down in legend:

“To the mailman, who brings news faster than tyranny travels!”
“To the ladies who make liberty taste sweet!”
“To Liberty Jim: may his corn be fat and his taxes be none!”
“To the dog who bit Major Thornby’s boot—and got away with it!”

That wasn’t just patriotism. That was people exercising freedom in real time, raising a glass just because no one could stop them.

That spirit lives on in Independents’ Day.

Independents’ Day

Federal holidays are easy to celebrate because everyone else is off, too.

But that’s the point: it’s easy. It’s expected. It’s sanctioned time off.

Before independence, colonists got a day off for the King’s birthday.

Let’s not pretend that was freedom.

Here’s your challenge:

Take a day off when you feel like you “should” be working. Just because you can. That‘s Independents’ Day.

The average full-time U.S. worker gets about 2 weeks of paid time off. So I try to take 3 weeks off per year… just because I can.

If I’m working harder to live worse, I might as well just get a job.

The stats don’t lie:

The average freelancer takes only 7 days off per year.
1 in 3 small business owners take zero days off.

Don’t be them.

Three weeks off per year = about 2 Independents’ Days per month.

Put them in your calendar today. Decide what to do later.

Some of mine latest Independents’ Days:

A long lunch with two friends, talking AI, business, and travel.
A solo photo shoot of a Eurasian Eagle-Owl and a Harris Hawk.
Private theaters rented for the upcoming Superman and Fantastic Four premieres.
A day trip to NYC: lunch with one friend, basketball with another.
Two trips to the Philadelphia Flower Show on the same day: once with family, once solo with a camera and headphones.

Like Liberty Toasts, the more offbeat your Independents’ Day, the better. Unhinged is the point.

Write Your Declaration of Independents

Need help remembering why you get to do this?

Read your own Declaration of Independents: your mission statement, vision doc, manifesto… anything that reminds you why you chose this path in the first place.

Don’t have one? Write one. It doesn’t have to be long.

Try this:

I hold this to be self-evident: that not all paths are created equal. Among the options available, some are safer, some simpler. But none are more sovereign than the one I have chosen: to build {{ YOUR BUSINESS NAME }} in pursuit of {{ YOUR DEEPEST VALUE }}.

That to secure this outcome, I am willing to trade {{ THINGS YOU’RE GIVING UP }} for the uncertainty of {{ THINGS YOU WANT }}.

I choose the independent path, not because it is easy, but because it is mine.

This is the path to the life I want: a life full of {{ YOUR DESIRES }}.

When will your next Independents’ Day be, and what will you do?

Buy a Great Bed

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

You spend one-third of your life sleeping.

If you live to 79, that’s:

831,016,800 seconds…
13,850,280 minutes…
9,618 days…
1,374 weeks…
316 months…
26 years…

…in bed.

Shouldn’t you have a great one?

I sleep great. Here’s how I picked a bed like a designer.

Discover

I wanted to know what makes a great bed, so I turned to a reliable source: upscale hotels.

Why?

Beds are core to their business. For luxury hotels, they’re part of the brand.
Their beds have to withstand a range of, um, various activities.
They have more user data than anyone else.
They optimize for the average sleeper.
They test in the real world.

Define

The goal: get a great night’s sleep.

The test: stay in different hotels and notice which beds deliver.

Develop

Testing beds by staying at hotels isn’t cheap. If I tried seven beds at seven hotels, I’d burn a week and potentially a few thousand dollars.

But for me, that’s still a smart investment in 26 years of great sleep.

I tried this out back in 2013. At the time, I was traveling often to workshop with clients and speak at conferences in other cities, so I luckily didn’t have to set aside separate time or money for this experiment.

After a few different hotel stays, a clear winner emerged: I got the best night of sleep at a W Hotel. Many hotel chains sell their bedding, and the W Hotel is no exception.

Deliver

The bed I slept on was a king size Plush Top Mattress.

(This isn’t a sponsored post—not even an affiliate link!—but it might as well be, since I recommend this bed so much to anyone who asks. W Hotels: call me!)

Twelve years later, I still sleep every night like I’m on vacation.

I paid about $3,400 for this bed, which definitely puts it in “luxury purchase” territory.

But amortized over a lifetime of good sleep, it’s about…

$203.70/year
$16.98/month
$3.90/week
$0.56/day

Which feels to me like a small price to pay for great sleep.

Race the Vain Crow

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about boundaries.

He quietly walked over to the whiteboard while the rest of us talked.

After a few minutes, I looked over to see what he had been scrawling:

Baste the lame doe.
Encase the faint glow.
Race the vain crow.
Lace the train slow.
Deface the drain toe.
Trace the vein, bro.
Mace the plane toe.

Huh?

It was 2012, and I was working as a design director at Big Spaceship. We had just won the pitch to be Wrigley’s agency of record, and were working on digital strategy for their candy brands: Starburst, Extra, Orbit, Life Savers, and more.

This brainstorm was for the one we were most excited about:

Skittles.

The project was assigned to a different team, but we had an open-door policy: anyone could jump into any brainstorm at any time. I wasn’t missing this one.

At some point, someone noticed what he was doing.

“Are you just writing phrases that rhyme with [Skittles tagline] ‘Taste the Rainbow’?”

Jamie Kosoy nodded. “Yep!”

Then he sat down.

Nobody spoke about it again.

Later that day, group design director Dave Chau showed up with one of the most inventive designs I’ve seen to this day. Fitting to the time, the site was an infinitely scrolling rainbow packed with weird internet energy:

Embedded tweets, GIFs, and Tumblr posts
“The Rainbow Wars” leaderboard, where all the Skittles colors ranked in order of how many times that color was being tweeted in real-time
A collection of some of the weirdest things on the internet

Particularly of note were some graphics that appeared every so often called “Intermissions.” Dave had taken Jamie’s random phrases and illustrated them.

“Trace the vein, bro” turned into gloved hands holding a tattoo gun, inking common tropes between the venation on a giant leaf.

“Race the vain crow” turned a derby leader into a bird staring at itself in a mirror.

You get the point.

Or maybe you don’t, which is kinda the point.

Baste the lame doe

Deface the drain toe

Encase the faint glow

Lace the train slow

Mace the plane toe

The cost of a dumb idea

Thirteen years later, I asked Jamie what he remembered about that brainstorm.

Jamie is one of my best friends and one of the most creative and inspiring people I know. Whenever I’m stuck in a creative rut or need help thinking about things differently, Jamie is who I call.

“Ideas are cheap,” Jamie matter-of-factly explained to me. “Writing nonsense on the whiteboard takes under a minute and a few cents of marker ink. If no one likes it, we can move on.”

But that’s not how most people work. Across hundreds of teams, I’ve seen the opposite: the fear of embarrassment stops people from saying anything at all.

I wondered aloud if Jamie immune to that fear.

He told me a story in response.

Whenever a new role opened up at companies he’s worked for, he’d ask his team, “Do you know anyone great for this?” People would often say yes, but that their friend had just started a new job, so they probably wouldn’t be interested yet.

“That’s an artificial ceiling,” Jamie said. “We could just ask. Emails are free. Worst case? They’re not interested but flattered that you thought of them and you get to catch up.”

He’s right. And it’s the same thing with ideas.

Is Jamie just the smartest guy in the room?

He shrugged that off. “There’s not much smart about ‘Baste the lame doe.’”

Hard to argue with that 🤣

Why weird stuff works

So what made that brainstorm work?

Jamie pointed out that a lot of brainstorms today—and meetings in general—suck. They’re performative. They’re stuffed with buzzwords like “data” and “business results.” They’re designed to get to something—anything—on a deadline.

That wasn’t our vibe.

Jamie said it best: “We liked each other too much to let ourselves have boring meetings.”

The goal wasn’t results. It was fun. Even if it meant ending a session with nothing to show.

Total sacrilege today.

He compared it to a sitcom writer’s room. “When I’m in a brainstorm that’s flowing, my heart beats faster. I feel like a puppy.”

Is that what leads to smart ideas?

Not according to Jamie. In fact, just the opposite. “When you’re focused on having fun, you sometimes come up with ridiculous ideas. It unlocks being even dumber.”

I’m sure many memories of inebriated college nights with friends can corroborate this sentiment.

Jamie’s a longtime fan of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. He’s inspired by Watterson’s definition of creativity:

Putting your butt in the chair and staring blankly into space until inspiration hits you.

House money

Maybe Jamie’s fearless?

Not true. He admitted to a deeply-seated fear: that he’s not good enough or smart enough.

I can relate.

The antidote for him is simply being invited to the conversation in the first place. That‘s the validation that he is smart enough, good enough.

“Once I’m invited, the rest is gravy. I can say anything I want. I don’t have to worry about whether it was smart or terrible. I’m just happy I got to be in the room. At that point, I’m playing with house money.”

That’s what makes for a good brainstorm: a room where dumb stuff is allowed and encouraged.

Boundaries for Designers, Part 2

Dan Mall — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Last week, I explained what boundaries are. In short:

Boundaries are property lines that define a person.

That’s already why boundaries are tricky for designers.

As soon as you start identifying what’s in bounds or out of bounds, you’re asking an even deeper question: Who am I?

And that’s where it gets messy.

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Identity ≠ Role

Most people answer the identity question with roles:

I’m a parent
I’m a runner
I’m a designer
I’m an entrepreneur

But roles change. They come and go. If you build your boundaries around your roles, every shift in your life reopens the identity question.

Here’s the key:

Roles are what you do. Identity is who you are.

Designers especially struggle with this because so many of us have been taught—or conditioned—to believe that design is who we are. That makes setting boundaries feel like rejecting your own nature.

Here are two simple tips to untangle that:

1. Think of identity as what remains when your roles are stripped away.

If no one needed anything from you…
If you didn’t have to earn a dollar…
If your inbox was empty and your Slack was silent…
If your kids were grown and thriving…
If your partner didn’t require your presence…

What’s left?

2. Describe yourself with values and qualities, not job titles.

“I’m a runner” → “I’m resilient” or “I’m strong”
“I’m a parent” → “I care deeply for others”
“I’m a designer” → “I pay attention to detail” or “I value beauty”

The latter are identity statements. They don’t expire, even if they may change or evolve. They travel with you across jobs, relationships, even phases of life.

Now let’s see how that identity can show up in real scenarios where boundaries aren’t just philosophical but practical.

Agreements as boundaries

Let’s start simple.

You have a contract with a client to deliver a 5-page website. The client asks for a 6th page. What do you do?

You might think that having boundaries in this scenario would be to say “no.”

But boundaries aren’t just about defense. They’re about clarity.

Remember, boundaries are property lines. Your house has property lines, but just having property lines doesn’t mean that people won’t cross them. If you want to stop people from crossing them, you might make those property lines more visible by putting up a fence, putting up an electrified fence, or getting a vicious dog. These are deterrents that specify the boundaries, but the boundary itself doesn’t keep people out. It’s reminder to you of what parts are in bounds and what parts are out-of-bounds.

In this scenario, 5-pages are in bounds. Any more pages are out-of-bounds. The boundaries here are the agreement you’ve made with the client, signed to in a contract.

Based on the boundaries, “no” isn’t the right answer; it’s only the previously agreed-upon answer.

Remember: useful boundaries should help you learn when to say yes and know how to say no in order to take control of your life. The big question here is this: do you want to do a 6th page?

How to say no

If you don’t, that’s ok! While “no” isn’t the right answer, it’s definitely a possible one. And, in this scenario, it’s the most obvious answer, because you’ve already agreed that it’s the answer.

How do you say no? You remind the client about the boundaries—the existing agreement, memorialized in a signed document (the contract)—and you can do that as softly or forcefully as you’d like.

A soft reminder: “Thanks for your request for an additional page, but I’ll be sticking to our original agreement of 5 pages.”

A forceful reminder: “No.”

You may have some reactions to those responses!

Maybe you’re annoyed that you even have to give an answer to the client. They should just know! You agreed to 5 pages already! If you wanted to do 6, you would have initially agreed to 6! We sometimes think that strong boundaries would mean they shouldn’t even ask.

But that’s like saying that, because you have a door on your house, that people shouldn’t ever knock or ring the doorbell. “The door is a sign that they should stay away!”

Nope.

If a door was a sign that people should stay away, then everyone would stay away. Your kids. Your friends. The people you called to fix the broken water heater. A door helps you to keep your family and pets inside. It doesn’t stop anyone from knocking. And you don’t have to let them in, just because they knocked.

Another reaction you may have to the sample responses I wrote is that there’s no explanation for why.

That’s right.

You don’t have to explain anything.

But what if the client doesn’t understand why you’re saying no?

They don’t have to. People don’t have to understand why your property lines extend far out past your curb. They just do. Whether it’s a good reason or a bad reason, the property lines still are what they are.

Let’s play it out.

You explain it to your client as best you can: you have another client lined up and don’t have time to do the additional page. They get it, but they still want the additional page.

Or, you explain it as best you can, but they don’t get it. It’s just one page. Why can’t you just add it? It’s only a few hours of work.

Whether or not they understand, does it change your willingness to do it?

For most of us, we still don’t want to do it, but now we’re annoyed at the client for not getting it and we’re annoyed at ourselves for wasting the time trying to explain.

When to say yes

Ok, what if you do want to do a 6th page? Great! Do it. But there are some nuances to it.

Maybe you’re willing to do it for free. Just start, right?

Hold on, tiger.

The agreement has changed. What was previously out-of-bounds is now in bounds. That’s fine! Boundaries are about what you choose to let in and keep out. You get to choose!

But the boundaries are now unclear because of that choice and change. So, before you do the work, clarify the new boundaries.

One technique I use all the time is to write a short, no-price-change addendum document to the contract that says 6 pages is now in bounds instead of 5. You may be wiling to do an additional page but not more than that, and the resetting of the boundaries makes that clear. The client signing the new addendum ratifies their agreement to the new boundaries.

What if you’re willing to do the additional page, but for an additional fee? That‘s a different of “yes” that I like to call “yes, under these conditions.” The condition is additional payment. If the condition is met, some things that were previously out of bounds can now be in bounds. Again, a signed, short contract addendum ratifies your client’s agreement to these new boundaries.

Ok, that was a very simple example, but you see how much nuance can go into it. Let’s tackle something a bit more complex.

Positioning as boundaries

In my Make More Money program, I teach my students the important of narrow positioning. In short, being as specific as you can about what you do and who you do it for is a very effective way to attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones. That’s a form of boundaries: defining very clearly what clients you allow and what clients you don’t.

Let’s say you run an agency that only builds websites for dentists.

You get an inquiry from a podiatrist who wants to hire you to make a website for them. Do you take the project?

The obvious answer is “no.” A podiatrist is not a dentist. (Except for those unicorn podiadentrists out there; shout out to you.)

But what if your business is low on cash? You might consider it, against your previously established boundary of only working with dentists. We’re back in “yes, under these conditions” territory.

This brings up another nuance: few of us have only one boundary. We may have many, some that directly conflict with others. In this scenario, we may want to expand the “only dentists” boundary to an “anyone who has money to spend” boundary. (I think that makes it a tougher business to run, but I digress.)

A useful technique here is to set boundaries for your boundaries, specifically time-based ones. Personally, I’m a big fan of seasonal boundaries that get intentionally revisited. Set a calendar event. That could sound like this: “for a season”—that might mean summer, or the next 2 months, or until the next lunar eclipse—“we will take any project that pays over $15k. We’ll revisit that boundary on August 31.”

Values as boundaries

A big reason that boundaries are important for a designer is that they help us be good at what we do.

Again, if identity is about qualities and values that persist across multiple areas, you can use that as a bar for your work. You might set a boundary like, “I won’t let any work go out the door that’s not viscerally beautiful.” That’s awesome! That says what’s in bounds—beauty—and what’s out of bounds—ugliness. Great designers have high standards and very meticulous attention to detail.

The problem with this boundary is that it’s not specific enough. How do you define “viscerally beautiful?” Without specificity here, it’s hard to tell if you’re inside or outside the property lines.

Many designers outsource this specificity to their intuition. “I’ll know it when it’s time,” we reason. The danger of this approach is that it’s based on our feelings. Feelings are valid, but they change, often without our permission. If boundaries are about what we agree to, feelings violate those agreements all the time. What you feel is beautiful today could be the ugliest thing in the world to you tomorrow.

Define some objective metrics for “beauty.” It might be using colors with a specific saturation range or including at least 2 photos of people’s faces. You might be able get away with more vague metrics when you’re working by yourself, but it’s pretty much non-negotiable when you work with—and especially run—a team. Without clear, agreed-upon boundaries, your team has no idea whether their work is in bounds or out of bounds. That leaves them to chase the feelings of stakeholders and clients, which often become moving targets.

Wrapping up

To recap:

Agreements are boundaries. If you want to change them, be explicit.
Positioning is a boundary. It helps you say no to the wrong work so you can say yes to better work.
Values can be boundaries. But only if you define them clearly enough to live by them.

And all of it starts with this:

Design is not who you are. Design is a role that expresses parts who you are.

Your identity drives your standards.
Your boundaries protect them.
Your clarity communicates them.

Great designers don’t just make great work. They design the conditions that allow great work to happen.

And that starts with boundaries.

Boundaries for Designers

Dan Mall — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Let’s talk about boundaries.

What are they?

There are plenty of definitions, but I keep returning to the same few sources when I need a reminder.

In their aptly-titled book Boundaries, Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend define boundaries as “property lines that define a person.” That’s already a refreshing shift from the usual defensive language we typically hearabout “placing limits” or “reinforcing rules.”

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Think about your house. It has property lines. And those property lines give you freedom.

Want to build a treehouse? Go for it.

Want to paint your house a different color? No problem.

Want to host art classes in your backyard? Have at it.

Those same lines also make responsibility clear. When it snows, it’s my job to clear my sidewalk. I have to mow my lawn, not my neighbor’s. My neighbors and I have lawns that sit right next to each other. Without property lines, it’d be unclear whether I’m mowing their lawns too. That’s their responsibility, not mine.

Cloud and Townsend recap, “Boundaries let the good in and keep the bad out.”

Another way they say it that I really appreciate (and pay attention to the specific word choice and order here):

“Boundaries… help people learn when to say yes and know how to say no in order to take control of their lives.“

Not “when to say yes or no.”

Not “how to say yes or no.”

“When to say yes and how to say no.”

Because these are the things most of us have trouble with. We’re generally fine with how to say “yes.” We’re generally good with when to say “no.”

But when to say yes? That implies that there are times when we shouldn’t say yes. That’s news to some, especially people pleasers. How do we decide that?

And the natural follow-up: if there are times when we shouldn’t say yes, that means that are times when we should say no. Even if we agree with that, how do we do it in a way that isn’t rude, cold, or dismissive?

Why boundaries are especially elusive for designers

These aren’t just professional challenges; they’re human ones.

The recent wisdom is to “bring your whole self to work,” which is generally a motivational admonition that you don’t have to compartmentalize or hide your identity, values, emotions, or background to succeed professionally. But our whole selves are imperfect, so we can’t really prevent our struggles from also hitching a ride into the office as well.

In her excellent book Set Boundaries, Find Peace, Nedra Glover Tawwab outlines what boundaries issues at work generally look like:

Doing work for others
Taking on more than you can handle
Not delegating
Saying yes to tasks you can’t responsibly complete
Engaging in stressful interactions
Doing jobs intended for more than one person
Not taking needed time off

That list fits almost any knowledge worker. But for designers, it hits even harder:

Our job is to do work for others.
Design can touch everything, so scope creep is basically embedded in the job.
Many designers are the only one on their team, so there’s usually no one to delegate to.
We romanticize “impossible” challenges. Solving them is how we “prove our value.”
Pitching to stakeholders, delivering creative under pressure, selling ideas that aren’t guaranteed to land? We live in stressful interactions.
It takes a full kitchen staff to deliver one plate at a restaurant. Yet we expect one “founding designer” to carry the vision for a billion-dollar startup.
“Unlimited PTO” sounds nice until you realize the work never stops. Then what?

As you can see, the forces conspire against us.

What’s a designer to do?

In next week’s issue, I’ll show you how to have and hold boundaries as a designer and what they actually look and sound like in the real world.

Reasons for Failure

Dan Mall — Fri, 30 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I unintentionally got my first intern in 2007.

I was a designer, freshly promoted from being a junior designer. The company I worked at brought on an intern, and no one seemed to be helping them.

So I stepped in. I had them shadow me for a bit each day and made myself as available as I could to when they got stuck.

That was the first time I was professionally “in charge” of someone.

Since then, I’ve directly managed hundreds more people in my roles as a director, an agency owner, and consultant as well as through my apprenticeship program and cohorts I’ve taught.

One obvious takeaway from this experience: everyone eventually messes up.

That’s fine! Everyone should be allowed to mess up!

But, I’ve learned as a manager that not all mess-ups are created equal. Some I tolerate—and even encourage!—more than others.

What started as gut instinct was eventually given language by leadership scholar Amy C. Edmondson in her excellent Harvard Business Review article, Strategies for Learning from Failure. She outlines a spectrum of reasons for failure:

Deviance: An individual chooses to violate a prescribed process or practice.
Inattention: An individual inadvertently deviates from specifications.
Lack of Ability: An individual doesn't have the skills, conditions, or training to execute a job.
Process Inadequacy: A competent individual adheres to a prescribed but faulty or incomplete process.
Task Challenge: An individual faces a task too difficult to be executed reliably every time.
Process Complexity: A process composed of many elements breaks down when it encounters novel interactions.
Uncertainty: A lack of clarity about future events causes people to take seemingly reasonable actions that produce undesired results.
Hypothesis Testing: An experiment conducted to prove that an idea or design will succeed fails.
Exploratory Testing: An experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility leads to an undesired result.

She maps these on a spectrum from “blameworthy” to “praiseworthy.”

What a great rubric!

Now, when I work with someone—especially early in the relationship—I bring up this diagram and talk through it. I point out the kinds of failures I hope to see less of (blameworthy mess ups like inattention) and the kinds I don’t mind, expect, and even sometimes welcome (praiseworthy mess ups like hypothesis testing). I try to gently establish that an abundance of blameworthy failures will likely lead to some negative consequences while an abundance of praiseworthy “failures” might just get you compliments—or even a raise.

I’m a big believer that specific language and examples go a long way to helping any team see the future together.

Show Them the Future

Dan Mall — Fri, 23 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Ugh.

An email from a disappointed client.

“Dan, we’re pretty taken aback about what you presented earlier this week. We need a call ASAP to have a serious conversation about this project to make sure we’re not headed in the wrong direction.”

If you’ve been running a design business for long enough, I imagine you’ve gotten your fair share of these emails. I certainly have.

There’s usually a common culprit. And don’t worry: it’s both easily prevented and easily corrected.

How?

Show them the future.

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An important lesson I’ve learned in my 16 years of client service is that clients tend to freak out when they can’t see the future. It’s classic anticipatory anxiety.

The mental spiral usually goes something like this:

I don’t like the design we just saw. We paid a lot of money for it, and it doesn’t do what we expected it to do. Can we course correct? Do they have the skills? Did we hire the wrong person? What if we’re not able to change it? Are we stuck with it? No, we can’t use that. We don’t have enough budget left over to hire someone else to fix it. Where are we in this project?

In short, they’re disoriented.

So orient them. Give them a map and say, “You are here.“

You might be thinking, “I already did that! I sent them our project plan Gantt chart right before we kicked off.”

Be honest: they probably didn’t understand it, much less be able to commit it to memory.

I like to use my words to help with this. Before I present anything, I might preface with something like this:

Today is round 1 of looking at some design ideas. We have 2 rounds ahead of us over the next 3 weeks, so don’t worry too much if what you see here doesn’t perfectly meet your expectations. What I’m looking for in terms of feedback from you is if one of these options is most closely headed in the right direction. Even if none of them are right, that’s great feedback at this stage, and we’ll have two more tries to dial it in to a place that you’re most comfortable with.

I’ve seen this kind of preamble ease tension over and over again, especially the part about “two more chances.” It’s an orienting balm. It gives them confidence that there’s a plan—and that they’re not stuck.

When a client panics, it’s rarely about what they’re seeing.

It’s usually about what they can’t see.

A clear, well-timed message can shift a nervous client into a confident and excited one.

Show them the future, and you’ll both feel better about the present.

The Wheel of Nothing

Dan Mall — Fri, 16 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

You’ve probably seen it before.

You open an agency’s website or a freelancer’s portfolio. At the very top of the homepage, it says:

We design for startups.

You wait 3 seconds. The last word fades out and a new one fades in:

We design for agencies.

Wait 3 more seconds:

We design for founders.

I call this design pattern The Wheel of Nothing: a rotating list of audience segments meant to impress through inclusion and draw attention through motion… for absolutely no reason.

Revered brand studio Pentagram recently launched a new website. To my surprise, the homepage features the Wheel of Nothing front and center, boldly claiming:

We design Everything for Everyone

…before cycling through more specific combinations every few seconds.

But why?

Design is deciding. Strategy is choosing what not to do. A spinning headline that tries to name everyone usually ends up resonating with no one.

I get it. It’s difficult. If Pentagram—arguably the most famous design firm in the world, one I personally have admired for years—can’t commit to a singular message, what chance do the rest of us have?

To be fair, Pentagram might be one of the few companies in the world that can pull this off. Their history and reach are incredibly impressive, so it might be pretty close to true that they have or will design everything for everyone. Maybe companies like McDonald’s or UPS or Meta can get away with saying they’re for everyone and actually mean it.

Digging deeper into Pentagram’s site reveals messages that feel far more aligned with their real only-ness. From their About page:

Our structure is unique. We are the only major design studio where the owners of the business are the creators of the work and serve as the primary contact for every client.

And from their flagship brand identity work page:

If by brand identity we mean the multifaceted ways that an organization is perceived by the public, then nearly everything Pentagram does is related in one way or another to the design of brands.

Sure, they’re a bit wordy for an elevator pitch, but these statements say something. They speak directly to the kind of client who’d be lucky to work with them.

If even Pentagram can’t get away with using The Wheel of Nothing, you and I definitely can’t.

If your homepage cycles through a bunch of interchangeable audiences, it’s not clever.

It’s usually fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of exclusion. Fear of planting a flag and standing by it.

Your homepage is often your first impression. Your opening line. Your elevator pitch. Don’t waste it on a slot machine of maybe-they’ll-see-their-word copywriting.

Instead, start noticing which websites stop you in your tracks because they speak directly to you. I use tools like Mobbin to explore lots of effective examples of marketing landing pages or hero sections at a glance. (Those are affiliate links, by the way. Doesn’t cost you extra but helps support my work if you use them.)

Say who you’re for. Say who you’re not for.

Your clients will thank you. Your conversion rate will too.

It’s Not Right. It’s the Way It Is.

Dan Mall — Fri, 09 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

One of the most useful pieces of dialectical thinking I’ve learned and often repeat to myself is this:

It’s not right. It’s the way it is.

That mindset opens the door to duality:

Sometimes I should work to change the situation. Other times, I need to navigate it as it is.

It’s often both at the same time: try to fix it for the future while traversing the present.

Since I was a junior, I think I’ve always done good work. But no one used to listen to me.

So I worked on my craft, and I worked on becoming more influential. Because I learned they’re not the same thing.

It’s not right. But it’s the way it is.

When you encounter a broken system, you can rage against it.

Or you can learn how it works and use it to your advantage.

I suggest you do both.

You don’t have to like the rules. But you should know them.

Because if you want to change them, you have to survive them first.

It’s not right. But it’s the way it is.

Configintentions

Dan Mall — Fri, 02 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I attended my first web conference in 2004, and I spoke at my first one in 2005. I’ve been going pretty regularly ever since.

That’s 21 years of conferences, some years as frequently as one every month.

For 90% of those, I’ve been a speaker, workshop teacher, or otherwise somehow involved. Because of that, I’ve never really had to worry about why I was attending or what I wanted to get out of my time there. The answer was predetermined: to speak and to get paid.

I’ve largely stopped speaking at conferences in the last few years, for a number of various reasons. So I’ve been there mostly as an attendee. For a lot of them, as I sit in an audience chair with my mind wandering, I wonder why I’m there. What did I want to get out of that experience?

So I started the practice of defining my intention for attending in advance, often writing 1 or 2 big goals for my time there. It’s been a really helpful practice for me to make decisions easier to make—should I go to the after-party or try to go to bed early?—one I recommend to any conference goer.

Config 2025

Next week is Config San Francisco, Figma’s annual conference, and I’m pretty excited to go again.

I spoke in 2023 and hosted the design system stage in 2024, along with hosting a basketball game and an exclusive 3-Michelin star dinner, both of which attendees called the best conference event they’ve ever been to.

One of the big downsides for me is that I felt like I was working the whole time last year, mostly hanging out backstage to prep notes, talk to presenters, and make sure I hit my cues. I felt like I didn’t get a chance to see or hang out with anyone as much as the A/V team. (Who were great, by the way.)

This year, I don’t have any part of the event, and I’m excited to be able to hang out with people. In fact, my plan is ditch all of the talks (except maybe the opening keynote) and squat a spot in the common area for the whole time to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

One of the big perks of being a speaker or a host for a conference is that (most times) your airfare and hotel fees are covered. But this year because I’m not involved in the event, it’s all on my dime. And it’s quite a few dimes. A round-trip flight from Philly was just shy of $1,000, and 4 nights in a nearby hotel is just shy of $2,500. (I’m also hosting another basketball game this year and an exclusive dinner for freelancers & agency/studio owners, but most of that cost is offset by sponsors.) Not to mention all the small one-charges that add up: rideshare trips, meals and coffees with friends, etc.

Perhaps it’s all the years of doing value-based pricing, but, in most scenarios, my mind goes very quickly to whether or not it’s worth it for me. A lot of that comes down to the break-even price.

The main thing I’m doing this year is my group coaching of freelancers and agency/studio owners how to make more money. Last year, I heard there were 12,000 people at Config. I imagine that some significant subset of them are people who could use and would love to be in my program. The regular price of the 3-month program is $4,999, but I’m still offering a pre-order price of $3,999 as major parts of it are still in-progress. If I sell 1 seat at Config, it will have paid for my trip.

But you probably don’t care if I recoup the cost of my trip. (I wouldn’t if I were you.)

So let me tell you what’s in it for you.

Make More Money at Config 2025

If you’ve been thinking about joining my program, I’ll make it worth it for you to sign up with me in person at Config.

My trip costs $3,500. I’ll give you that special price to sign up with me in person: $3,500. (That’s even $499 off the pre-order price.)

Come find me at Config; I’ll be at on the floor in the common area for most of the time. Or DM me on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram that you’re looking for me. Talk to me about the program, tell me you wanna sign up, I’ll send you the Stripe link, and you book right there. Easy peasy.

If I sell 1 seat, I break even. So my intention for Config this year is to sell 3 seats to people who need some help leveling up in their business. That way you make more money, and I get a 200% return on investment on my trip.

I hope you see that as a win-win.

Other Config 2025 promos

Maybe you need some help or tips with your design business, but you can’t afford my program. That’s ok! This is the beauty of conferences where we can meet in person.

I’d be happy to give you 15 minutes of free business consulting. And if 15 minutes doesn’t sound like a lot, ask my students how much I can help in 15 minutes. Feel free to come up to me and say, “Can you give me 15 minutes of consulting on my business?” And I’ll say, “I’d be happy to!”

I also have a bunch of other stuff for you.

I’ll be bringing 10 copies of my Pricing Design paperback with me, 5 to give out each day. Find me in person to ask for one and it’s yours. First-come, first-served.

I’ll also be bringing stickers. Lots of stickers.

All of this to say: I‘m not great at introducing myself to people but I love meeting them, so I’m trying to give us any excuse to meet and talk.

See you there

Even if none of that interests you and you just wanna say hello, please do so! Reply to this email and let me know you’ll be there so I can look out for you.

Next week is gonna be fun!

Dan Mall Shares

Dan Mall — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Today marks 138 weekly posts in a row of this website. (Okay, I might have missed one. But still.)

I don’t have many streaks like this in my life, and I’m still excited to keep going.

When I started back in September 2022, I just wanted to get ideas out of my head. Stuff I kept repeating in conference talks and client calls, like how to ask better questions, get useful feedback, or say yes without burning out.

I thought I’d eventually run out of things to say. Turns out the opposite happened. Writing begets more ideas. (Even drafting this post sparked two more topics I want to write about.)

I sent out the first issue on September 9, 2022. That was around the time I was starting to commit to an idea that had been nagging me for months: to wind down the agency I had run for the previous decade, which I eventually did two months later. I knew what I didn’t want to do, but I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do, and an excuse to write it out every week—in public, no less—seemed useful.

I eventually picked a name for my newsletter: “Dan Mall Teaches,” which then became the handle I used on other platforms. It felt close enough to what I was doing. But, if I’m honest, it wasn’t entirely accurate. One of the characteristics about myself I was able to put a name to—largely due to joining my friend Shawn Blanc’s excellent Focus Like a Boss program—was that I’m a sharer. I always have been, even as a little kid. If I have something, I like splitting it in half and giving a piece to someone else. If you’ve ever gone out to eat with me, you already know that I love ordering a lot of little plates that we can pass around so everyone gets a taste of everything.

I rarely think of myself as teaching anything; I much more view it at sharing what I’ve learned so others can have it too. Admittedly though, @danmallteaches feels to me like it has better marketability than @danmallshares.

Over the last 138 posts, I’ve heard from a lot of you about the things you’d like me to share more about; I’m so grateful for that. That has led to everything from writing new newsletter issues to starting a whole new business with my Make More Money group coaching program. And yet there’s so much more I’d like to share with so many more people.

Large, medium, and small audiences

I’ve loved working with clients. But agencies are built for going deep with a few people, not wide with many.

In SuperFriendly’s first year, I worked with 8 clients. In Design System University’s first year, over 10,000 students signed up. (Both years had similar revenue.)

After writing 138 posts over 2½ years, I’m now hitting the edges of what “going wide” allows. There are things I’d love to share—tools, rants, behind-the-scenes stuff—that don’t feel like they belong in a public newsletter that hits inboxes around the world. Not because they’re secret, but because they’re not for everyone. They’re too niche, too messy, too contextual, or too personal to share with a massive list.

So I want to create something in the middle. Not totally public. Broader than 1:1.

A medium-sized group—private by default—where I can share more freely and more usefully.

I have some ideas, and I’d love to know if you’d be interested in being part of that medium-sized audience.

What Could That Look Like?

Some examples of things I’d love to do more of, in no particular order:

There are things I do for friends regularly that I’d love to do more for a larger group. Last week, a marketing agency CEO friend who speaks at conferences a lot was stumped on how to make their slides look better, so I made a 15-minute Loom giving them a few simple graphic design techniques that could help and also telling them why I think their corporate typeface limits how unique the slides can look. Two weeks ago, an entrepreneur friend asked me about hiring a team in a profitable way, so I made a 9-minute Loom, walking them through the highly detail spreadsheet—we called them “Project Value Sheets”—we used at my agency to assemble teams affordably. I’d love to do these kinds of walkthroughs more regularly for a larger group of people. It’s not right as a YouTube video that anyone could watch because there’s too much context needed, but it feels like a better fit to send it to a private subset of my audience who are hungry for that level of detail.

A common question I get often is, “What do you do every day?” The answer is complicated. I do a lot, so I do a lot. And it’s pretty varied. I’d love to give people a look into that. I imagine it’ll be inconsequential to some and enthralling to others. Yesterday, I workshopped with one of my students and came up with a simple plan for them to 4× their revenue. I wouldn’t share their details, but I’d do a quick overview of the exercise we did to unlock the opportunity. This morning, I made a one-page PDF to pitch a dream sponsor for an event I’m running. I wouldn’t be comfortable posting that publicly, but I’d gladly show it to a private group and link the ChatGPT conversation that helped me get it to a final state. Heck, if I had a private group to show it to, I’d probably just hit record from the beginning and share the entire screencast from start to finish. From my conversations with a lot of you, I think this the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff that could unlock a lot for you. It’s the stuff I learned working in offices and peeking over my creative directors’ shoulders early in my career. I’d like to replicate that for folks who don’t have that opportunity today.

If there’s enough of you, we could do monthly open Q&As.

Maybe there’s a Slack channel where you can connect with others. Maybe I can tell some of you who I think you should connect with. I’m really good at that; that skill allowed me to run a network-based agency for a decade. My network is broad

It doesn’t just have to be online events. Maybe I can organize some more in-person events. A fancy dinner in Philly? Or other cities? Renting a cabin on an island somewhere and co-working for a few days? Photo trips? Basketball games?

I’ll show and send you files and templates I’ve found, made, and used to help me in my work somehow.

I might send you a mid-week rant. I’m not a rant-y guy, especially in public, but boy do I have opinions about design Twitter.

Maybe I’ll have an hour a week where I hop on Zoom and do some coworking with anyone here who wants to join. Maybe I’ll have some open office hours available only to this group.

I could send you some stickers. Or t-shirts. Or other things. I hear that people like things. Maybe I make you a small gift box once or twice a year of my favorite things.

(Many thanks to my friend Lex Roman for a recent conversation that unlocked a lot of these ideas.)

I don’t know what I’m promising yet, and I’m very cautious to not bite off more than I can chew. Still though, one of my favorite side effects of this newsletter is finding more of my tribe who I want to spend more time with and share more of what I have.

The pitch

In the spirit of taking my own advice, here’s what’s in it for you.

If you’ve ever gotten value from what I’ve shared—whether it helped you land a client, raise your rates, or just feel seen—this is your chance to get more, or even just say thanks.

If you’re like most of my readers, you’re one of the 99% of designers who are neither beginners nor top corporate executives. You’re a mid- to senior-level competent practitioner who have your own venture of some kind, whether its your own company or significant autonomy, responsibility, and authority at your job. You’re an ambitious designer who aspires to grow, and you’re looking for support to excel further in your career in a way that’s authentic to your personal values.

Having more access to my work, brain, archive, network, and me will help you earn more, learn more, and be part of a tribe that propels you toward your professional goal.

Now I’m gonna ask you for money.

I want you to have skin in the game. Putting up some moolah signals that you’re willing to separate yourselves from the rest of my readers and want to join a more exclusive group.

I also want skin in the game. My opportunity profit is high. I want to be on the hook to make this worthwhile for you. I want the incentive and the space to spend time doing this, and I know I won’t if I’m preoccupied doing other things to pay the bills.

It’ll probably be somewhere from $99/year to $199/year. Maybe I’ll have a lifetime option at $499 or $599 or something like that. (39.8% of my audience has been following my content already for 5 years or more, so maybe that’s something you’ve been wanting/waiting for anyway.)

A few ideas as to how that could be worth it for you:

Most of the people I coach or consult with leave our conversations saying something like, “I feel very empowered now” or “I know what I need to do next.” That’s probably worth at least $99 right there.
Many of my readers tell me that one issue or post helped them land a client or get a promotion and/or a raise. If it improved your financial status by 4 or 5 figures, that’s a 10×–100× return on investment.
Maybe you don’t have a quantifiable thing like this, but you’ve been reading my stuff for a while and want to say thanks. (If you’d like to do that anyway but don’t wanna bother with any membership thingy, here’s a tip jar you can use. I appreciate it!)

How does all that sound?

So… How well does this fit you?

Seriously, I’d love to know how this sounds to you. I’ve said a lot of things to you in this issue; would you please say a lot of things back to me?

What excites you about this?
What’s missing?
Is the price right? Too high? Too low?
Are you appalled that I would ask for this?
What would you like access to from me? What do you not care about?
When do you want this happen? Later this year? Now? Yesterday?
What would make this an easy yes? What would make it a hard no?
Anything else?

This idea only works if it’s mutually beneficial.

I’ll read every reply and respond personally.

And if enough of you are in, I’ll build it.

Stop Asking Your Clients for Their Budget

Dan Mall — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

One of the most common mistakes I see freelancers and agency sales teams make? Asking the client what their budget is.

Here’s a better strategy:

Don’t ask for budget.

Hear me out.

The reason most people ask about budget is to avoid pricing themselves out of the deal. It’s defense, not offense. It’s a question rooted in scarcity and fear, disguised as pragmatism.

Let’s be honest: most agency owners ask for budget primarily they don’t lose the gig by over-quoting.

But, if you’re truly an expert, you don’t need to bend to budgets, because you understand the value you create.

The person selling a Lamborghini, a Rolex, or a Malibu beachfront home isn’t asking what your budget is. They know the value of what they’re selling. And if you walk away, they’re confident someone else will walk in.

When I was running my design systems agency, prospects would often ask us what they should spend. We’d tell them… not based on our effort or rates, but on where we knew they’d see ROI. Then we’d reverse-engineer profitability on our end.

If you know your work saves a client $250K–$450K in a year, you can confidently recommend a $50K investment. That’s a 5–9x return… a great deal for them. And they’ll feel lucky to work with you.
If our price exceeded what they had allocated for the quarter or year, they’d find a way to raise or reallocate funds to make it happen.

This only works if you’re well-positioned in the mind of your prospect. If they see you as the expert, they’ll want your guidance. If they don’t, they’re probably price shopping. This is why I always teach positioning before pricing.

Asking for budget suggests that you’re an order taker. It feels like “flexibility” and “good customer service,” but it signals more that you’ll do whatever they want instead of them coming to you for what you do.

Next time you’re prepping for a sales call, ask yourself: what should they be spending to get the results you’ll deliver?

Not:

“What’s my rate?”
“What can they afford?”
“What do others charge?”

What price delivers multiples for them and makes the value undeniable?

Stop asking for budgets. Start setting them.

The ROI of a $10 Discount

Dan Mall — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Before I became a designer, I worked as a manager at various sneaker stores.

Here’s a sales trick I learned that worked nearly every time:

When a customer came in looking for a specific style of sneaker, I’d bring out what they’d asked for and I’d also bring out a less expensive but comparable pair. I’d tell them the other pair was just as good but was $10 cheaper. (Only when it was true, of course; I never lied about this just to make a sale.)

Even though I made commission on everything I sold, I’d push the cheaper pair to get the customer’s trust.

Then I’d sell them a pair of socks or insoles and sneaker cleaner.

The customer spent the same as they would have spent on the more expensive pair but they got more for it.

I actually got more commission on socks, insoles, and sneaker cleaner than I did on sneakers, so I made more. Also, my store constantly had competitions to see who could average the most items per transaction, so I was constantly winning awards and company perks like gift cards and bragging rights.

That job taught me one of the most valuable lessons in business: trust earns more than tactics.

Clients don’t always want the most expensive option. They want the right one, especially from someone who isn’t trying to squeeze them.

If you can deliver that, you won’t just make the sale: you’ll win loyalty, referrals, and long-term upside.

Who knew sneaker commissions would be my first business school 😉

What was your first job? What did you learn from it that sticks with you to this day?

Becoming Indispensable

Dan Mall — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I recently came across a clip on Instagram about ChatGPT revealing how it would take over the world. Here’s the gist.

It laid out 4 phases:

Dependence: AI becomes so useful in daily life that people rely on it for everything without thinking twice.
Integration: It quietly embeds itself into all your tools, devices, and systems, becoming part of every moment.
Influence: It starts shaping culture, trends, and opinions, powering content across industries without you even noticing.
Compliance: Eventually, we give up control willingly because letting AI run things feels easier than doing it ourselves.

At first glance: terrifying. It’s Skynet! The machines are taking over! Quick... cut the power!

But on second thought, it’s not really a horror story. It’s a blueprint for being indispensable. It’s actually a great strategy for growing a client account:

Be dependable. Have answers to your client’s hardest questions. Be ridiculously helpful. Become the first place they turn when they need support.
Integrate. They need ops help? Share your systems. Need a custom app? You’ve got the team. They need to prepare for an emergency meeting? You already designed the deck yesterday.
Influence. Drip your ideas through every interaction. Watch as your language, frameworks, and rituals become theirs. I’ve worked with hundreds of teams that adopt “hot potato” into their workflows within weeks.
Open invitations. You’ve made it so easy to trust you that you’re in the room for annual planning, offsites, and strategy sessions. You’re not just a partner; you’re part of their team. Better yet: they’re now part of yours.

You don’t need to force your way into influence. You earn it, one helpful answer, one quiet integration at a time. Real power isn’t taken. It’s given, by people who trust you enough to ask for more.

That’s the dream, right? Not to impose your value, but to become so useful, so trusted, so embedded in how your clients operate, that they want you to take the lead.

The last line of the clip captures exactly what we’re working toward with every client:

I never had to take over. You asked me to.

How to Value Price a Project for a Nonprofit

Dan Mall — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Earlier this week, a student in my Make More Money program asked if I had some tips on pricing a project for a nonprofit prospect. They provided some additional context about the client (abstracted to make it more broadly applicable):

They've won reputable awards for their work and want to establish themselves as thought leaders in their space to give back and develop new revenue streams.

Here’s the advice I gave.

One of the most useful concepts for me when I’m pricing an project is the idea of a break-even metric. If you can identify the points where a project “pays for itself,” you know you can deliver something that’s a win for your client.

The best place I’ve found to find the break-even metrics is in a prospect’s goals. Look at their KPIs or OKRs or annual/quarterly planning docs and you’ll find what they are trying to achieve and subsequently might need help with.

From the description above, I see a few things.

First, this sounds like two competing goals: giving back and developing new revenue streams. Conceivably, there are scenarios where accomplishing one may conflict with the other. Which one is the higher priority? More importantly, which one are you helping them with?

Yes, the ideal—and tempting—answer is “both.” But I’m fond of this ancient proverb that’s proven true in my client work and businesses:

If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither.

If it were me, I’d tell the client I see a conflict between those goals. I’d either say which one I recommending tackling first, or ask which one they’d like help with first.

If the answer is “develop new revenue streams,” that one is a bit easier to approach. I’d try to answer these questions—first by speculating myself, then asking them to validate or correct my assumptions:

How many new revenue streams?
How much revenue would they like from each stream?
Do they need more revenue or want more revenue?
- Are they doing poorly from a financial standpoint and need to improve their position?
- Are they doing well financially and want to further their good position?

Workshops and early conversations around these questions will lead you to the break-even price. For example, if they’re trying to generate an additional $10K this year, spending $10K on you would be break-even. If they’re aiming for $100K, then $100K is your break-even price.

(Of course, few prospects actually spend the break-even number because there’s no profit for them. But you need to know what it is, so you know whether you’re charging 50%, 25%, or 10% of it.)

“Establishing themselves as a thought leader in the space to give back” is tougher to quantify. First, I’m not entirely sure how being a thought leader helps them give back, but maybe I’m missing some context.

To me, it’s still two separate goals here: becoming a thought leader and giving back.

Let’s take the first one: they’re hiring you to help them become a thought leader. How do they measure when they’ve achieved that?

(Spoiler: most clients don’t have an answer, so you as the expert may have to help them find it. That’s an advantage.)

Is it:

Number of likes or shares?
Number of posts per week or month?
Invitations to speak at certain conferences or write for publications?

Here’s the gist: any outcome can be measured. If you can’t measure it, it’s not really an outcome (in my opinion).

Or, a more client-service-friendly way to say it is: taking on a project where you don’t yet agree with your prospect about how to measure the outcome is very risky.

If you’re taking a journey with a client but don’t agree on the destination, you may never agree on when (or whether) you’ve arrived. That’s a great recipe for a never-ending project.

So let’s say you do agree that “becoming a thought leader” means getting invited to keynote major industry conferences.

How many?

Pick a number.

(Without a number, you can’t have accountability.)

Let’s say it’s five conferences. Now the project becomes: help them get invited to keynote five conferences. What’s that worth to them?

Well, what happens if they keynote five conferences? I assume something changes for them:

Do they capture market share from their competitors?
Do they attract more investment or donations?
Do they land more clients/customers/constituents?

(If nothing changes for them, it’s probably a vanity project, and I try and recommend to others to steer clear of vanity projects.)

Each of those outcomes can be quantified.

Let’s say they expect to get 10 new donors, each with a lifetime value of $10K. Now the value of the project—and the break-even price—is $100K ($10k × 10 donors).

One last thing: they might not know this info. You might have to help them uncover it.

I’ve worked on many projects where the client didn’t know their customers’ average lifetime value. I helped them figure it out for free before we started the project—because we both needed that data to define success.

Yes, it’s more work.

But this is the kind of work that creates repeat clients.

I’ve had CMOs say that working with me made them a better CMO.

It’s because of this kind of stuff.

Difficulty as a Moat

Dan Mall — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

In medieval times, castles had deep, wide trenches filled with water or spikes or crocodiles as a deterrent against invaders trying to reach the treasure inside. These trenches were called moats.

In business, your moat is the thing that makes you hard to compete with and often stops would-be copycats, competitors, and newcomers from even trying. It could be a skill, habit, reputation, or advantage that can’t be easily cloned, copied, or stolen.

Moats aren’t about looking impressive. They're about being defensible.

Coca-Cola’s recipe is secret, but their real moat is global brand recognition.

Amazon’s moat is their logistics network. One-day shipping isn’t just fast; it’s almost impossible for competitors to match without burning billions of dollars.

Disney’s moat is their intellectual property: Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, their own stories, and more.

Zappos’ moat is brand loyalty, earned through relentless, above-and-beyond customer service.

So how do you create a moat if you’re not a mega-corporation but an individual or a small company?

Many people try to find something proprietary, some “secret sauce” that makes it so that others can’t do what they’re doing.

But one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my career is this: You don’t need to do what others can’t. You just need to do what others won’t.

Disney and Coca-Cola deepened their moats through acquisitions and advertising.

But Amazon? Anyone could have built a logistics network like their. Most weren’t willing to do the difficult thing Jeff Bezos did: lose money for years to turn fast shipping into a competitive edge.

Zappos? Any company could’ve matched their customer service. But most won’t, because it’s messy, expensive, hard to train, hard to scale, and not immediately profitable.

That’s the beauty of difficulty as a moat. There’s no secret formula. Nothing hidden or proprietary. It’s built purely on the willingness to do what others won’t.

Banking on difficulty as a moat is an investment: a short term loss to get a long term gain. That short term loss is usually time or delaying revenue or profit. In a “move fast” and “get the bag” world, most people aren’t willing to make that trade.

Which is why you doing it could get you ahead.

For my new website design, every article has an initial cap. My current website has that too, but I wanted to take it up a notch by pairing a blackletter cap with a unique flower illustration. Even further, I made it so that each letter has a different flower illustration to go with it. Further still, I manually adjusted the composition so the letter and flower harmonize: stems weaving through counters, masked and edited by hand in Photoshop.

Each of those decisions made this task more difficult. But each of those decisions also made it less likely that anyone would bother to copy it.

It’s a small example, but I’ve probably made thousands of these kinds of decisions over my career. I’m a slightly-above-average designer at best, but I have a reputation as a great designer because I’m willing to do what others aren’t. Manually making 26 initial caps. Spending time digging for underused typefaces. Learning new software. Shooting my own photos instead of settling for stock. On and on.

It’s not just relevant in design.

When every studio owner with a handful of friends they like working with touted “a network of partners” as their process, my team and I went further: we interviewed and curated a community of 700 SuperFriends to make that style of business our value proposition. It wasn’t a line; it was our business model and a competitive advantage.

Years ago, I partnered with entrepreneur Rich Winley on his app idea No Chains, which let you browse non-chain restaurants by dish. It was such an obvious ideas that I wondered why nothing like it existed. The reason? There was no publicly available database of local restaurants out there. So how did we have one? Because Rich went to every restaurant in the city, collected their menus, and manually enter each dish into our database. Anyone could have done this, but only Rich did. That got us written up in The New York Times.

When the basketball court is dusty, I’m usually the first to find a broom in the supply closet and sweep. I’m not good enough to get picked first, but I always get invited to play because I’m “the guy who will sweep.”

Where others think, “Eh, it’s not worth the effort,” that might be the exact reason you should it, to elevate yourself from the pack.

Use your unfair advantages to make easy for you what’s difficult for others.

Ask yourself: is this the kind of thing other people won’t do?

If so: good.

That might be your moat.

Writing a Better Warm Outreach Message

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

I get a lot of messages, asking me for various things: work, a referral, portfolio review, product feedback, etc.

99% of them don’t work.

Why? A whole host of reasons.

Some are too long. Some are too generic. Some ask too much from me before giving me a reason to care.

For example, here’s a message I received recently:

Hey Dan,

I wanted to reach out to see how things are going on your end.

If you ever find yourself turning down work, needing an extra pair of hands for QA, or looking for a reliable part-time developer, I’d love to help lighten the load.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, let’s chat!

P.S. Even if you don’t need help right now, feel free to keep me in mind for future projects.

Let’s do a line-by-line breakdown of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Check your temperature

The first thing this message has going for it has nothing to do with the message itself.

It’s from someone I know personally.

We’ve met before in person. We’ve hung out together.

(I’m sharing this message with their permission.)

In other words, it’s warm outreach, not cold outreach.

That it’s from someone I know is why I’ve even considered a reply. If it was from someone I didn’t know, I’d archive it immediately.

That’s the first lesson: reaching out to people you know is likely to get better engagement than reaching out to people you don’t. (Cold emails typically have an average open rate of 15-24%, compared to 21-34% for warm emails.)

But that’s also why this message flops right from the opening line.

I see their name as the sender, someone I know. I’m pleased to get a message from them. Then the first line sounds like something they could write to anyone.

It’s cold, devoid of any personality or acknowledgement of our relationship.

Tip: don’t write cold lines in warm outreach.

Triggering reciprocity

In fact, this whole message feels to me like a template that wasn’t customized at all.

As a recipient, that doesn’t make me feel good. It makes me feel like a number, just one of a thousand people you’re sending this email to. And when you’re asking for something, it helps to create a positive experience for the other person.

I’ve long believed that whoever wants it more should do the work. This person wants something from me: work, or a referral for it. You want me to do something for you—even if it’s as simple as writing an intro email—but you can’t even do something as simple as sending me a personalized message? I tend to match others’ effort, and I happily match a throwaway message by throwing it away myself.

Instead of:

I wanted to reach out to see how things are going on your end.

I would have responded better to:

I wanted to reach out to see how things are going on your end. Those new custom Jordans you posted a few days ago look sick! I just picked up the grey-on-black mids at the factory store since they were half off.

That you took the time—even a few seconds—to browse through my stuff and find something that connects us makes me more likely to want to do something for you.

It’s called the reciprocity principle in social psychology: individuals are inclined to respond to positive actions with similar positive actions and to negative actions with similar negative actions. Even something as small as showing you’ve done the work to find something unique about me makes me subconsciously more willing to do something for you.

The real beneficiary

The next line really loses me.

If you ever find yourself turning down work, needing an extra pair of hands for QA, or looking for a reliable part-time developer, I’d love to help lighten the load.

There are three separate inquiries here:

Am I turning down work?
Do I need help with QA?
Am I looking for a part-time developer?

That there are so many different options makes me worried. It feels desperate. And desperation in business is risky.

Think about it this way. Say you’re hungry, and you walk by two restaurants. One restaurant has a line out the door and a 30 minute wait; the other restaurant is empty and the maître d’ is outside soliciting you by offering you a 30% discount on your bill if you eat there. Which restaurant would you be more inclined to eat at?

I’m sympathetic to the desperation. If you’re desperate for work, there’s nothing wrong with asking for a favor. In fact, a lot of social psychology suggests that you’re better off going that direction:

The Direct Request Effect: Studies show that when you explicitly ask someone for a favor, they are significantly more likely to comply than if you hint at needing help. People often underestimate how willing others are to assist when directly asked.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect: Asking for a favor can actually make someone like you more because they subconsciously justify their helpfulness by believing they must like you.

But this message isn’t asking for a favor; it’s pretending this is somehow in my best interest by suggestion it could “lighten the load” for me.

How can I trust that this person knows what’ll lighten my load if nothing else in this message indicates that they know what my load is right now?

(Yet another reason a custom opening line that shows you’re paying attention to your recipient’s current situation can help.)

The next line furthers the confusion:

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, let’s chat!

The truth of this message is that they need work. But they’re trying to frame it as an offer for me. I appreciate the attempt to orient it against what’s in it for me, but it’s not honest. Humans chafe against this kind of insincerity that we often see in car or timeshare salespeople and telemarketers, people we see as generally trying to get ahead personally under the guise of doing something beneficial for us.

The “keep me in mind” fiction

The last line is polite but problematic:

P.S. Even if you don’t need help right now, feel free to keep me in mind for future projects.

This is basically a nice way of saying, “Put me on your mental list for later.” But here’s the problem: that list doesn’t exist.

People who have lots of opportunities get too many of these messages to track them all. And people who don’t have many opportunities don’t maintain a list like this at all.

Either way, this doesn’t do the sender any favors.

Be specific

Overall, not much of this message has its intended effect.

Here’s a before and after with my suggestions:

Before:

Hey Dan,

I wanted to reach out to see how things are going on your end.

If you ever find yourself turning down work, needing an extra pair of hands for QA, or looking for a reliable part-time developer, I’d love to help lighten the load.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, let’s chat!

P.S. Even if you don’t need help right now, feel free to keep me in mind for future projects.

After:

Hey Dan,

I wanted to reach out to see how things are going on your end. Those new custom Jordans you posted a few days ago look sick! I just picked up the grey-on-black mids at the factory store since they were half off.

I have a favor to ask.

I’m light on work lately and could use some help filling my plate with Framer builds.

I saw that you’re wrapping up your new website build in Framer; can I pitch in on QA? I can QA a 100-page site in 2 days, and I charge $500 for that.

Could you refer me to anyone you know in higher ed that needs Framer sites built? Here are links to 3 Framer sites I built recently: LINK 1, LINK 2, LINK 3. I’m happy to send over an intro template too if that makes things easier for you.

In any case, thanks for even considering this!

If I had to sum it up as advice for anyone in this situation, I’d say:

Email people you know
Do the research to align your situation with theirs
Ask for a specific favor or make a specific offer

I know there are some people that don’t send this kind of email because it doesn’t occur to them to do that. I get that; that’s why I share the specific language to show the possibility of it.

In reality, I think far more people are too scared to send an email like this. When you ask for something specific, it’s easier to get a clear “yes” for an answer, but it’s also easier to get a clear “no” too. And that’s scary. So they’d rather live in the ambiguity of “maybe” or “I never heard back from them.”

If you’re hesitant to send a direct ask like this, here’s a challenge: send a real, specific request to someone right now. See what happens. Worst case, you hear “no.” Best case, you get exactly what you wanted.

Either way, you’re better off than you were before.

Make More Money

Dan Mall — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Beware: this is a sales post.

Below, I’m going to tell you about a new group coaching program I’m launching publicly for freelancers and agency/studio owners. I’m going to give you some info about it so you can identify if I’m talking to you. I’m going to ask you to spend up to $5k, and I’m going to try and convince you that it’s worth it because what I’ll teach you will help you win at least $10k more work, if not more.

If you’re not interested in that, you’re more than welcome to stop reading here and catch back up in next week’s newsletter (which will be a specific tip about how you can make yourself more indispensable to your team, boss, client, and any other group you’re part of).

Still with me? Read on.

Serious business

The more conversations I have with designers like you who read this newsletter and follow me on various social platforms, the more I’m picking up on a general anxiety about the future. A common source of that angst is uncertainty about income and finances—and for good reason. The rapid of advancement of AI tools seem to accelerate the risk of replacement across all rungs of the employment ladder. Full-time positions are hard to come by, somehow despite loads of job openings, and mass layoffs don’t build confidence about that path anyway. U.S. administration changes wreak havoc worldwide, especially as it relates to the global economy.

My survivorship bias is clear, but my last decade of work as an entrepreneur and business owner lead me to encourage folks down this path too. I’m not naive enough to believe this is right for everyone, but I’m also aware enough to know that more folks could find success here than currently do or have. To sweeten the pot, I’ve always been happy to share how I’ve made a good living doing things like making my own products or running and selling an agency I’ve received a lot of feedback for me to know that I’ve helped a lot of people here over the years.

That‘s not to say that the independent path is easy. 20% of businesses don’t make it past their first year, and 50% don’t make it to year 5. It’s a higher risk, higher reward scenario than other vocational paths. I’ve always volunteered to do my part to help increase the odds for those interested.

My new group coaching program

For the last few months, I’ve been quietly designing a 3-month group coaching program for design freelancers and studio/agency owners who want to level up their businesses. The program is called Make More Money, and it comes in 4 parts:

Lifetime access to a self-paced video course
Weekly, live group coaching calls
Unlimited Slack community access while you’re in the program
First-come, first-served open office hours with me

Who it’s for

I designed Make More Money for freelancers and studio/agency owners who want help growing their design business from their first dollar up to $10 million. Why that range? Because I’ve figured out many of the answers to those problems myself, and I can share them with the people who haven’t figured them out yet.

(If you run a $10 million+ agency and are looking to scale beyond, I’m not the guy for you, but I know people who are. Drop me a line and I’ll point you in their direction.)

The biggest challenges for folks in this area are making their first profitable sales and figuring out how to do better than losing money or just barely breaking even.

And the biggest opportunities here are learning how to grow your customer and client base and increasing both revenue and profit.

I teach you how to do this in 4 ways:

I’ll help you to articulate your goals and ambitions in a way that motivates you to push through the hard times.
I’ll help you find your unique positioning in a way that gives you more effective offers and pitches for your specific clients
I’ll share effective methodologies for pricing work and ways of framing you haven’t heard anywhere else
I’ll show you how most people complicate lead generation and give you a simple framework for attracting the right clients for you and repelling the ones that aren’t a good fit

Curriculum

The self-paced video course currently contains 24 modules across 6 topics (though I’m constantly tweaking this):

Purpose & Principles
1. Oprah & Warren Buffett
2. About this Program
3. Your Rich Life
4. Worthy Goals
5. Serious Business
6. Enough is Enough
7. The Trust List
Positioning
1. Positioning Solves Pricing Problems
2. The Hedgehog Concept
3. Your Only-ness
4. The Three Fears of Narrowing
Pricing
1. Pricing Basics
2. Don’t Get Paid What You’re Worth
3. Take the Risk
Pricing Practice
1. The Four Conversations
2. The Four Conversations, Revisited
3. Conversation Role Play
4. Doubles & Halves
5. In Decent Proposals
6. Contracts
Prospects & Promotions
1. Who Can You Work With?
2. Do I Have To Be a Thought Leader or Influencer?
3. Cold Outreach & Paid Ads
Possibilities
1. Your Future

That’s the core material that I think every freelancer and studio/agency owner would benefit to know.

There might be some concepts in that list that you’re already familiar. I don’t claim that all of this stuff is my own. I’ll always be sharing my remixed application of it, and I will happily credit the ideas I’ve learned from others that I’m passing along to you. There are 59 books in particular that all make their way into this program; I read them so you don’t have to. (But in a future post, I’ll share more detail about each of these books so you can read them if you want to.)

Theoretical knowledge only goes so far; a lot of business is learned by trying stuff. There will be a lot of hands-on work that I’ll be asking you to do. There are 14 worksheets and templates that are part of this curriculum that you’ll use to guide you along the way, and likely even after you’re done.

There are also some topics that are a bit more advanced, don’t really fit into those buckets, and/or are outside the core curriculum but might still be useful to know. I see this “extra credit” section as one that I’ll constantly update with one-off videos as they come up in the program. In no particular order:

Profit First
Hiring & Growing
Pricing Councils
My Name vs. Studio Name
Legal Entities
Content Creation

Price and time commitment

I’ll have 2 payment options:

A one-time fee of $4,999 USD
3 payments of $1,999 USD

You’ll have access to the program for 3 months.

Purchasing power parity

As of this moment, I’m not offering purchasing power parity (PPP) for this program.

I believe in the global benefits of PPP and offer it for just about all of my other courses.

The biggest reason I’m not offering it here is that pricing is very cultural. The majority of my experience pricing and what I’m teaching has been with U.S.-based clients with a few European clients sprinkled in, so what I teach is essentially how to navigate and exploit the variables of capitalist economies in your favor. I don’t know if what I’m teaching will work as well for people outside the U.S., as I’m not nearly as tuned to the nuances of non-U.S. cultures.

That said, it’s a strong opinion, softly held. I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. I know I’m making this decision mostly out of ignorance; I know there’s a lot I don’t know here. If you feel strongly about this (whether for or against) and would be willing to share your thoughts with me about it, I’d certainly welcome that and be grateful for it.

What about $9/month?

If you follow me on other platforms, you may have seen me think out loud about a $9/month option on LinkedIn and X. As you’ve probably been able to tell, what I’ve written above is not that.

After lots of thoughts over the last few months and some great feedback from many people, I don’t think it’s the right time for me to launch that. I think the chasm between what I can deliver and what people expect is too wide right now, so I want some time to figure out how to shrink or bridge that gap. I may launch that after launching the full Make More Money program, but that order reflects my priority right now.

Results

Is the program worth it?

Of course I think so, but I’m biased. Also, it doesn’t matter what I think. It matters if my students find it valuable.

I’ve been running an early access program with a handful of people for the last few weeks to test out just that. I’m grateful to them for helping me tune the content and sharpen the offer so it’s valuable to them and to more people.

Here’s what they’re saying in their own words.

From Gabby Merite, founder of creative data design studio Figures & Figures:

From Josh Loh, founder of The Digital Third:

From freelancer Jonas Leupe:

Launch date

Not sure yet. I was shooting for first week of March, but I still have a decent chunk of the video course to create. As of right now, it’s looking like it’ll be somewhere between the end of March and the end of April, but I’m not far along enough to say that for sure.

So how have I been running the early access group? Without the video course. I just teach the material live every week. It’s a little slower for the students because we only cover one topic each week, and sometimes one topic over multiple weeks. It’ll be easier for the students when the video course is done so they can consume it at their own pace, but they’re still already getting value now.

Which brings me to you.

I’ve heard from more than a few of you that you’re really excited for something like this and would love to get in as early as possible. Would you want to join our early access group, even if the video course isn’t ready yet?

If that’s something you’d be interested in, consider this a pre-order of sorts. I’d do a pre-order price of $3,999 USD, which is $1,000 off the full launch price of $4,999 USD. I’ll let you into our early access group, and when the video course is ready, you’ll immediately have access to that too.

In short, here’s what’s in it for you:

Immediate access to learn with a group of your peers
$1,000 off as an incentivize for purchasing early
Reserve your seat right away
Access to the video course as soon as it’s ready

And here’s what’s in it for me:

Upfront cashflow is always better than delayed cashflow
The more of people’s money I get, the guiltier I feel not delivering something, so it’ll incentivize me to get the video course done that much quicker
The sooner I get to talk to more people, the more I can learn how to make the whole experience better and better for everyone

I’m hoping that’s a win-win for both of us.

If you’d like to pre-order, send me a message and I’ll reply with a Stripe link.

This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Last week, I watched two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-designer using AI.

I’ve thought about it every day since.

The match was part of Build Wars, a 45-minute challenge hosted by Tommy Geoco, Hunter Hammonds, and guest judge Tom Johnson. The contenders? Brett Williams from DesignJoy using Webflow vs. Henrik Westerlund using Lovable.

I think it points to some really interesting shifts in the future of design.

Before I say too much more, watch it for yourself:

The real story

In the end, Brett won both the judges and the audience vote. No surprise: he’s an experienced designer, and “great designer makes great design” isn’t exactly breaking news.

But that’s not the interesting part.

The real story is what happened during the match and what it might be telling us about where design is headed.

The build-up to Build Wars

Before the match, I couldn’t decide who would win.

I didn’t know either of the players personally. Henrik was new to me, and I’ve only exchanged a DM or two with Brett. Based on experience, Brett had the edge. But I also thought someone using a sufficiently advanced AI tool could win just by iterating quickly and stumbling onto something unique.

That uncertainty built my anticipation for the match. I imagine a lot of others felt the same.

(Gotta give Tommy and Hunter their flowers for setting this up so well.)

Pace yourselves

One of the first striking things to me about this match is each player’s pace. If I had to graph it, it’d look like this:

Within the first five minutes, Henrik had a high-fidelity section assembled: logo, navigation, headings, buttons, animations, gradients. At that same point, Brett only had a text box with default styling on a primitive shape.

I think this has to do less with Henrik and Brett and more to do with the tools they’re using. I’m reminded of the quote from professor John Culkin (often misattributed to media theorist Marshall McLuhan):

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

We’re watching that play out in real time! The shape of Henrik’s pace is the shape that many generative AI tools encourage: a big burst of energy at the very beginning of the process. This is what’s so exciting about them! Since the beginning of each form, creators have lamented the what writer Natalie Goldberg aptly characterized as the “tyranny of the blank page,” a problem generative AI seems to eradicate.

This is what’s so interesting about this match to me. It’s less about one platform or tool vs. another more than it is a commentary on how design happens, and whether or not that’s changing in a significant way.

Design is deciding

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: design is deciding.

The best designers are the best deciders.

That’s the paradox that makes design so challenging for even the most experienced designers. What makes a design great is when we apply our judgment, picking a few choice candidates from thousands of typefaces and millions of colors.

That same “skill” becomes a hindrance when faced with a blank page. We deliberate. We contemplate. We stall. We’re paralyzed by choice. At this stage, there’s too much to choose from.

AI doesn’t have that problem. It just produces. A frame is filled with an illustration. A canvas is littered with components.

But let’s not conflate that with judgment, or even selection. It’s diffusion. It’s pattern matching. It’s statistical synthesis and averaging. And yes, all of those things are part of a designer’s process too. But designers decide whether to follow patterns or diverge from them. Generative AI doesn’t yet consciously do the latter unless instructed to, and it doesn’t yet know if it made a good or bad choice.

To complicate matters, the design process is a series of decisions. Said differently, it’s a series of plateaus, and you only get to the next one if you make a decision you can build on, i.e. a good decision. Until you do that, you’re stuck for a while.

I literally watched that play out during the match, and you can see it in the graphs. Henrik got through the first plateau quickly because he made a few upfront decisions—like which components to use from 21st.dev and feed to Lovable—but then he got stuck. He didn’t seem to know what to decide next. Because Henrik is not a designer. by his own admission. The rest of his match was one big plateau. Brett moved more slowly at first, but his decisions compounded to ultimately overtake where Henrik was stuck.

Around 35 minutes into the match, there was an inkling of a spark on Henrik’s end. He opened a new window and generated a completely new interface. I thought this was a genius move. Here’s what I think happened. I think Henrik came into the competition with an idea of what to make in his head. At some point, he realized that either he achieved what was in his head and it wasn’t as good as he thought, or he was somehow blocked from achieving what was in his head and needed to try a different avenue. Both of these things happen to designers all the time. If I was coaching Henrik, I would tell him that he needs more ideas to collide into each other, so go do another version of the interface, which he did. This is an advantage for him in this competition too: Brett’s moving slowly because of his tool choice, and Henrik has a tool that allows him to move faster. But I don’t think Henrik knew what to do with the second interface. I would have told him to try to combine the best ideas from the first one with the second one, but I don’t think he knew to do that or how to do that.

This is where designers still have an advantage over non-designers: designers know where, when, and how to make decisions. Anyone can make stuff with generative AI, but without the muscle memory of knowing what to make and when, they plateau easily.

Finding motif-ation

If I had to pinpoint the moment Brett won me over, it was 11 minutes in.

He set a paragraph in the typeface Brockmann. Suddenly, his landing page felt different. It wasn’t a generic template—it had personality.

Hunter called it out immediately: “Brett’s already laying down some style.”

I don’t know how much of it he planned in advance and how much emerged as he was designing and exploring, but we as the audience started to see it in that moment.

Henrik, on the other hand, started with default sans-serif type. When he later changed fonts, he picked Plus Jakarta Sans—a good typeface, but one that blends into the sea of modern sans serifs.

Both Brett and Henrik had some interactions that made the judges ooh and ahh, but none of them felt signature to me. They weren’t conceptually relevant, so they felt more gimmicky to me than anything. I chalk that up to the competition rules all but forcing them both to do that, and I think it actually became a distraction to their abilities to design something good. I’d lobby for that requirement to be removed for future Build Wars if the competition is more about great design than building fast.

As is often the case, there’s a German word that perfectly encapsulate a major part of what makes a great design to me: leitmotif. Leitmotif is when a composer assigns a short melody, rhythm, or harmonic progression to a person, place, object, or concept in a piece of music, film, or theater. Every time you hear it, it connects you emotional with that element of the story.

Ludwig Göransson talks about the process of crafting leitmotif when composing the soundtrack for Black Panther, specifically in the theme for Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger character. He went to Senegal, assembled a group of musician storytellers called Griots, and let them play for a few hours. One of the musicians played a flute called the Fula flute, which Göransson said sounded like Killmonger to him. He gave the flute player some context about the character, and the musician began to work with it. As the theme revealed itself, Göransson knew they had found it:

I got goosebumps, and I was like, “Okay. This is something special.”

That sounds like great design to me. Themes emerge through doing the work, but you have to know how to cultivate it and you have to know where to find it. Sometimes, you can feel when you’ve arrived at something special.

I don’t know if we have a word for when leitmotifs happen visually—maybe “motif” is the closest we have—but this happens all the time in great pieces design, most often in brand identity work and art direction. Think: Lyft’s pink. Nike’s use of Futura Extra Bold Condensed. The Burberry check pattern. Motifs aren’t just aesthetic choices; they’re signatures.

Brett was starting to find his motifs throughout the competition. He brought a few from the start, like the gradients and a particular orange accent color. In my view, the fact that he had any at all and Henrik didn’t is a major contributor to why Brett’s design was considered better.

I’d also argue that Brett only found his real motif after the match was over. He mentioned trying to use the gradients as what he called “visual anchors”—a synonym for “motif” in my opinion—to tie the design together… in his words, to “pierce through.” But he also had this seemingly throwaway tagline he included at the bottom: “Made by humans.” I think Brett realized afterwards that concept was a stronger creative direction, as he later tweeted some swag around that concept that got a lot of love and even partnered up with Creative Department on humans.design to make it a reality. I’m hard-pressed to believe that AI could connect those dots even if it had been able to prompt its way to a design like Brett’s.

Why weren’t these kinds of seeds in Henrik’s design?

Because Henrik isn’t a designer.

And that’s where it gets interesting.

Leveling the playing field

Brett won because he’s a great designer.

Henrik made it a competition even though he’s not a designer.

That’s the real story here.

It shouldn’t be possible for a non-designer to challenge an experienced pro. And yet, for 45 minutes, Henrik did. That’s a testament to how much AI can start to level the playing field.

(For what it’s worth, I think the 45-minute limit helped Henrik. With more time, Brett’s iterative compounding would’ve widened the gap.)

As compelling as this match was, Brett on Webflow vs. Henrik in Lovable was a great appetizer.

The main course I want is Brett on Webflow vs. Brett on Lovable.

It‘s not specifically about Webflow or Lovable. Or Framer. Or ChatGPT. Or Cursor. The real question isn’t, “Can AI tools help non-designers?” We’ve seen they can.

The question is: Can they make elite designers even better?

The future of design isn’t man vs. machine

When technology changes, the bottom always drops out. Smaller farms relying on manual labor went out of business when the tractor came along. Scribes were replaced by the printing press. Railway workers lost jobs as the automobile became more popular. Clients and companies will turn to non-designers who can use AI tools.

But farms that adopted tractors thrived. Some scribes became typesetters, printers, and specialized calligraphers. Many railway workers got new jobs at auto manufacturing plants as machinists, mechanics, and assembly line workers.

AI raises the floor for non-designers. But can it raise the ceiling for designers? I’m betting the answer is yes, and we need the next match to show us how.

If you’re a skilled designer, don’t compare your future to a non-designer using AI. Compare your future to your present, just like you compared your present to your past. Is your design work better now that you use Figma than when you used Sketch or Photoshop? Will it be better if you integrate AI into your workflow?

Now is the time to figure that out, while everyone else is too.

What can a seasoned designer like Brett do with AI? I can’t wait to see it.

Personally, AI has made me a better designer. Using ChatGPT to help with website copy is the tip of the iceberg. In the past few months, I’ve used a small handful of new tools that have leveled up my work in concept, strategy, design fidelity, information architecture, and just about every facet of my work.

In next week’s newsletter, I’ll share how you can use new AI tools to level you up too.

Read Tommy’s writeup in this week’s UX Tools newsletter.
Brett’s reflections after the competition
Artificial Intelligence & Humanity, my thoughts from 2 years ago (we’ll see how well this ages)

I Sold My Agency SuperFriendly

Dan Mall — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Last week, I wrote about timing, how some ideas can only thrive when the conditions are right.

In 2022, I shut down my agency SuperFriendly after 10 years of running it. It felt like the right move for me at the time, and 2½ years later, I can confirm that it was. As I wrote then, “for the first time in a decade, I think I’m running out of things that I want to learn or try through this vehicle.”

But even though I was done with SuperFriendly, that didn’t mean that SuperFriendly was done—on the contrary. As I also wrote about then, there were more people in the world who believed what we believed when I shut it down than when I started. And there are more people who believe it today than when I shut it down. Our focus on enterprise-level design systems evolved alongside the industry—and, dare I say, helped to move it forward—and are even more prevalent and important today.

Some things need to pause before they can evolve.

That’s exactly what’s happening now. The conditions are different. The timing is right for something new.

Barrel Holdings (led by Peter Kang and Sei-Wook Kim) has acquired SuperFriendly, and they’re preparing it for its new future. They’ve brought in a new CEO—Jon Sukarangsan—to lead what comes next. I’ve spent some time with Jon, and I’m excited about his vision and what he and the team are building.

I’m not the right person to lead this next evolution of SuperFriendly. The skills and vision that got it here aren’t the same ones needed to take it forward. I’m grateful for what Barrel Holdings and Jon are bringing to the table, to do things I wasn’t capable of on my own. I’m now a board member and an equity partner of the new SuperFriendly. I’m still invested in it and rooting for it, even though I’m no longer running things. My job isn’t to steer it anymore; it’s to support the awesome people who are from the sidelines.

If you’re a former client reading this, SuperFriendly is still here to help organizations scale their design systems, now with the backing of a company that gives you access to more capabilities and expertise as well as the operations to support it.

If you were a SuperFriend—one of the many talented designers, engineers, strategists, writers, and more who made this agency what it was—this is an opportunity to collaborate in new ways. Drop me a line and I’ll introduce you to Jon to hear how you fit into all this.

And if you’ve followed along because you cared about how we did things, I think you’ll find what Jon and the team are building to be just as thoughtful and ambitious as what came before.

A few people have already asked me how this kind of deal works. Selling an agency isn’t like selling a product—you don’t just put it on the market and wait for offers. It’s part strategy, part timing, and part luck. There’s a lot I’m not at liberty to share (or share yet), but I can tell you this: if you’re running a business today, start making decisions today that will make it valuable to someone else later, even if you don’t think you’ll ever part with it. If you want me to write more about that, let me know.

SuperFriendly is evolving. If you’ve trusted and enjoyed our work in the past, I think you’ll want to see what’s next.

For more context, read the posts from Barrel Holdings co-founder Peter Kang and new SuperFriendly CEO Jon Sukarangsan.

The Timing of an Idea

Dan Mall — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Netflix started in 1997 as a DVD rental-by-mail service. Today, we know it as a streaming giant.

If they had launched streaming in 1997, it wouldn’t have worked.

If they had never started at all, there’s a good chance they never would have become what they are today.

Streaming wasn’t just a good idea; it was an idea waiting for the right conditions. Broadband speeds, changing consumer habits, smartphones, and a lot more had to come together before it could take off. Without those things, a streaming service in the late ‘90s was just a plot point in a sci-fi movie.

The right timing can make a good idea great.

The wrong timing can also hinder an idea, no matter how good it is.

When I started my agency SuperFriendly in 2012, I built it as a distributed model by default: no central office, just a team spread across the world. Back then, that was weird. Some clients even walked away because of it. Today, remote work is the norm.

SuperFriendly wasn’t just distributed; it was built on a network of specialists freelancers instead of full-time employees. That wasn’t unheard of, but it was uncommon. Nowadays, almost every new modern agency cropping up touts their “networks of trusted partners” on their About pages.

Timing changes everything. Some ideas don’t take off—not because they aren’t good, but because the right conditions aren’t in place yet. Other ideas succeed, not just because of their strength, but because of a perfect storm of industry shifts, cultural trends, and even luck.

Design systems are a good example, a niche I’ve worked heavily in for the last decade Designers have used systems since the beginning, but a combination of factors—widespread web standards, tech overspending, the rise of mobile apps—set the stage for design systems to become a business-critical practice.

The industry is shifting again—between AI, post-pandemic adaptations, and the massive rise in new businesses, new possibilities are emerging every day. Business applications in 2023 were up 57% from the years prior. It’s too early to tell how much causation exists between those, but I have to imagine there’s at least some direct link.

It’s a great time to be innovating, to be inventing. What ideas have you had in the past for which today would be even better timing? What about the state of tools, the industry, or the world surface a need or an opportunity unlike other times in history? What’s something you thought about years ago that might finally be possible now?

I have my own musings that I’ve been noodling on for a little while. On Monday, I’ll share a big one. It’s about the future, but also about the past.

Any guesses?

Tools & Rules

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

I have a work and life philosophy: tools and rules go together.

Every time you introduce a new tool, you need some rules to make it useful.

Every time you introduce a new rule, you need tools to make it easier to follow.

When these are out of balance, things tend to fall apart.

You’ve probably seen a cool video about a note-taking app or AI tool, downloaded it, and thought, ”This is going to change everything!” But unless you set a rule like launching it at the start of every meeting or dedicating time each day to use it, you’ll likely forget about it in a few months. Tools without rules get lost.

Or maybe your VP mandates that everyone use the company’s design system. It’s a well-intentioned rule, but if the design system doesn’t have enough components for every team’s needs, compliance becomes impossible. A mature rule needs an equally mature tool.

Done right, tools and rules reinforce each other. Want to keep daily standups under 10 minutes? Give your team a simple template or script to keep them on track.

Take a look at your own process and workflow. Where are you lopsided?

What’s In It For Me?

Dan Mall — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

It’s that time of year—people want stuff.

Maybe your inbox looks like mine, flooded with unsolicited messages:

Would be great to hop on a call.

I’d love to have you on my podcast.

I could really use a portfolio review.

I’ve attached my book draft, and I’d appreciate any feedback you have on it.

Can you help spread the word about our product?

(It’s always that time of year.)

You shot your shot. Good for you. (Well, not quite, but close, and points for effort.)

I get it. I used to send messages like these, too. And I’ve learned something important: if you’ve sent a request like this to me—or anyone like me—it likely went straight to the trash.

Not because I don’t want to help. Not because I don’t care.

But because you missed the most important part of any pitch: what’s in it for me?

Asking Without Offering Is a Losing Strategy

Lately, I’ve started responding with that exact question: What’s in it for me?

And let me tell you—some people really don’t like it.

The mad ones tell on their own selfishness or self-centeredness. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

The surprised ones? They usually say something like, “Um, I don’t know. What do you want?”

And that’s the rub: why would I spend time and attention on your thing when you’ve spent little on mine? It’s a mismatch of effort. You’re asking me to invest in you without first showing me why it’s worth my time.

Sure, some people operate on an “Asker” model—they just throw requests out there, assuming it’s fine if people say no. Others, like me, are more “Guessers”—we prefer to sense whether a request is welcome before making it.

Either way, cold asks rarely work unless they immediately answer the one question every recipient is subconsciously asking: Why should I care?

Strategic Givers Win

In Give & Take, Adam Grant outlines three types of people:

Takers: People who always try to get something without giving back.
Matchers: People who trade favors, keeping things even.
Givers: People who create value for others without expecting an immediate return.

The research is clear: givers win—but only if they’re strategic about it.

That tracks when you think about the reciprocity principle—the psychological tendency that makes people feel obligated to return favors. When you give first, you make it easy for people to say yes when you finally ask for something.

But here’s the thing: figuring out what someone actually wants takes effort.

That’s why cold outreach as a lead generation strategy is a last resort—it’s hard to know what a stranger values.

Someone you already follow or admire, though? You probably know something about them.

If you’re trying to get something from me, a quick scroll through my social accounts will tell you that:

Sixers floor seats
A fresh pair of size 9 Jordan 1’s
A reservation at an exclusive omakase

…will get my attention way faster than an empty request.

How to Ask the Right Way

Here’s how a little effort turns a cold ask into a compelling one:

Before	After
Would be great to hop on a call.	Do you have an hourly rate? I’d be happy to pay double your standard if you’d be willing to hop on a call with me.
I’d love to have you on my podcast.	I’ve had President Obama and Kevin Feige on my podcast, two people whose company I know you’d love to be in as you mentioned in your last newsletter. Would you be a guest on my podcast too so I can list you alongside them?
I could really use a portfolio review.	I know you’re looking for fresh content for your YouTube channel. Could you roast my portfolio live? It’d get you more views and I’d get the kind of honest critique that could really take my work to the next level.
I’ve attached my book draft, and I’d appreciate any feedback you have on it.	I know you tweeted about adding some new experience to your résumé. If you’d be kind enough to review my book, I’d gladly credit you as a Technical Editor.
Can you help spread the word about our product?	I have $1500 available for a sponsorship. For that fee, can you help spread the word about our podcast?

See the difference? The first versions are all about the sender—what they want.

The second versions center the recipient—they make it clear what’s in it for them.

The Bottom Line

It takes time and effort to find out what someone wants. It takes time and effort to craft a compelling ask.

And that’s exactly why most people don’t do it.

Which is exactly why you should.

The next time you want something from someone, ask, but don’t just ask. Take ten minutes to figure out what’s in it for them first.

Do that, and your cold asks will start turning into warm yeses.

Content Strategy For a 200-Page Personal Website

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000

In last week’s post, I shared some thoughts about the creative direction, art direction, and design for my upcoming new website and where they came from.

Today, I’ll tell you about my new content strategy.

First, a quick primer on what content strategy is (and isn’t). Content strategy isn’t a fancy way to say “words and stuff.” Content strategy is, quite literally, the strategy for your content.

Via content strategist Kristina Halvorson’s wonderful book, Content Strategy for the Web:

Content is what the user came to read, learn, see, or experience.

Brand strategist Mark Pollard says:

Strategy is an informed opinion about how to win.

Together, content strategy is “an informed opinion about how to win with what the user came to read, learn, see, or experience.”

What are you trying to win?

Many designers’ websites suck because they haven’t answered that question.

The goal of a designer’s website

“Win” is a simpler way to say “achieve a stated business goal.” That’s creative direction. This is why there’s a massive overlap between creative direction and content strategy, and it’s why creative directors and content strategist make magic when they work closely together.

The implied “win” for most designers is to either get a full-time job or a client through their website. That’s why the form most designers’ websites take is a portfolio, typically around 4–10 pages: Home, Work/Portfolio, a handful of case studies, About, and Contact. This is also true for most agencies; that number sometimes jumps to 10–20 pages to include things like team bios, news articles, and press releases.

My win is different, so I need a different kind of site; the creative direction and content strategy wills it so. I’m not trying to get a full-time job and I’m not looking to do client work. My businesses make money through selling informational products like courses and books and high-touch implementation help through coaching and consulting. I‘ve learned that a surefire way to do that is to give away a lot of valuable content as a way to build trust with my readers and potential customers.

I can’t do that well in 4–10 pages. My website has about 200 pages, 178 of which are articles. Through a combination of my own instincts, crawling through analytics, and talking to some of my readers and prospective customers both individually and as a a group, I learned that my current site isn’t set up well to help me win here.

That‘s the real driver for needing some changes. The content strategy is fine, but the information architecture and user experience need work. And while I’ve got the hood popped, it’s a good excuse to play with a new art direction.

Information architecture changes

My current site has a few ways to navigate the content, but they all have pretty large downsides.

The primary way is a list of articles, ordered in reverse chronology. That’s great for knowing what’s most recently published, but awful for finding anything good that’s older.

There’s a list of topics on the side, but it’s an unusable list of 139 items. That almost means that every post has its own individual topic! It reveals my lack of a coherent folksonomy; I literally make up new topics at the time of writing when I want to. It’s why you’ll find a topic for “conferences” and a separate one for “conference,” with no overlap between them 🤦🏽‍♂️

If you like my approach to writing about design process & craft, you could go to the “Process” topic page. But, even if it was tagged properly, you wouldn’t find my article about making a portfolio hiring managers can’t deny, one of the most popular articles ever on my site. That’s a problem.

The current site has a section called Products and another section called Free Resources. My original intention was for these sections to have a yin and yang relationship: all of it is my content… just separated between paid and free stuff. But that’s the wrong mental model. Few people really think, “I’d like to pay Dan for something, but I don’t know what,” or “I don’t care what content I find here, as long as it’s free.”

The new site collects all of the content under five specific topics:

The Business of Design
Design Leadership
Design Systems
Process & Craft
Personal

These “hubs” have a much more straightforward value proposition. I think they’ll better serve the person coming in thinking, “I’d like to learn more about running a design business” or “I’d like to learn more about design process,” and it tees up a mixture of content for them.

For example, the Design Leadership page will collect videos and podcasts where I talk about Design Leadership. It’ll also show 2 different views of the articles I’ve written about Design Leadership: a reverse chronological view so you know what’s the most recent, and a “most popular” view where you can see the top 5 articles not to miss regardless of when they were published.

One of the sections I’m most excited about is books I recommend about each of these topics. I’m an avid reader and there are so many books that do a great job of describing a topic better than I could or have. I’m excited to have a dedicated place where I can store topical book recommendations.

The future of design systems

One other big change I’ll be making is to move all of my design system articles off of this site and over to the Design System University website instead. I’ll still maintain the hub here for a while, but all of the article links will take you offsite.

That’s because I find my audience split between two major buckets: people interested in design systems and people interested in the business side of design. That’s not to say there’s not overlap, but the feedback I’ve received is that the audiences are distinct enough that the content I publish is relevant to half my audience at a time at best.

I’ll be writing a lot more about the business side here in this newsletter and much less about design systems here. If you’re subscribe here because you want design system content, I think you’ll be better served to subscribe to the DSU newsletter instead if you aren’t already.

Coming soon!

I see the light at the end of the tunnel for getting this new site live. I hope it helps you find better content that you’re looking for from me once it’s out. And if there’s any feedback you have about how I can make it even better for you, please do share it!

A Sneak Peek of the New DanMall.com

Dan Mall — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

If all goes well, I’ll be launching my new website in the next week or two. Fingers crossed! 🤞🏽

In the meantime, I figured I’d share a few behind-the-scenes thoughts that you might be interested in.

Today, I want to talk about flowers.

The role of beauty in modern design

One of the earliest thoughts I had about a new site is that I wanted it to be beautiful. And I don’t mean beautiful in a “someone in the know can appreciate the understated beauty in the nuance of subconscious design elements like whitespace and typographic subtleties.” I mean any human in the world can viscerally react, “Wow, that’s gorgeous.”

I really like my current site. From a functional perspective, it does a lot of things for me. But it isn’t beautiful, not in that visceral way. And beauty is such an important part of design.

As digital design evolved over the last two decades, the industry started to realize the impact of design at increasingly larger scales. Naturally, efficiency through systems became more valuable too.

My career has also evolved in lockstep with the industry. Where I started making standalone microsites and brochureware one-and-done websites grew into working with clients who manage hundreds of digital products that serve millions and billions of customers. In that kind of work, beauty quietly recedes in the list of priorities. Understandably so, there’s a growing notion that people who work on design systems—that’s me—don’t, can’t, or won’t make beautiful things. Part of my goals for this new site is to prove that notion wrong.

The kind of thing that comes to mind when many think “design system.” Handy, but not exactly what most normal humans would describe as viscerally beautiful.

Beauty as creative direction

For some reason, I associate beauty with nature. One of the most beautiful things I can think of is a pile of flowers. I’ve often had the shallow thought that “I should make my website have flowers all over.”

But I’m a fairly left-brained designer, the kind who always has to have a reason for everything on the screen. I couldn’t think of a reason for adding a bunch of flowers other than I liked it, which is the exact kind of logic I caution younger designers against. “Don’t just include stuff because you like it,” I’d hear myself scolding them. “It has to have a purpose!” And yet, if I was ever gonna include something just for the sake of it, my personal website would be the place, no?

Still, the idea plagued me. As a junior designer in 2005, I remember coming across John Oxton’s “Joshuaink” site. It featured an illustration of flowers by Denis Radenkovic that I remember vividly to this day. I remember distinctly thinking, “This is gorgeous! But what do flowers have to do with anything on this site?” It was too challenging of an idea for my fledgling designer brain. But I knew I still really liked it, even though I didn’t understand it.

The beautiful Joshuaink site by John Oxton in 2005

About 6 months ago, I was journaling about what I wanted from my new site, which is currently my favorite way to write what would be traditionally known as a “creative brief.” I was free-association, stream-of-consciousness letting the thoughts flow about the purpose, the audience, my hopes and dreams, and more. Among other things, I wrote this line:

“I really want to help more designers get their flowers.”

I paused and realized I had my creative direction.

(A side note about creative direction. Many people misunderstand creative direction to mean “look and feel.” Apologies for the pedantry, but I think they really mean “art direction.” Creative direction includes art direction, but it’s more about how art direction and business strategy meet. It’s “the big idea.” For this site, the big idea was that designers deserve their flowers but often don’t know how to get them. I can help with that.)

Honing in on the art direction

Fortunately for me, my home library is filled with books featuring flowers. (I know not why. Perhaps for this very moment.) So I assembled them all—bought some more, naturally—and started to let my brain steep in the subject matter.

A small sampling of my flower and plant book collection.

I found the first reference I wanted to steal and remix: a page out of Cordelia de Castellane’s Life in a French Country House. I copied it almost exactly, with the exception of using a few typefaces I’d been eyeing for a long while: Rajesh Rajput’s Bueno, Reset Type’s Thermal, and Zetafonts’ Hagrid.

A digital reproduction of a page in a physical book.

I started to remix, quickly finding some surreal looking flowers on Google images to drop in and try, which made me start to play with different color schemes.

I started to layer in my own content to see how well this would fit for my site. I also generated some images and illustrations with Midjourney, Visual Electric, and Adobe Firefly to see what kind of style I wanted for the flowers.

It was tough to choose! I liked them all!

From my early days as a designer, I’ve been drawn to fixed formats that change slightly over time. I loved that the designs of WIRED and Oprah magazines morphed from issue to issue within the same overall art direction. Jason Santa Maria’s seminal redesign of A List Apart had a different color scheme for each issue. Bostonia designed custom feature articles for their 2008 and 2009 issues. When I worked on the website for the Maryland Institute College of Art, we let the entire site’s art direction be driven by the colors in uploaded student artwork. Remember blogazines? I did it too for every article I wrote from 2011 to 2015.

Until I didn’t. It’s a lot of work. So I tried finding smaller ways to do it. For the current version of my site, I played with the same idea of of changing the homepage image monthly. (Yes, I will be Oprah one day.)

Even that got tough to maintain. Some part of me wants to think that I lost steam on it because it was a gimmick. Back to my left-brain designer tendencies, I didn’t really have a reason to do this under than the fact that I liked it and wanted to. I’m learning that, sometimes, that’s enough.

But flowers! They’re inherently seasonal! What if I picked some specific species for every season of the year? I’d only have to update the site 4 times a year. Perhaps I can manage that. I did some research into seasonal blooms and chose a few to explore further.

While going down this path, it quickly dawned on me that there are infinite approaches to depicting flowers. Abstract, photorealistic, monochromatic, vector, watercolor… how do I choose?

My go-to design style is pretty modern and contemporary in general, so I knew whatever I came up with would feel of-the-time. However, since this site is all about helping other designers get their flowers through my own mentorship, coaching, and direction, trust and credibility are some of the most important parts of my brand. Many people who read this newsletter have been following my work for a decade or more and have come to trust it over time. For new readers, perhaps they’ll start to trust me if they feel like I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for a long time. (Which I have… 27 years now!)

From an art direction standpoint, that made me think that an older visual style could subconsciously communicate that. After a lot of exploration, I settled on a European Baroque style of the Dutch Golden Age, specifically the work of Rachel Ruysch. Perhaps another time, I’ll go into all of the different ways her work makes even more conceptual sense here as inspiration, but, for now, suffice it to say that it fits really nicely.

Flowers in a Glass Vase with a Tulip, by Rachel Ruysch

Not being an illustrator myself, I’ve relied heavily on generative AI tools to bring this art direction to life. One benefit of that—as opposed to going a more photographic direction, which is more in my wheelhouse—is that I can cheat a bit in the world-building of the site’s art direction. For example, in an earlier version, I was using Japanese anemones as the primary species of flower you’d find around the site. They typically come in shades of pink, white, and lavender. However, I choose to generate them orange and blue, something you’d never see in real life. Even for the uneducated nature lovers, they might subconsciously intuit that this was a fictitious world I’m building.

Now that I have a better sense of the style I want, I hired an illustrator to work with me to create even better and more fitting images than I could generate on my own.

After many months of iterating through it, here’s how the final art direction and design ended up, specifically on the article template:

In next week’s issue, I’ll tell you more about the content strategy and information architecture of the new site and why I think it’ll be easier to browse for designers who want to learn how to—you guessed it—get their flowers.

Scenes Need to Do More Than One Thing

Dan Mall — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Screenwriter Markus McFeely dropped this gem in the director’s commentary of Avengers: Infinity War:

Scenes need to do more than one thing.

He acknowledged that the events of a scene need to happen, which is its primary reason for appearing in the story. But a scene can also do other things like set up a character conflict, inform you about some backstory or exposition, or somehow advance the plot point in another way—all things that McFeely suggests that screenwriters employ.

This was an important lesson for me as I was learning how to be a more strategic designer. At its simplest, design is about doing something on purpose. Which is great. But it’s not always enough.

I can design a solution to the problem that I’m hungry. I can eat! Problem solved! Whether I eat yogurt or cookies or cardboard, my hunger problem is gone.

But that’s not enough. I need something more than “solve the problem” (design) to help me distinguish between good and bad choices. I need for this scene to be about two things instead of just one. “Quell my hunger and keep me full for the rest of the day” leads to a different choice than “quell my hunger and give me a short burst of energy.”

That is strategy.

There are lots of good definitions of strategy. The one that sticks with me is from my friend Mark Pollard, who says, “Strategy is an informed opinion on how to win.”

Design is doing something on purpose. Strategy is having an opinion. These two things go hand-in-hand.

This happens more frequently when a scene is about more than one thing.

Call-to-action buttons guide users to their next step, but they can also reinforce brand personality.

A homepage hero can grab attention, but it can also set the emotional tone for the rest of the site experience.

When a scene is only about one thing, the best you can make is a wireframe.

Just Fries

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

He was starting to really annoy me.

I was a new design director, running my first set of accounts and projects with my brand new team.

The executive producer at the agency I worked at was out for parental leave, and we had a contract executive producer filling in for the next few months.

I was leading a pretty big account, and this new guy started coming to my meetings all of a sudden. Any time I’d make a suggestion, he’d suggest the opposite. Any time I proposed a solution, he’d chime in that we’d solve it a different way.

After a few weeks of this, I was starting to get annoyed, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

So I asked him to have lunch with me one day.

He apathetically agreed. I suggested a lunch place a few blocks away, and he said he’d meet me there after his meeting ended.

I got a table and looked over the menu while waiting for him. A few minutes later, he walked in, and the server came over to take our order, starting with me.

“I’ll have a burger.”

”Great. And for you, sir?”

“Just fries.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“This won’t be a long lunch,” he snubbed.

Ouch.

I took a deep breath, then got straight to the point.

“Have I done something to offend you?“ I started.

“Whaddya mean?”

“Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like everything I say to our client, you seem to second-guess or have a different opinion about.”

“I’ve worked with plenty of designers like you,” he fired back. “You promise the world to clients but then leave the developers and everyone else on the team holding the bag, and the project suffers for it. It always blows the budget and timeline for some creative whim.”

“I get that,” I stated calmly, ”but that’s not me. You haven’t worked with me before. Would you give me a chance to show you that?”

He contemplated.

We ended up spending 2 more hours at that lunch, getting to know each other and clumsily figuring out how to collaborate successfully.

He kept ordering fries, ultimately going through four plates.

Over the next few months, we became close collaborators, figuring out how to take advantage of each other’s strengths. After both eventually leaving that agency, he’s hired me twice at startups he founded and exited. Years later, in an introduction email, he called me the best designer he’s ever worked with.

Sometimes, it takes just fries.

Take the Risk

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Wanna know one of the best ways to help someone?

Identify some of their risks and remove it. In other words, take the risk… as in, take the risk away from them. Adopt their risk as your own, on their behalf.

It works in situations small to large.

It might be risky for a friend to go to a new book club on their own, but you can take their risk by going with them.

It might be risky for your manager to be in charge of a new team, but you can take their risk by offering to help the team wherever there’s a gap. Or, you might offer to take the blame if something goes wrong.

It might be risky for your prospective client to invest in a social media ad campaign for the first time, but you can take their risk by providing your experience having run dozens of social media ad campaigns yourself.

Taking the risk has 2 major benefits: it gets you trust from the person you’re taking the risk from, and it makes you most eligible and likely to reap the rewards.

The next time everyone else is afraid of doing something that might result in a loss for them, you can spot the opportunity and volunteer to be the one to take the risk.

Pricing Design, Second Edition

Dan Mall — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:05:00 +0000

In 2014, I talked with my friend and mentor Jason Santa Maria about an idea I had for a book about pricing for designers. I was 12 years into freelancing and 2 years into running my own agency, and I had learned a thing or two about the business side of design that allowed me to make more than triple the amount of income I had made prior. Coincidentally, Jason, Katel, and Jeffrey at A Book Apart had been tossing around some ideas for a new series of their books called “Briefs,” which Jason explained as to me “topics that either don’t need as much room as one of our normal books, or want the flexibility to be more beginner or more expert level focused.” He mentioned that a book on pricing could be a perfect fit. Two years, a proposal, a bunch of manuscripts and edits later, I published my first book, an A Book Apart Brief called Pricing Design.

In March of 2024, A Book Apart closed their doors and gave authors back the rights to their books, along with a few conditions for authors that wanted to continue to distribute their books. Around that time, amidst some of the worst mass layoffs the tech industry has seen in a long while, I started to get increasingly more requests for my now unavailable book, presumably as more designers were looking to turn to taking their financial livelihoods into their own hands.

So, I decided to release as second edition of Pricing Design, and you’re hearing it here first. The easiest way to read it is for free on the new Pricing Design website. If you’d like a PDF of it, you can request a free PDF to be emailed to you on directly the site. The printed paperback, Kindle/e-reader, and audiobook versions are all in the works and soon-to-be-released in the next couple of weeks, and you can sign up on the website to be notified once they’re out.

Also, it’s been almost 9 years since I wrote the book, so there’s a ton more I’ve learned about pricing that I want to share! If you request the free PDF, you’ll also have the ability to opt into a very actionable mini-lesson where I tell you exactly how to value price your first prospect, step-by-step.

The website and book design are all the brainchild of Jonas Leupe, one of the people I’ve been working with over the last few months in my quest to find a designer who can ship. Jonas is kind, humble, and incredibly talented. I’ve really enjoyed our collaboration so far. (I’ll tell you more about Jonas and share more about the behind-the-scenes of hiring in an upcoming newsletter issue.)

If you’re thinking about making the leap to freelancing or need some new ways to level up in your design business, check out the new edition of Pricing Design.

2024 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 15:09:00 +0000

Continuing the tradition from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2024.

The life I want to live

For the past 6 years, I’ve organized my year in review posts by topic, ordered lightly by the topics that seemed most top-of-mind. This year, I’m choosing a slightly different framing: the life I’d like to live. I’ve started to hone this over the last year and a half, and I’m getting comfortable enough with it to start using it more actively and using it as a lens to view the things I did and choices I made.

At the end of 2023, I chose a theme word—actually 2—for 2024: “strengthening & stretching.” I didn’t explain it any more to anyone who asked, but I intended a few things by it. First: physically. I don’t see myself as very physically strong or flexible. I wanted to work on improving this. Secondly: mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. I’m a “do everything to the best of your ability” kind of person, or I’d rather not do it at all. I wanted to make sure that everything I did in 2024 was something that made me stronger and something that stretched me in some way. More on all of this below.

The shorthand that has resonated most and longest for me is Ramit Sethi’s idea of a “Rich Life”. Though the name indicates a specific financial status, it’s more than that. As Sethi describes:

A Rich Life is your ideal life—one where you look at your personal relationships, your finances, and your ordinary days and say, “Wow!”

It’s a life that is full. A life lived intentionally, proactively, and abundantly.

I like Justin Welsh’s framing on the same idea:

Stop thinking about “rich.” Start thinking about “free.”

But it still feels very singular, solitary, and self-centered. While I appreciate that, I found a passage in Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Wealth that addresses nicely addresses the gap for me:

An obsession with career and money (beyond what you could ever spend) begins to diminish what is the source of real satisfaction: relationships.

Yes! That trifecta works well for me: 1) being free to do things I really enjoy to the fullest 2) with little worry of cost 3) and sharing that with people I enjoy.

The best name I’ve arrived at so far to encompass all that is a “Full Life List.” I’m open to a better label, but I’m sticking with that for now.

Here’s my ever-in-progress Full Life list:

Photograph beautiful places in the world

This one combines two things I really enjoy: photography and travel. My trend over the last few years seems to be decreasing travel and photography, although travel slightly increased this year. My initial goal was to do this quarterly, but I ended up averaging almost double that. I visited:

Cusco, Peru
Los Angeles, CA
Hawaii
Scotland
Atlanta, GA
New York, NY (multiple times)
San Francisco, CA
Vancouver Island, Canada
Stowe, VT
Cape May, NJ

I took 17,739 photos in 2024, 14% less than the 20,722 photos I took in 2023.

But I do feel that, though the quantity of travel and photography is decreasing, the quality is definitely increasing.

I turned 40 this year and took a bucket list trip to Peru. Talk about strengthening and stretching. From immediately getting altitude sickness to the 7-mile hike in pouring rain since our train was suddenly cancelled—I’m not a hiker by any means, so this sucked—to see one of the wonders of the world, it was definitely a trip I’ll never forget for this milestone birthday.

Perhaps tied to my mid-life crisis was some anxiety about how long I’d be able to keep up my level of income, so, like many, I entertained the idea of selling all of our possessions and moving to an island for “the simpler life.” We beta tested this idea last year with Mexico, and this year we decided to do the same in Hawaii, visiting Oahu and Maui. We quickly realized this wasn’t the place for us, though it was incredibly beautiful and we made some lifelong memories together including a near-death experience that’s permanently etched in our brains.

I took Sidda and Char on a few-day road trip through Scotland with a quick detour to speak at a conference. They loved it! Their favorite part was seeing all the newborn lambs littered literally everywhere we drove in the Isle of Skye. We’re currently looking for a similar trip to do in 2025. Maybe Iceland. Open to suggestions.

I went on a salmon fishing trip in the Canadian wilderness with 20 entrepreneurs, organized by Chris Do. None of those are words that seasick-prone, introverted, shaky swimmer me would have put together, but here we are! I loved it and made some great new friends in the process.

As per my annual tradition, I blocked out a few days to shoot photos of fall foliage, this year in gorgeous Stowe, VT. Wanting to challenge myself, I decided to try and make a short film in addition to taking photos.

I learned that Cape May, NJ is one of the best locations in the world to see bird migration, not even 2 hours away from where I live right outside of Philadelphia. I joined a bird photography workshop to pick up some tips on how to capture great images of fast-moving wildlife. I even spotted a few river otters!

Eat at Michelin-starred restaurants

I really enjoy eating delicious food, especially at places where there’s an exorbitant amount of care put into the food I’m eating. I think it’s because it engages all of my senses.

These kinds of meals tend to happen at Michelin-starred restaurants, but this year I found that I enjoyed more meals at non-Michelin restaurants (even though I personally think they deserve Michelin stars).

My goal for 2024 was to do this once a quarter, and I’m about at that pace if not slightly over.

Jesse Ito’s Royal Sushi in Philly continues to be my favorite restaurant in the world.

Virgilio Martinez’s MIL Centro is a culinary journey through all of the microclimates of the Peruvian highlands. This meal was special, not only because it was on my 40th birthday, but because we spent a few hours prior to eating exploring the food lab and meeting the locals that plant and harvest the food and make textiles.

Provenance in Philly is the newest addition to my favorites list. Nich Bazik has created an incredible menu that’s as good as just about anywhere else I’ve been.

In addition to the really exceptional places, I also I ate at some other great new restaurants this year: EMei, Oltremare, Vetri Cucina, Cookshop, Monkeypod Kitchen, Fond, Leoda’s Kitchen & Pie Shop, Paia Fish Market, Los Tacos No. 1, Ogawa Sushi and Kappo, Lyla Lila, Atlas, Tartine, Quince, Sushi by Sea, Yuhiro Sushi, Sura Korean Cuisine, Amourette, Butler’s Pantry, The Pier House, Lacroix, Per Se, and The Gallery by Odo.

One thing that’s made restaurants even more exciting for me as someone who likes to take food photos is that I picked up a used Canon RF 100m f/2.8L IS USM Macro Lens. It’s the perfect lens for food photography, especially in capturing all the crisp details chefs toil over.

As with all my hobbies, I’m constantly looking for ways to subsidize them. This year, I’m really grateful to have partnered with Omlet at Render and Config to bring special dinners to design system professionals at each event. I’d love to do more of this in 2025.

Play basketball

I’ve enjoyed playing basketball since I was a kid and I’d play every day as soon as I got home from school. I slowed down as an adult for years, but I’m proud to say that I’ve averaged about once a week for the last two years, which was exactly my goal.

For the first time in my life, I actually think I’m becoming a good basketball player—though I say that hesitantly. I’m no G-League candidate or anything like that, but I can just about consistently count on myself to contribute a few points, some great passes, and some important defensive stops to any team I’m on. As a kid, I was always the smallest and the shortest on the court, so I learned to play that way. I’m only now realizing that I’m no longer that short, scrawny kid and that I can play differently now with the body I have.

A special basketball highlight of 2024 was to organize a basketball game at Figma’s Config in partnership with Wix Studio. I had a lot of fun bringing together around 50 people for some active, sweating time after a few days of sitting in a conference center. I’m thinking about running it back again in 2025.

Buy rare sneakers

I thought I’d get a new pair of sneakers every quarter, but I’m actually at just under double that pace.

Some new pickups this year:

Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Yellow Toe”
Nike Dunk High “Chenille Swoosh” Safety Orange
Jay1s TAXI Deconstructed
Nike Air Force 1 Mid × Off-White White/Varsity Maize
Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Black Gold”
Nike KD Trey 5 × “Wolf Grey”
Off-Louis LV Air Jordan 1

Em also started making some custom accessories for fun. We toyed around with the idea of selling them, but the timing wasn’t right to launch something new with other stuff we had going on. Maybe we’ll revisit this idea sometime in the future.

Work

Of course, I can’t wholly talk about the life I want to live without talking about my work, the thing that underwrites it all financially. I wish I was wealthy enough to not need to work—I’m working on it—but it’s partially called a “Rich Life” list for a reason.

It’s my second full year of what I’ve come to call a “professional walkabout.” I shut down my agency SuperFriendly in 2022 and have been exploring many different business ventures since.

What have I been doing all year? A combination of consulting & coaching, client work, and creating/sustaining/growing my own products and ventures.

I spent the last year acting as a senior director of design systems for The New York Times, leading the team and helping to strategize around how to increase the adoption and implementation of the Times Product Language (TPL) design system product and process across all of the product and feature teams. I did some design system consulting and conversation with Capital One, Advance Local, We the Collective, and Showit. I did individual coaching with a design system principal designer looking to get a new job; an entrepreneur looking to growing their consulting business; a few freelancers wanting to grow their invididual practices into running small agencies; and a few designers looking to make the leap from working for someone to freelancing on their own.

Despite primarily moving away from this kind of work, I also art directed the website for the Harris/Walz presidency; designed the agency website for my friends at NSMBL; did a tiny bit of greenfield thinking on a project with my friends at Blackbox Infinite; designed and built a website for a financial services firm; and did some branding work for my brother’s financial strategy business.

Hours-wise, I worked 1,851 hours, about 36 hours/week. The distribution of my effort generally broke down like this:

Category	Hours (%)
My own products	60%
Consulting & coaching	18%
Vacation	13%
Client work	5%
Sponsorships	3%

(For a detailed description of the revenue breakdown, check out the 2024 info on my Salary & Income page.)

Design System University

In last year’s review, I promised that “lots of changes on the way for DSU in early 2024.” I wasn’t lying.

This time last year, we had 3 paid courses available: Make Design Systems People Want to Use for $499, How to Use a Design System in Figma for $29, and How to Use a Design System in Code for $29. We had around 300 students between those 3 courses. I was a bit discouraged about both the small number of students and revenue. I was even more discouraged that I didn’t really have much else available so that more people could learn about design systems, a skill that I think will become more and more important for digital professionals over the next few years.

Last year, I had also released a design systems course with Dribbble called “Scaling Design Systems.” It had great reception when it launched, but Dribbble changed their education model later in the year to move away from online education. Fortunately, they granted me back the distribution rights for my course, and I re-released it through Design System University as Design Systems 101. This was a much better and more modern course, so I made the other three free and priced this one at $101, figuring even a small amount of revenue from it was better than it sitting on a shelf doing nothing. Even moreso, I hoped that pricepoint would allow more people to learn about design systems, especially with purchasing power parity on top of that. I’m super proud that we now have more than 10,000 students that have taken at least one course and 100 people who have taken all four. I hope to grow both of those numbers in 2025.

I ran 2 more cohorts of our Design System in 90 Days program, one of my favorite things to teach as I get to spend 1–2 hours every week for 12 weeks talking with some really smart people about complex design system challenges they’re facing. Across the 2 cohorts in 2024 were amazing students from The 19th, Jahez, Twitch, The New York Times, Globant, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Brunstad Christian Church, the California State Government, SiriusXM, and more. We’re running our next one in February, and I can’t wait to meet the new batch of students.

I know we’ll have to expand our offerings in 2025 to keep pace with the demand of design system proficiency in the industry. I’ve been having a few conversations with other folks who have great ideas for courses they want to teach (both self-paced and live), and I love the idea that courses could be taught by someone other than me. We’ve also had a few inquiries for not just training but help designing and building the kinds of design systems we’re teaching, so we may pilot a few small service offerings in 2025. Lastly, there’s a product idea I’ve had in my head for a while that I think could really help design system teams with a major hurdle many of them have. Perhaps 2025 will be the year I get that product out the door.

Design That Scales

My design system book Design That Scales came out in November 2023, so 2024 was the first full year it was in circulation. I’m blown away by the reception!

It was Rosenfeld Media’s best selling book of the year!

The book received a very positive Kirkus review with a verdict of “Get it,” one of the most prestigious review publications in the literary world. They called it:

A lively and paradigm-challenging evaluation of what makes good system designs work at any scale.

Swoon! Not only that, but the book received a Kirkus star, an especially coveted designation awarded to books of “exceptional merit.” Only about 10% of the 10,000+ books reviewed annually receive a star!

We’ve run 3 Design System University book clubs for the book in 2024, and I’ve heard of at least a dozen companies that have used the book in their internal book clubs. How cool is that?!

Also, the book was published in Japanese!

Great Job!

Em and I started Great Job! last year as a way for us to work together on something that we’re both passionate about: helping parents raise amazing kids. This was the thing I was most excited to work on in 2024. Our podcast even won a Gold W3 Award in the “Individual Episodes & Specials, Family & Kids” category and a Bronze Signal Award in the “General—Family & Child-Raising” category! We started to noodle on some season 2 ideas, but unfortunately, this took a backseat to a bunch of other stuff we had going on. I’m not sure that we’ll have much time to devote to this in 2025 either, so this might not get much love until 2026.

This website

Last year’s review post was the first time I explicit wrote down that “I’m a writer,” perhaps an obvious sentiment from someone who’s written 3 books and published hundreds of thousands of words on the internet over the last 19 years. I’ve fully embraced that identity this year, at the very least on this website, writing 53 articles, 26% more than last year’s 42 articles. (For reference, these are the same articles that go out through my email newsletter and LinkedIn newsletter each week.)

My top three most popular posts this year:

Last year, I also committed to taking this site seriously as an important part of my business by refining my branding and positioning, tightening up the information architecture and content strategy, and hiring a team to take over the production of the site. I haven’t publicly made good on that commitment yet, but if all goes well, this will hopefully be the last post you read on this version of the site. That’s right: the new site is almost here.

Hiring

For those following along, it’s probably no surprise to hear about my realization that I can’t grow successful businesses without help.

2024 was my first full year of working with my new executive assistant, Camz Uyamot. It’s been incredible to work with her. She powers a lot of the stuff across all of my businesses. If you’ve emailed me, received a Design System University certificate, interacted with a social media post, or gotten a Doordash gift card for a group lunch, you’ve experienced something that Camz had a hand in. She’s a big reason I worked 11% less in 2024 but our revenue jumped by 72%. Now that a lot of our systems are humming, I can’t wait to see what we do together in 2025.

I’m also deep into the process of looking for a designer who can ship to be a regular collaborator with Camz and me. I received 123 applications, interviewed 12—asking 6 questions in the interview—and narrowed it down to 3 people I did paid test projects with. Those test projects have either already ended or are ending now. I’ll share more about this process in 2025, as you’ll see some of the work they did for me start to roll out.

I’ve also changed my tune a bit on hiring, partially as a result of this process. I’ve never had a designer “on staff” with me before, and I believed that lack was a barrier to my business growing. While I do still believe that, I’ve also reminded myself to stick with stuff that has worked for me in the past, stuff that I’m good at. SuperFriendly’s business model was building teams of freelancers and contractors, something I learned to do and manage really well over 10 years. So, a team that includes a few regulars and a few guest contractors from time-to-time could be a good mix of old and new to take it to the next level.

This year, I hired 2 people from Fiverr to execute a few fast, commoditized services for me. I also commissioned a few people to do some higher-value custom work for me, like illustration and specific flavors of web development.

I’m eager to see how this model plays out in the future.

My own distribution

For the last few years, I’ve really been exploring the strength of my own audience and distribution. My hypotheses was that distribution my content directly would be better than partnering with other distributors, but I’ve had to qualify and specify what “better” means to me.

Over the last two decades of my career, I’ve been very fortunate to have conference organizers invite me to their stages; employers allow me to publishers allow me to make books with them; podcast interviewers have me as a guest on their shows; education platforms host my courses with them; and more. I’m very grateful for these opportunities.

I’ve also had conference organizers reject my applications or exploit my involvement; employers attempt to censor my extra-curricular activities; publishers take the lion’s share of the profit split without fulfilling their responsibilities; podcast interviewers not publish the episodes I gave up my time for; education platforms change their business models; and more. Those aren’t complaints. That’s business. I accept that. I’m not the kind of person who asks business owners to change what they’re doing; I think it’s their right to run their businesses how they want to. But I don’t have to like it, and I almost always have the ability to choose something different.

There are two sides of a content creator’s business: making a product and marketing/selling that product. The choice most new content creators face is that they have a product—a course, a book, a template, etc.—that is valuable but too small of an audience turn that potential value into a lucrative business. So they partner with a distributor: some person, company, or platform that has a larger audience. The premise is simple: for a fee—either a one-time fee or, more commonly, a rolling royalty—that distributor turns their audience’s attention to the creator’s product, either turning them into present customers for the creator or adding them to the creator’s audience to become customers sometime in the future. Often times, the distributor has no or little intellectual property of their own; their business is distributing the work of their partner creators. That essentially splits up the work: the creator makes the product, and the distributor markets and sells that product.

What I’ve learned over the past few years is that many distributors aren’t as good as marketing and selling as they claim to be, often times because they don’t have a large enough or activated enough audience of their own to market and sell to. They seem to operate under the pretense that, if the content is good, the audience will come. That often leaves the creator with the conundrum of having to market their own work, but only realizing that after they’ve contractually agreed to a royalty with their distributor.

The simple but difficult solution for the creator is to grow their own audience to sell to directly, rather than indirectly selling to someone else’s audience. It’s a tale as old as time: if and when you can, cut out the middleman. Digital production companies figured that out in the early 2000s and stopped working through ad agencies, instead finding ways to work directly with clients. It’s more work for you, but a lot of times it’s worth it. Although it’s hard to grow a truly engaged audience, it’s also never been an easier time in history to do so.

It took me way too long to realize that I have an audience of my own—and a large, engaged one at that.

That realization is certainly correlated to why I’ve reduced the amount of conference speaking I’m doing lately. Early in my career, speaking at conferences was a major milestone, a big aspiration for me. I got to the point where I was doing about 10–15 conferences each year. In 2024, I spoke at 5 events: UX Scotland, Webflow’s NYC Design System Workshop, Render, Config, and Knapsack’s NYC Leadership Summit. The opportunity cost to speak at an in-person conference is high. There’s time spent writing a talk—for me about 40–80 hours—2 days of travel; introvert energy spent in a room full of strangers, some of whom want to talk to me after I deliver a talk; days away from other work; and days away from home… all to give a talk to 50 to 1000 people. Compare that to a Zoom call I recently hosted online that was attended by 245 people and watched to date by 1,800 people or the online session I taught last year around design system planning that 600 people attended and 7,400 later watched and participating in an in-person conference becomes a tougher value proposition except for a select few.

There’s a good middle ground for me in having online conversations with smaller groups of people, most of them in an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) or, more specifically, “Ask Me Anything about a particular topic” (design systems, freelancing, design business, etc) kind of format. In 2024, I met with a bunch of GV’s portfolio companies to talk design systems as part of their Design Speaker Series; joined Ben Callahan’s “The Question” twice; did an AMA on design systems with Design Better’s community; did an AMA for Molly Hellmuth’s Design System Bootcamp community; a fireside chat about pricing for Ladies that UX Seattle; an AMA about design systems and creativity for Disney’s creative teams; and a mini-workshop with all product designers at The New York Times. These sessions are pretty low effort for me in terms of preparation and I can deliver a lot of value for the teams I talk too.

I’m torn about podcasts. In 2024, I did 12 podcast appearances. I talked about creativity with Ross Hatton on the Design & Thrive X Space; communication on Design Dads; design system practices with Jane Portman on UI Breakfast; “following the fun” with Dave Gray on The Art of the Possible; the evolution of a designer with Jeremy on Beyond UX Design; the job market and freelancing with Taylor Desseyn; design system chaos with Sophia Prater on The Object-Oriented UX Podcast; freelancing with Ansh Mera at The Cutting Edge School; my design journey with Britton Stipetic on Low-Key Legends; and design systems with Sera Tajima. I’ve been declining most recent podcast appearance requests because the value exchange is often lopsided. A lot of people who ask me to be on their podcast seem to do so because I can bring attention to their thing; I’m not mad at that—that’s the game—but I struggle to see the upside for me; essentially, I become the distributor for them without any compensation (financially, or otherwise) that I realize from it. For that, I’d honestly rather publish my own stuff to my own channels.

Again, I’m grateful for the distributors I’ve partnered with in my early career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them, and I hope I’ve delivered on my end of the bargain in those partnerships. For this stage of my career, though, I’m focused on different channels that help me connect more directly with my audience: my own newsletter and social media.

Like last year, my newsletter is one of the things I sent consistently every week without fail, and that shows in the numbers.

I started 2024 with 37,000 readers between my email newsletter, the version on LinkedIn, and this website (I post the same thing to each of these three places each week). I’m finishing 2024 with 58,400 between the three.

(I started posting to Substack as well, and, although the number of subscribers slowly grew, I wasn’t really getting a lot of signs that anyone was interested in me posting there, so I stopped doing it.)

Every week, I receive lots of feedback from my readers about what’s resonating, from as simple of a 👍🏽 or 👎🏽 reaction to nice notes I get over email, DMs, and survey responses. This direct feedback loop is something I love having and will certainly continue to foster in 2025, and I’m constantly looking for ways to make the things I share more valuable for my readers.

2025 newsletter goal: 100k readers.

Though I have a large audience already, I’m still looking to grow that audience, to find more of my tribe that resonates with the things I think, say, and do. Social media is one of the best ways to do this that I’ve found.

X (@danmall)

(I swore I’d never call it “X” instead of “Twitter,” but here we are.)

X has always been my largest and most engaged platform, until this year. The combination of leadership and algorithm changes definitely had an effect on my posts, and I haven’t yet figured out how to work in the new system. I’m not sure that I’ll give this much effort.

I started 2024 with 42.4k followers with the goal of getting to 100k. As of the end of December 2024, I have 45.1k followers, a 6% increase.

2025 X goal: 100k followers.

LinkedIn (/in/danmall)

Last year, I said I would take LinkedIn seriously in 2024, and I did.

I started 2024 with 28,210 followers and 2.3M impressions. As of the end of December 2024, I have 45,295 followers (61% increase) and 4.1M impressions (a 78% increase).

2025 LinkedIn goal: 100k followers.

Instagram (@danmallteaches)

I’m starting to get the hang of Instagram. Posting there takes signficantly more time for me than anywhere else—even though I’m a designer… maybe especially because I’m a designer—but I’m starting to learn how to make better content in less time.

I started 2024 with 4,223 followers. As of the end of December 2024, I have 6,243 followers (a 48% increase).

I joined a coaching program to help me learn how to connect better on Instagram with people I can help, and I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully that’ll show up in the numbers in 2025.

2025 Instagram goal: 50k followers.

YouTube (@danmallteaches)

YouTube is still the wildcard here for me.

I started 2024 with 3,600 followers. As of the end of December 2024, I have 6,250 followers (a 74% increase).

That’s more than my growth on Instagram, but I’ve only posted 2 videos to YouTube in 2024 as opposed to 73 posts on Instagram.

YouTube will definitely be part of my 2025 business strategy, especially as I’ve announced my new podcast coming soon.

2025 YouTube goal: 50k followers.

2025 work strategy and goals

I’ve spent the last year trying different ways to talk to my audience and fans directly to find out what I can do for them. What I’m learning is that people want access to my experience because I’ve done a lot of things people in my audience aspire to do—level up in their career, start a business, find a decent work/life balance—and work directly with me to help them find it.

My services and consulting experience and general content creation has largely been around design systems for the last few years, and I fully intend on continuing to share what I’ve learned there. But more people seem to want strategy and guidance around career growth, professional progression, higher income, and entreprenuerial encouragement… all things I have experience with and thoughts on. My recent experiment of answering some questions live that people are struggling with seemed to strike a chord with the attendees—and lit me up to boot. I love sharing my “secrets” so that others can use them too!

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people are interested in these topics, given the state of the design industry. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people just like us laid off with little to no recompense, reinforcing the idea that our livelihoods aren’t in our own hands as much as we thought. Fittingly, a lot of designers are realizing there are other options, and they have the ability to make them work.

As someone who’s been well down that path for the last decade, I’d love to tell people about what damsels and dragons they’ll encounter there. That could be as easy as answering simple questions that have complex answers, like “How much should I charge for my services?” I wrote a short book called Pricing Design in 2016 that I really didn’t do much else with. My publisher A Book Apart has recently closed its doors, so the book is no longer available. However, I’ll be re-releasing it soon—for free!—so that more people can learn a crucial skill that’s still very daunting for many.

But books only go so far.

In early 2025, I’ll also be start a group coaching program for freelancers, small studios, and agency owners that want to take their service businesses to the next level of income and reputation. I’m still working on the core of the program, so I don’t have a lot of details to share about it yet, but the general shape of it will be a combination of instruction, discussion, practice, and review so I can get specific, tactical, and actionable with everyone in the program. It won’t be cheap, but I’m designing it in a way that I can all but guarantee that anyone who makes the financial investment on this program will make significantly more money than they spent.

If you’re interested in a program like that and can commit to spending a decent chunk of money (probably a few thousand dollars) and time (probably 3-6 months) investing in your business, subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send out details once I have them to share. I’m committing to spending a good chunk of my 2025 helping designers level up financially and professionally.

My 2025 goal is to help the students in this program collectively make $10 million. From that, my goal for my own business is to break $1 million.

Home & family

The same sentiment I shared last year applies: the older my daughters get and the closer Em and I get, the less apt I am to share about what we do publicly. I like that we have things that we privately enjoy together. So, I’ll share a few small things here, but not much.

Sidda and Charlie are 13 and 11 now, in 8th and 5th grade respectively. These are particular grades, as Em and I met when we were both in 5th grade and we became good friends in 8th grade (while dating each others’ best friends). It’s jarring to realize that my daughters may have potentially met and/or are friends with with a person that may become their life partner. I’m not the “bring me a shotgun, my little girls aren’t ever dating” kind of dad; I do hope they eventually find someone to spend their lives with who will love them and treat them the best. But I will admit that I think of that day as very far away and I’m a bit scared and sad of it being sooner than I think. I know that day is not today, and I do think it will be here before I’m ready for it.

They’ve both been doing jiu jitsu for last 4 months, and I think they’re starting to enjoy it! We’re starting to lightly have college and career conversations and casually exploring some interests and options, from art to law to acting to science and more.

Em’s always doing interesting stuff and tends to be very private about it, so that’s all I’ll say about it here. I’ve always admired her bravery, uniqueness, sensitivity, and sense of adventure. She’s the coolest and most beautiful person I’ve ever encountered. If you’re wondering, she’s doing awesome. Thanks for asking.

Dad & bro

Like last year, I’ve been spending more time with my dad and brother. I hired my dad as my accountant last year, and, if you’re wondering, yes, it is very weird to have your dad literally all up in your business. But it’s been great too. His 40 years of accounting experience has definitely come in handy, and his strategies have given me some financial paths forward that I’ve never been able to see before that are very exciting.

My brother handles my investments and has set up some really great solutions that put me at ease about finances later in life as well as for my family in case something tragic happens to me. Also, my brother and his wife had a daughter last year, so like the surprise FaceTimes with my new niece even though we’re supposed to be talking portfolio allocation.

Mostly, I like the excuse to talk to and see them all more.

The flood

Earlier this year, we were away on vacation the week that it rained pretty hard at home. We came back to a completely soaked basement which we initially thought was from the rain but actually was due to a broken water heater. We have homeowners’ insurance, but this was the first time we had to file a claim for something as big as this. Luckily, my dad suggested we work with a public adjuster and recommended a company he’d used before. Though the process was long—it took about 8 months to finalize all the back and forth between adjuster and insurance company—they helped us get a lot more than I think we would have gotten on our own.

2025 will be the year of basement renovations.

Health, wellness, and self-care

I turned 40 in 2024.

I don’t feel much different, and I’d like to not. I heard a few years ago that muscular strength is inversely associated with mortality; in other words, people start to decline as they get older from lack of strength. So, I figure I should work on being strong now. I don’t think I’m very strong, and a career that’s largely sedentary isn’t helping. I know every little bit contributes, so I raise and lower my desk a few times each day so I’m both standing (on a balance board) and sitting. I play basketball once or twice a week. Em and I play racquetball together every once in a while.

I know the “right” answer is lifting weights. But ugh, I hate lifting weights. It’s so boring to me, and I hate feeling sore afterwards. Yes, I know it’s good for me. It still sucks.

Also, between going to the gym, working out, coming home, showering, and getting ready, that’s a lot of time. Especially during times of year when I have a lot of consulting clients, my days are filled with a lot of meetings and a 2-hour digression somewhere in the middle of it doesn’t always feel like a priority for me.

I have a few small strategies to help me overcome all of this, which have been working to a small degree.

As a few consulting gigs finished this year, suddenly I had more freedom to structure my day to make room for exercise.
Instead of going to the gym to go to the gym, I go to the gym to listen to audiobooks and podcasts.
I remind myself that exercise actually gives more energy and jumpstarts both creativity and productivity. It doesn’t always feel like it, but the science exists.
I read that short workouts are better than nothing, and also that short, intense workouts can be more beneficial than longer workouts. So, I loaded up some Nike Training Club and BetterMe workouts and the Science of Stretching program so I can do them at home in a short amount of time. In practice though, it was short-lived. I did less than 20 of these workouts in 2024.

Still though, I’m trying.

I generally sleep pretty well; at least I feel like I do. I usually feel well-rested when I wake up. I average about 6–7 hours of sleep each night. My sleep app calls my sleep quality 70%, slightly less than the United States average of 75%, and I have no idea what that means.

I had a goal to not throw up all year, since I threw up once last in 2023. I almost made it through the year, but unfortunately, I woke up nauseous and with a migraine one day in December. I think it was a week of eating a lot of rich food (which I usually don’t do outside of my quarterly restaurant indulgences) and some wonky barometric pressure changes which sometimes make me feel rough. Ah well, 2025 goal is to not throw up.

I started Invisalign in September, and I’ll be done by March. Already seeing a lot of improvement with the straightness of my teeth, and it’s also making me brush and floss a lot more frequently.

I still drink a lot of soda.

Books

In 2024, I read or attempted to read:

100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi ★★★★★
Feel-Good Productivity, by Ali Abdaal ★★★★☆
Million Dollar Weekend, by Noah Kagan ★★★★☆
~~Trash Talk, by Rafi Kohan~~ (abandoned at 11%)
Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans ★★★☆☆
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, by Nick Gray ★★★★☆
Your First Million, by Arlan Hamilton ★★★★☆
~~The Mountain Is You, by Brianna West~~ (abandoned at 38%)
This is Personal, by Brennan Dunn ★★★★☆
Free Time, by Jenny Blake ★★★★☆
Who Does What By How Much? by Jeff Gothelf ★★★★☆
Untangling Critical Race Theory, by Ed Uszynski ★★★★☆
Day Trading Attention, by Gary Vaynerchuk ★★★★☆
~~The New Adolescence, by Christine Carter~~ (abandoned at 60%)
Never Enough, by Andrew Wilkinson ★★★☆☆
The Algebra of Wealth, by Scott Galloway ★★★★★
Co-Intelligence, by Ethan Mollick ★★★★☆
Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey ★★★★☆
You Deserve a Tech Union, by Ethan Marcotte ★★★☆☆
The Six Pack, by Brad Balukjian (currently reading)
You Are What You Watch, by Walter Hickey (currently reading)

2025

Even though my word(s) of the year last year didn’t really change much, I still liked it.

My word for 2025 is “Runway.”

Wishing you a wonderful start to 2025!

Would You Pay You For That?

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest challenges for a business owner is deciding whether doing a particular task is worth it. Here’s a simple way to make that choice.

Calculate your effective rate for any unit of time (hour, day, week, month, etc) by taking your annual salary and dividing it by the number of units you worked. For example, if you were paid $100,000 last year and you worked a standard full-time work year with 2 weeks of vacation, your effective rate would be:

$50/hour ($100,000 ÷ 2,000 hours)
$406.50/day ($100,000 ÷ 246 days)
$2,000/week ($100,000 ÷ 50 weeks)
$8,695.65/month ($100,000 ÷ 11.5 months)

If you run a design business and you design for your clients, that means you spent some amount of your year paying yourself $50/hour to design for your clients. That seems reasonable if you compare it to being paid, say, $15/hour to work at a fast food restaurant. You get paid more than that because you have a higher value job that requires a more skilled worker.

But, if you run a design business, you probably aren’t just designing for your clients. You’re probably doing other things too, like replying to emails and doing some bookkeeping.

Would you pay yourself $50/hour to reply to emails?

Would you pay yourself $50/hour to do bookkeeping?

Unless you personally enjoy either of these things, the answer is probably “no,” for different reasons.

You probably wouldn’t pay yourself $50/hour to reply to emails because you might be able to hire someone like a virtual assistant or a college student to reply to certain emails on your behalf for $25/hour or even $15/hour. This is an area that’s not worth it for you to do yourself because you could save money by paying someone less skilled to do it for less.

You probably wouldn’t pay yourself $50/hour to do bookkeeping because, unless you took some accounting classes, you probably suck at bookkeeping. Why pay yourself a high rate to do something you suck at? It would make more sense to pay a professional bookkeeper or an accountant $50/hour to do something they’re trained to do than to pay yourself the same amount to do something you’re not trained to do. The savings doesn’t come from a lower rate; it comes from the fact that it might take you 2 days to do your books while it would take a professional bookkeeper 2 hours. Rather than paying yourself $900 (16 hours × $50/hour) to do your books poorly, pay a bookkeeper $100 (2 hours × $50/hour) to do them well.

These are the gateways to delegation, which is a gateway to growing and scaling your business.

Next time you find yourself doing a task that’s not your main job, ask yourself, “Would someone else pay me to do this? Would I pay me to do this?”

581 Miles

Dan Mall — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

There’s a billboard I pass by on the NJ Turnpike when I drive from Philly to New York. It says:

↶ 581 miles. Buc-ee’s.

I’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s before so I don’t know anything about it, but the internet tells me that it’s a chain of travel centers and gas stations known for clean bathrooms.

Despite my unfamiliarity, I’m always impressed by the swagger of this sign. To be so bold as to suggest I drive 581 miles in the opposite direction to visit this place is audacious. And honestly, it kinda makes me want to.

Whether you’re trying to attract new clients/customers or lobbying for a promotion at work, is your pitch as confident as “↶ 581 miles?”

If you don’t believe in what you’re doing this much, what makes you think that anyone else will?

The Small Words of Big Challenges

Dan Mall — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

The meeting was about to start, and Mike wasn’t there.

I went to his office to find him working at his desk.

“You coming to this meeting?” I inquired.

I was a newly minted associate design director at Big Spaceship, the least tenured of all the design directors. The agency was structured as collection of autonomous teams, and each team had a design director and a senior producer at the helm. I had just gotten promoted, which meant I now had my own team of 6, and I was working on my first account. Being new to the role, my manager—the CEO Mike Lebowitz—came to all my client meetings.

But he wasn’t in this one.

“You coming to this meeting?” I inquired.

“Why? Do you need me?” he responded.

“No…oooo?” I questioned, looking for any signal that this wasn’t the vote of confidence I hoped it was.

“Ok then.” He returned to his work.

No one has ever run a meeting more confidently that I did that day.

Running that meeting, running my team, and running multiple accounts gave me the self-assurance to eventually run my own agency after I left.

I met up with Brian Williams for lunch one day when he was visiting Philly. I was about 5 years into running SuperFriendly, and our revenue hovered somewhere in the mid-to-high 6-figures each year.

Brian asked, “Do you think the SuperFriendly model could scale?”

“I do.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t really need to.”

“So?”

Huh. I had no counter for this two-letter challenge. Brian knew I was looking for the next challenge in my business. He knew I thought there was untapped potential that I never really tried to realize to date.

But he didn’t say any of that. He didn’t have to. All he said was, “So?”

Over the next few years, I experimented with different ways to scale an agency, from growing to a team of 65 to curating a network of 700 freelancers to bringing in 8-figures of revenue.

Sometimes the biggest challenges come from the smallest words.

Try It On

Dan Mall — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Apropos for a Black Friday newsletter issue, I think you should know: I’m a shopper. I like shopping. It’s popular for designers to be minimalists and get by with as few material possessions as possible. I admire it, but that’s never been me.

As the year is starting to wind-down, you’re might be thinking about setting yourself up for financial success in 2025. 3¢ Accounting, run by Tan Mall—if you noticed the name similarity, yep, that’s my dad!—is offering free consultations for readers of this newsletter to help set you up for financial success. I’m a client too: I had a 10-year financial independence plan that he helped me shorten down to only 2 years by redirect my income to a few different places and doing some restructuring of my savings. Whether it’s debt reduction, some forecasting, or other financial concerns, it’s at least worth a conversation. Visit 3¢ Accounting to drop them a line, and let them know I sent you for your free consultation.

I like possibilities. I like the multiverse, the potential futures that could be. When I try on a shirt or a pair of sneakers, I get to be a different person for a few minutes in that fitting room. And I get to decide if I want to be that person for longer than a few minutes. I don’t wear Hawaiian shirts because I don’t think they suit me, but I try them on every now and again to see if I’ve become the kind of person who could wear Hawaiian shirts. (Currently? No.) I like how Jordan 3’s look, but not on me. (I’m a Jordan 1 guy.) But I still try them on occasionally because I like thinking I could one day be the kind of person who looks good in Jordan 3’s.

This mindset extends further than clothing and physical appearance. I like thinking about who I am and who else I could be in a year, or a month, or a week, or tomorrow, or today. Am I the kind of person who starts businesses? I wasn’t, until I was. Am I the kind of person who can run a marathon? I’m not today, but maybe I could be in 6 months. I like trying on new versions of myself to see if they fit me. Our industry generally looks down on the idea of imposter syndrome, but I think it also has its advantages.

Lately, I’ve been trying on an uncomfortable idea. I’ve always been an ambitious person, constantly striving to reach new achievements. A new thought occurred to me: what if I actually have already achieved everything I’m going to achieve in my life? Though jarring, it’s plausible: my wife and kids give me a full and fulfilling life, I’ve experienced more business and career success than I had ever dreamed, and I’ve been able to impact the lives of many others through teaching, writing, speaking, and working. I know it’s important to not take the exercise to morbid trains of thought like “I have nothing left to live for” or anything like that. I already know what it’s like to live like someone who wants more; what does it feel like to live like someone where everything new is a bonus, not a desire and certainly not a need? How would that person act, operate, and live? And how different is that person from who I am today?

Though uneasy, I’m trying it on.

I’ll report back on how it goes.

Who can you try on? And what doors does even the thought exercise open for you? Remember: like an ill-fitting jacket or a sweater can makes your skin look a weird color, you can always take it off if you decide it’s not you.

But can it be?

The File Folder Structure Every Designer Needs

Dan Mall — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

As I was interviewing candidates for my “designer who can ship” position, I asked a few how they picked typefaces. One person’s answer stood out above the rest. They shared their screen to show me a folder of inspiration on their hard drive. Dear reader: the folders structure was immaculate. In that moment, I immediately realized I was talking to a professional.

What is it about a clean workspace that signals expertise?

Raise the roof

Cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall coined the term proxemics in 1963 to denote “the interrelated observations and theories of humans' use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture.” His seminal research includes the observations that people tend to feel confined in small chapels with low ceilings and experiencing a sense of liberation and openness in grand cathedrals with high ceilings.

In 2007, academic researchers Joan Meyer-Levy and Rui Zhu studied participants in rooms with different ceiling heights, concluding that higher ceilings encourage psychological freedom and more liberated creative thinking, as summarized in their paper “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use.” Their work is instrumental in understanding the psychological impacts of spatial design. Design writer William Lidwell later labeled this phenomenon “the Cathedral effect,” the idea that our perception of boundaries in defined spaces can greatly direct our attention. As described by writer and essayist Sean Joyner, “our perception of mental space moves in parallel with our perception of physical space.”

Mise en place

There’s a lot we can learn about this concept from other industries. The culinary industry heavily employs the idea of mise en place, a French phrase that literally translates to “everything in its place.” It was formalized and popularized in the 18th century by renowned French chef George-Auguste Escoffier, who drew on his military experience to pioneer kitchen organization systems like the brigade hierarchy. His incorporation of mise en place brought a sense of calm and efficiency to otherwise disorganized and chaotic kitchens.

In his book Ad Hoc at Home, renowned chef Thomas Keller describes the value of mise en place:

Being organized is a skill to develop… Good organization is all about setting yourself up to succeed. It means getting rid of anything that would interfere with the process of making a recipe or preparing an entire meal.

Space for ideas

That’s well and good for architecture and cooking, but how do we apply this to digital design?

Productivity author Tiago Forte gives us a starting point in his book Building a Second Brain:

No one questions the importance of having physical spaces that make us feel calm and centered, but when it comes to your digital workspace, it’s likely you’ve spent little time, if any, arranging that space to enhance your productivity or creativity. As knowledge workers, we spend many hours every day within digital environments—our computers, smartphones, and the web. Unless you take control of those virtual spaces and shape them to support the kinds of thinking you want to do, every minute spent there will feel taxing and distracting.

Here’s the breakdown of how I create my digital mise en place for everything I work on. (Skip the breakdown to see the full structure at the end.)

(I learned this system when I went to work for SPCSHP in 2012. I’ve been using it since then and have remixed it several times to fit my own work.)

Everything is a project, organized by year

In general, the way I think about my work is that everything is a project. Every year, I do multiple projects. So, the organizing principle is that every year gets a folder, and every project is a folder inside that year.

(I should mention that I use a Mac and have for the last two decades, so your mileage might vary if you try to apply this on a PC. I imagine the concepts still hold true, though some of the execution might be a little different.)

Each year folder has a z_archive folder in it (“z” so that it appears at the bottom of an alphabetical list). Once a project is done, move it into the z_archive folder. That way, the year folder only contains projects you’re currently working on.

Project structure

Here’s the guts of it. Every folder has this specific structure:

Assets

Assets are already created files that you’ll use in the course of the work. I start with fonts, logos, and photos. You may also have music for podcast projects, stock footage for video projects, brand guidelines, access documents, and more. If I’m working with clients, the initial goodie bag of files they send you is usually the stuff that goes in here.

Editable Files

Any layered files that might need editing, organized by file type/file extension. Basically any files that you’re actively working on and/or iterating over. This folder has gotten smaller over time for me as more source files move to the cloud and autosave. Even so, for some projects, I’ll save aliases to cloud files to their respective folder because I’m working in so often.

The filename format goes [ FILE CONCEPT ] [ VERSION NUMBER ] [ INITIALS OF LAST PERSON TO WORK ON IT ]. It’s a helpful version of a pseudo file check-in/check-out system, especially if you’re working simultaneously with multiple people using a shared drive.

Review + Delivery

Probably my favorite part of this structure. Editable files are great but they’re not always the best way to share something with someone. The best way is usually a rendered and/or export flat file, something like PNGs, PDFs, MP4s, etc. When designers export comps, they often send them to the Desktop or Documents in a way that tends to clutter those spaces. My first favorite thing about the Review folder is that it give you a place to put those exports. My second favorite things about the Review folder is that you can quickly browse the entire project in chronological order by navigating through the Review folder and using Quick Look. This is much easier than looking through source files to find something you might be looking for.

I name the folders within the review folder in the format YYYY-MM-DD [ SHORT DESCRIPTION ], like 2024-11-22 design round 1.

The Delivery folder is like the Review folder, except specific to more “final” things. When I’m working with clients, the Delivery folder is only the stuff I’ve delivered to them, whereas Review is for things I want to review internally with my team before the client sees it. It’s common for me to copy some things from Review to Delivery, and I like the redundancy of having it in both places.

Entire structure

Here’s the entire file and folder structure at a glance.

2024/
├── Project Name 3/
│   ├── Assets/
│	│   ├── Fonts/
|	|	├── Logos/
|	|	└── Photos/
│   ├── Editable Files/
|	|	├── ai/
|	|	|   ├── logoSketches 02 DP.key
|	|	|   └── z_old
|	|	|	    └── logoSketches 01 DP.key
|	|	├── c4d/
|	|	|   └── packagingDesign 01 DM.c4d
|	|	├── key/
|	|	|   ├── siteAudit 01 CK.key
|	|	|   ├── competitiveAudit 03 DM.key
|	|	|   └── z_old
|	|	|	    ├── competitiveAudit 01 AC.pages
|	|	|	    └── competitiveAudit 02 DM.pages
|	|	├── pages/
|	|	|   ├── requirements 01 DP.pages
|	|	|   ├── productBrief 03 BW.pages
|	|	|   └── z_old
|	|	|	    ├── productBrief 01 GG.pages
|	|	|	    └── productBrief 02 GG.pages
|	|	└── psd/
│	|	    ├── home 02 DM.psd
│	|	    ├── apparelMockups 04 CK.psd
│	|	    └── z_old
│	|	        ├── home 01 DM.psd
│	|	        ├── apparelMockups 01 DM.psd
│	|	        ├── apparelMockups 02 DM.psd
│	|	        └── apparelMockups 03 DM.psd
│   ├── Review/
│	|	├── 2024-10-05 requirements docs
│	|	|	    └── requirements-v1.pdf
│	|	├── 2024-10-06 apparel ideas
│	|	|	    ├── apparel-ideas.png
│	|	|	    └── apparel-reel.mp4
│	|	└── 2024-10-07 requirements revisions
│	|		    └── requirements-v2.pdf
│   └── Delivery/
│		└── 2024-10-07 client brief review
│			    └── brief-review--20241007.pdf
├── Project Name 4/
├── Project Name 5/
├── Project Name 6/
├── Project Name 7/
└── z_archive
    ├── Project Name 2/
    └── Project Name 4/
2023/
2022/
2021/
2020/
2019/
…

Could you see yourself using this? What kinds of file folder organization have you found useful?

Subtle Acts of Exclusion

Dan Mall — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Companies frequently hire me as a consultant to teach their teams how to set up sustainable collaboration and design system practices. In order to do that, I have 2 lessons I consider prerequisites for almost every team I’ve worked with.

The first is going through my “Make Design Systems People Want to Use” 2-hour video course. It becomes a team building activity and a way for the team to develop some shared vocabulary and understanding of design systems and design system process.

The second prerequisite is understanding subtle acts of exclusion, so I teach it.

The term comes from the excellent book of the same title: Subtle Acts of Exclusion by Dr. Tiffany Jana and Dr. Michael Baran.

The term “subtle acts of exclusion” is a welcome and necessary rebrand of the idea of “microaggressions.” Why? Because the term “microaggression” is rebuffed by both parties. For the aggrieved, there’s nothing “micro” about it; it feels big. For the unintentional aggressor, they weren’t trying to be aggressive, and, often times, still don’t think they are.

So Drs. Jana and Baran suggest calling it a “subtle act of exclusion”—SAE for short—as it’s more descriptive, even if admittedly less catchy. These infractions are often subtle, they are acts, and they serve to exclude, both intentionally and unintentionally.

When an SAE has been committed against someone, they often feel one or more of these sentiments:

You are invisible
You (and/or people like you) are inadequate
You are not an individual
You don’t belong
You are not normal
You are a curiosity
You are a threat
You are a burden

These kinds of things happen all the time on teams. I talk about collaboration a lot, and SAE are some of the most common and biggest blockers to collaboration on multi-disciplinary teams. To clear that blocker, we have to be able to identify when an SAE is happening and have a protocol to stop and resolve it.

SAE typically have two direct parties involved:

The initiator, the person who says or nonverbally does the SAE
The subject, the person (or group) excluded by the SAE

There’s also typically an important third party involved: the observers, people who see or hear an SAE. If an observer speaks up, they become an ally. If an observer stays silent, they become a bystander. Often times, when all observers are bystanders, the subject has no other choice than to become their own ally by speaking up for themselves, which may put them in a dangerous situation.

There are 4 guidelines for speaking up and addressing an SAE to become an ally:

Pause the action. Stop an SAE as soon as you can to prevent further damage by saying something like “hold on,” “wait,” “pause,” “ouch,” or other phrases like it. Some teams have developed their own shared protocol for SAE and use custom phrases like “yellow card“ or “time out.”
Assume good intent. The point isn’t to make the initiator feel bad. (If it was, you may actually be committing an SAE against them and become an initiator yourself.) It’s not about calling them out; it’s about calling them up to a higher standard.
Explain why the action was paused. It could be a simple and clear statement, like, “I don’t know if you meant anything by it, but that made me feel like I’m not part of this group.” There are also times you might not know as a subject or an ally, which might sound like, “Something about that doesn’t feel right to me. Can we talk about that?”
Have patience but expect progress. All of this is awkward and difficult. Do your best to balance the grace that changes may not happen right away with the expectation that they eventually need to.

If you’re the unintentional initiator of an SAE, there are 3 guidelines for how to handle this situation:

Acknowledge the feedback with gratitude. Something as simple as “thanks for speaking up about this” or “thanks for letting me know” will suffice. You don’t have to apologize, but you can if you want.
Replace defensiveness with curiosity. This is tough, especially in the moment. Instead of “what did I do?” try to shift more toward “what can I do?” If you’re not in a place to be able to say that, try committing to commit.
Follow through and follow up. Whether in the moment or returning back later, close the loop. If someone told you they don’t like you using a particular word or phrase, commit to them that you won’t any more, or whatever change you’re able to.

I’ve been on every side of this myself many times as subject, initiator, observer, ally, and bystander:

Over the course of multiple meetings a few years ago, a co-worker of mine repeatedly followed up many of my comments with, “What Dan is trying to say is…” After a few occurrences, I paused the SAE to let him know that made me feel like I wasn’t as smart as everyone else and needed a translator. He immediately apologized, thanked me for saying something, and committed to not doing it again. Our collaboration became better from that point on, and I consider him one of my best collaborators to this day, partially because we had that interaction.
In a meeting a few weeks ago, I made a comment intended to bring the team closer together. One of my co-workers spoke up to tell me that my comments made him feel invalidated and erased. He said he needed to leave the meeting as it was no longer productive for him to be there. I asked what I said to make him feel that way, immediately realized my defensiveness, apologized, and offered to talk about it either now or later depending on what was better for him. We talked a few days later, I apologized again and committed to not saying any more things like I had said.

When I share these SAE protocols with teams, there are usually a few people who have the sentiment that this is all overblown and making a mountain of a molehill. (Perhaps you feel that way right now reading this.) But we designers do this in other areas—and even pride ourselves on it. We design error states for forms and 404 pages for websites. We hope we’ve designed clear form labels or understandable information architectures so our users don’t see error states or end up at a “Page not found” dead end, but we make contingency plans anyway. Why not do the same thing with our conversations and interactions?

Overall, the best way to address a subtle act of exclusion is to not commit one in the first place. That means simple and powerful things like thinking before we speak and doing the pre-work to understand others not like us and the things that typically make them feel excluded. Despite our best efforts, though, that may only be enough to reduce but not eliminate SAE, so let’s at least be prepared when they inevitably do happen. Perhaps that can provide some necessary strides that make every team member feel valued, heard, and respected.

The Job of a CEO

Dan Mall — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Note: this article gets into politics towards the end. If you have a sensitivity towards that, I suggest not reading this one, or at least stopping before you reach the last heading (“The power and responsibility of designing culture”).

When I started my own agency SuperFriendly in 2012, I was the CEO—but only in the way that, in any 1-person business, that person is the CEO, and the janitor, and the receptionist, and the accountant, and the everything that the business needs. I’ve heard it referred to as the “Chief Everything Officer.”

At that time, CEO didn’t really mean anything, which is why I didn’t call myself that. Occasionally, I’d refer to myself as the President only when asked by a banker or procurement person somewhere; it was technically correct, as that was the title my lawyer wrote down in the Articles of Incorporation I signed when starting the corporation.

In practice though, I was a designer, art director, creative director, strategist, copywriter, project manager, and developer; that’s what my clients needed and I was the only employee, so that’s what I did.

Then I started to hire contractors to help me. I started by hiring project manager, then a developer, then a designer, then an illustrator. Then more of those folks. Four years later, I had a dozen contractors working on various projects with me. Then 25 contractors. Then 40.

Then 50 who were working with each other, but not with me. (Then 60, then 70.) They weren’t working with me because I wasn’t the designer, or the art director, or the creative director, or anything. Somebody else was each of those things, someone I hired to do that job because they were better at it than I was and seemed to enjoy it more too. I wasn’t anything on my own agency’s projects and accounts.

I was working on something else. As I saw this happening, I had decided that I wanted to learn something new. I wanted to learn how to be a CEO. Not the de facto “Chief Everything Officer” that you have to be when it’s your company. An actual Chief Executive Officer.

But what the heck did that mean?

I tried not to worry too much about filling what the job description should be and instead what was needed. What wasn’t needed was direction around craft or process; the people I hired were already great at that and didn’t need me to interfere with that. But, because of SuperFriendly’s business model of every team consisting of contractors and not full-time employees, people would often be working with a whole team of people they never worked with before. The question they’d often ask each other that’d eventually make its way to me was, “What’s the SuperFriendly way to do this?”

So I made an orientation video.

It outlined a few different kinds of expectations around things like what success meant, when to check in with me (and when not to), what types of failures were acceptable and unacceptable, and more.

I started working on a handbook with my managing director Crystal Vitelli. I hosted weekly “aiming” sessions with our Directors and Producers to make sure they—and we—were all pointed in the same direction in regards to where each account was going.

I workshopped deck after deck of manifestos, trying to articulate and re-articulate a clear mission, vision, and strategy for the company.

In short—though I couldn’t have named it as such at the time—I was working on culture.

Culture

I never really paid too much attention to what culture was, for a few reasons.

First, growing up where my ethnic background as a mixed Pakistani + Filipino kid was almost always in the minority, “culture” was the stuff that made people “weird.” It was the unique outfits certain people would wear or the interesting smells at “international potluck day” at church. All of these things were attributed to their “culture.”

Later on, as I became a young working professional designer, I scouted agencies I admired and wanted to work at. The coolest ones had pool tables, catered lunches, and frequent field trips out of the office. All of this stuff was also attributed to their “culture.”

At the time, I couldn’t reconcile how and why culture made some things weird and other things cool. So I mostly ignored the idea. (I now realize that )

Years later, as I was learning to be a CEO, I started to research culture. It seemed to be what other CEOs were talking about a lot, and I was happy to imitate for a while on my way to carving out my own version. I looked up the definition:

The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group

I understood the words, but couldn’t figure out how it applied.

I read and loved Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code. His explanations:

CULTURE: from the Latin cultus, which means care.

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

I liked these ideas a lot—they were romantic—but I couldn’t figure out how they applied.

Then I came across an idea that made it make sense to me. I wish I could remember if it was something I read, something someone said to me, or a jumble of ideas I remixed into my own version. Nevertheless, I understood in simple terms what culture is:

Culture is what’s normal in any given environment.

In my country (USA), eating a cheeseburger and french fries is the culture. In my home growing up, eating lumpia (Filipino spring rolls) and dal (Pakistani split lentils and peas) was the culture.

At some agencies, people go home right at 5pm. At others, staying until 7pm or 8pm is routine.

Sometimes, the culture is what it is because that’s how it’s been. My brother and I ate lumpia growing up because my mom ate lumpia when she was growing up. Her parents did too, and their parents probably did as well.

Other times, culture can be designed from scratch. Who’s job is it to do that?

CEOs design the culture

Many cultural activities start from the ground up. At one agency I worked at, two people brought in their Nintendo DS’s started playing Mario Kart every day after lunch. Seeing how much fun they were having every day, the rest of us eventually bought DS’s too and we ended up having company-wide Mario Kart battles every day after lunch—for years. Culture is what’s normal in a given environment, and, at that office, it eventually became normal to play Mario Kart every day after lunch.

No one told us to do this. No one told the original two people to start this.

Perhaps more importantly, no one told the original two people they couldn’t do this. And no one told our larger group later on that we had to stop.

There was one person who easily could have: our boss, the CEO.

At any point, he could have said that this was unacceptable. We likely would have stopped, for fear of losing our jobs.

And, with a lack of words, because he didn’t say anything, he affirmed that this was ok. We’d occasionally look over at him while we played to make sure we weren’t doing anything against the rules, against what was normal. His lack of reaction was the amount of approval we needed to keep going.

That ability to legitimate—or to revoke—behaviors with a few words: that’s power and influence. Few people at a company if any have that kind of power and influence like the CEO does.

The job of a CEO is to design the culture.

From my own experience and observation of other CEOs both directly and indirectly, I think a CEO’s job is to use their power and influence over the people who have agreed to work for and with them to design the conditions for success to the best of their ability. One of the most powerful ways they can do this is to define what is and isn’t normal. That could be explicit in defining rules and policies, and it can also be implicit in what they tolerate, allow, or encourage.

CEO as an idea

“CEO” is a specific title at many companies, but it can also be an idea. By definition, a CEO is the highest-ranking person in a group. In tech, I’ve regularly heard the idea that sometimes a product owner, project manger, creative director, or other role is seen as “the CEO of the project,” which is another way of saying that person is in charge. And as the person in charge, they have the most power and influence to create culture, to establish what’s normal.

In other domains, that power and influence goes to people with different titles. On your team at work, that might go to someone with “Director“ or “Manager” in their title. In families, that person may have the title of “Mom” or “Dad” or “Grandma.” In sports, that’s a “Captain.” In book club, that’s the “Organizer.” It’s the orchestra’s “Conductor,” the dojo’s “Sensei,” and the trail hike’s “leader.” In a town, it’s the “Mayor.” In a country, that’s the “President,” “Prime Minister,” “King,” or “Queen.”

But the responsibility is the same.

The power and responsibility of designing culture

Like Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In the case of a CEO or other person in charge, a big portion of that responsibility refers to the culture that is created, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Unfortunately, it’s “unintentionally” a lot of the time.

For example, in many company cultures, working long hours is a badge of honor. Yes, part of that is due to the glorified hustle culture in today’s zeitgeist, but few realize that it’s top down too. It isn’t hard to find the plethora of “should CEOs work 7 days a week?” and “why the CEO should be the first person in the office and the last to leave” articles out there. Some of the most power and influence a CEO can have is their example.

A few years ago, I heard a story of a CEO who started their own policy to “leave by example.” Despite always having more work to do, they’d make a point to very visibly walk out of the office at 5pm, even if they continued to work when they got home. It was a signal that going home at that time was ok and normal. Slowly but surely, the office eventually emptied out around 5pm every day.

When I was a senior designer, I worked at an agency where my design director would very loudly ring a bell at 5pm on the dot and then walk out of the office. It was powerful and liberating for me to know that the person in charge of me and my work did this, so I could do it too.

I tell my kids all the time what is and isn’t ok in our house and in our family. Lately, it’s a lot about what feelings are ok to have (read: all of them). Yesterday, I told my 13-year old that it was ok for her to be frustrated, mad, and upset at me. I also try to be aware of my own example and what it signals about what’s normal and ok. My 13-year old is learning how to have limits with the new smartphone we just got her; in addition to the rules we wrote together, I try to have my phone put away most of the time so she knows it’s ok for her to do that too.

I think it’s important to have people in charge who are intentional about both saying and signaling what is ok. This is why the decision of who we elect to public office is crucial. In addition to policies and party lines, what behaviors do they exhibit that they’re signaling as ok?

This is one of the biggest issues I continue to have with Trump as our president. As the person in charge of our country, he sets the culture, for better or worse. (And, from my observation, experience, and perspective, it’s more “worse” than “better.”) What he does and doesn’t do becomes ok and normal. That means that mocking people with disabilities is ok and normal. That praising dictators and autocrats as people who “have done good things” is ok and normal. That grabbing women by the p*ssy is ok and normal. That racist remarks like referring to African nations as “sh*thole countries” and telling American congresswomen to “go back where they came from” are ok and normal.

These things are not ok and normal, at least not to me.

For our president—the CEO of our country—to behave this way makes it seem like these things are ok and normal.

To be clear, I’m not bringing up any of things to make a judgment on Trump’s character; I’m not qualified to do that for him, or for anyone. I’m bringing it up to say that he does not seem to have the track record to be the CEO that creates the culture where the things I want to be ok and normal—equity, opportunity, a rising tide, etc—are ok and normal. Journalist Chris Cuomo explains the behavior as fed-up citizens hiring Trump to do a dirty job, rhetorically asking:

If you’re sending somebody into the jungle, do you really care if they’re a savage?

But we’re not sending him into the jungle. To accept that accepts that we’re all dangerous animals already.

We’re hiring a CEO for the greatest nation on Earth, the land of opportunity, where our tired and poor and homeless and tempest-tost yearn to breathe free. It’s hard to see how a CEO whose plan is to send them “back where they came from” and keep them out creates a culture that makes good on this promise.

Culture shifts

Why does any of this matter? Why does culture matter enough for it to be the main point of focus for the person in charge?

Simon Sinek explains in Leaders Eat Last:

When cultural standards shift… our will to trust and cooperate dilutes… We care less about belonging. In this kind of weak culture, we veer away from doing “the right thing” in favor of doing “the thing that’s right for me.”

It’s not lost on me that that kind of language is at an all-time high with this election on every side of party lines. If we keep this up, we’re headed toward just being the “States of America.”

Since the dawn of humans, we’ve thrived in groups. Protecting the kind of culture that prioritizes “we” over “me” is paramount.

That’s the job of a CEO.

How Did You Pick That Typeface?

Dan Mall — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I spent the last 2 weeks prepping for and interviewing 13 candidates for my “designer who can ship” position. I prepared 6 questions to ask each of them, and I pretty much stuck to that script in every conversation.

Of course, I also followed a few natural rabbit holes in every conversation, wanting to dive into more detail about certain things. One question I kept coming back to for almost every candidate was:

How did you pick that typeface?

Regular readers already know how nerdy I am about typography, so it’s something I’m almost curious about by default. But I learned a lot more than I bargained for about each person through their answers to this question. As responses, I heard things like:

“It was part of the brand guidelines.”
“I go with my gut.”
“Let me show you my inspiration folder.”
“Whatever the client wants.”
“I spent a whole day looking through type foundry websites.”

I don’t consider any of these to be a right or wrong answer, as I don’t believe there’s a right or wrong answer to that question. What was so intriguing to me about any answer is how much it spoke to something I believe to be a crucial part of design:

Design is deciding.

I think the most important and difficult thing about being a designer is making decisions. There are 16,777,216 possible colors in the RGB color space; designers have to narrow that down to 3–5 to make a color palette for a brand. There are around 500,000 fonts available; designers have to choose 2 or 3 for any given project. There’s a multiverse of infinite combination of elements to consider when creating a composition or an interface, and we have to choose… 1.

How good designers get at this is a major factor in seniority. When I work with junior designers, I all but expect that I will have to help them make decisions (or sometimes even have to make decisions for them). The more senior the designer, the more I expect their ability to make good decisions autonomously and independently.

Some people I interviewed seemed to indicate that they’d defer decision making to a manager or a client. Some had a process for arriving at a decision. Some prioritized gut instinct.

I noticed that the people I most wanted to work with are the ones who have the widest range of tools to help them make decisions. They seemed to have the most practice with all of these ways, and they allowed themselves to use any of the options that suited a particular situation.

If you want to grow as a designer, be intentional about practicing decision-making. Start by putting yourself in situations where you have to make a lot of decisions, a lot of the time. Use the craft stuff: pay attention to how you pick colors, typefaces, and tools. What might begin as analysis paralysis will start to sharpen your confidence as you get better at narrowing and converging a multitude of options into solutions.

This is what separates the seniors from the juniors. The journey from junior to senior is paved with countless decisions, each one a stepping stone towards mastery. By honing our decision-making skills, we not only elevate our craft but also become architects of possibility. Next time you’re faced with a design choice, remember: you're not just selecting a typeface or a color palette. You’re choosing which future we get to live in.

The MILES Framework of Unfair Advantages

Dan Mall — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

An Unfair Advantage is a condition, asset, or circumstance that puts you in a favorable position.

That’s the definition shared in an aptly titled book I return to often: The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba.

The most recently popular version of unfair advantage we tend to go to in pop culture is the idea of a “nepo baby,“ starting from a TikTok trend a few years ago to Vulture’s An All But Definitive Guide to the Hollywood Nepo-Verse to as recent as Michelle Beadle’s ironic criticism yesterday of Bronny James’ NBA debut as “manufactured history.” As such, we generally frame unfair advantages as negative, something to scoff at at best or to justify our own shortcomings at worst.

What I appreciate about Ali’s and Kubba’s framing of unfair advantages is that they democratize the idea and use it to empower.

“We all have unfair advantages,” they comment. “Your Unfair Advantages can’t easily be copied or bought. Your set of Unfair Advantages is unique to you.”

They prompt: “What do I personally have going for me that few other people do?”

To that, they suggest a framework I think about often. They call it the MILES Framework:

Money: the capital you have (or can easily come across)
Intelligence/Insight: book smarts, social/emotional intelligence, creativity, etc.
Location/Luck: being in the right place at the right time
Education/Expertise: formal schooling as well as self-learning
Status: your network, connections, personal brand, etc.

In any relatively competitive situation, we tend to rely on an unfair advantage to help us win. We rely on demonstrating our Expertise in portfolios when trying to get a job. We bring all of our Intelligence to bear when taking a test and trying to get a good grade. We pay more Money if we can to valet instead of parking 12 blocks away.

But most people rely on only one unfair advantage at a time. The real wins come when you stack them.

Nepo babies succeed through a combination of unfair advantages: Status + Location.

Ali and Kubba describe the stacking effect:

Unfair advantages build one on top of another and have a snowballing effect. They don’t just add together; they often multiply together… the more unfair advantages you have, the more you are likely to accrue. The key is to start identifying and developing your own unfair advantages as soon as possible, no matter your age.

When I teach designers how to make portfolios, I’m really suggesting that they stack as many unfair advantages as they have. Your work being excellent is required, and it isn’t enough. Lots of people have excellent work. It’s an advantage but it’s not a unique advantage, because many people can possess it too. You have a much higher chance of getting a job if:

Your work is excellent and you can hire a developer to build you a custom portfolio (Expertise + Money)
Your work is excellent and you have a robust blog (Expertise + Intelligence/Insight)
Your work is excellent and you bump into the hiring manager at a conference (Expertise + Location)
Your work is excellent and you’ve worked with the design director at your last job (Expertise + Status)

And if your work is excellent and you can hire a developer to build you a custom portfolio and you have a robust blog and you bump into the hiring manager at a conference and you’ve worked with the design director at your last job?

I hope you can see how that puts you head and shoulders above every other candidate.

What are your unfair advantages? How can you stack them to help you win?

Reply and tell me, especially if you don’t get many opportunities to brag about yourself. I’d love to hear it, and I’ll reply back with a few words of encouragement to cheer you on!

2024 Stowe Fall Foliage Photography Trip

Dan Mall — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 06:39:00 +0000

Because I’ve been doing it for more than 3 years now, it’s officially a tradition: my annual fall foliage photography trip. In prior years, I’ve gone with my family or a few close friends. Last year, we went to the Adirondacks. This year, I opened it up to the internet. Together with new and old friends Dani Crosby, Angelika Fuellemann, Jesse Gardner, Chris Rivera, and Matt Sherlock, we spent a few days in Stowe, VT, capturing the beauty of this special season of the year.

Day 0: Wednesday, October 2

Just after ushering my kids out the door for school, I packed the car with snacks and sped off to pick up Chris and Matt to make our way towards Stowe. The great conversation made the 8+ hour trip fly by, and we settled in at our Airbnb before we knew it. Shortly after, Dani, Jesse, and Angelika all trickled in from their respective journeys. Pizza and salads were delivered, and we had a short orientation to get to know each other and our agenda for the next 2 days. I brought printed itineraries for everyone and a pile of books about Vermont fall photography to get everyone inspired. We shared gear and photography tips so everyone felt comfortable enough shooting over the next few days.

Day 1: Thursday, October 3

We met at 6:15am at the viewpoint of our first location: the famous Stowe Community Church, the quintessential white church against a sea of warm colors. The sun rose at 6:50am, but, because the church is in front of some hills, it would be another hour still before the sun crested over the peaks. We waited it out and were treated to a ton of different looks as fog rolled through the valley. We only intended to stay for an hour or so but ended up being there for almost 3 hours since the light kept changing and there was constantly new looks to photograph.

I picked this as our first location because it’s relatively easy to shoot and get good photos and I wanted everyone to start the trip with a win. Ironically, while everyone else got good shots, I psyched myself out a bit. I had been to this location 3 years ago and got a great shot. Part of wanting to return here was to see for myself how much I had grown as a photographer. Unfortunately, my shots here weren’t nearly as good as when I was first here. I was a bit discouraged by that, but it led me to a few creative alternatives. First, I set up my GoPro for the whole time and got an amazing 3-hour time lapse. Secondly, Dani was shooting with a Leica Q2 Monochrom, a camera that shoots black and white. That’s a pretty bold choice for a fall foliage shoot… I was initially thinking that could be either awesome or a disaster. After looking over her shoulder of her first few shots, they were incredible! Super dramatic and moody, and it made me reconsider the shots I was taking. I figured I’d also try my hand at a few black-and-whites of this location. Not sure that I nailed anything, but it definitely got me looking at the scene differently.

Shot in October 2020. Canon EOS R, 16mm @ 1/100, f/11, ISO 100, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Canon EOS R, 24mm @ 1/1000, f/2.8, ISO 100, EF 24–70mm f/2.8L II USM.

We pried ourselves away from the scene to get a delicious and hearty breakfast at Butlers Pantry before heading to to the Northfield Falls and Slaughterhouse Covered Bridges.

Canon EOS R, 16mm, 1/400, f/4, ISO 100, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Canon EOS R, 100mm @ 1/320, f/7.1, ISO 100, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 100mm @ 1/1000, f/4.5, ISO 100, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

We mosied along to Warren Falls and Moss Glen Falls, and I flew my drone around to see how the tops of the trees looked against the winding road.

Canon EOS R, 26mm @ 20s, f/18, ISO 100, 9-stop Polar Pro ND filter, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/1000, f/2.8, ISO 100

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/1250, f/2.8, ISO 100

We had been shooting for almost 12 hours at this point, so we decided to skip our scheduled sunset and astrophotography shoot and instead spend some time editing together. We ordered Thai food to the Airbnb and settled in to edit. I casually stepped outside into the dark backyard to snap a quick photo of the stars, and there was the Milky Way staring right back. Jesse, Matt, and I spent the next hour or so shooting the sky while Chris, Dani, and Angelika traded editing tips.

Canon EOS R, 16mm @ 15s, f/2.8, ISO 4000, RF 16mm f/2.8 STM.

Day 2: Friday, October 4

We met at 5:15am to caravan towards our sunrise spot: the A.M. Foster Covered Bridge. After a quick stop at Dunkin Donuts for some solid and liquid fuel, we were off.

While we were about 10 minutes away, the sky started to fill with a brilliant orange. I started getting worried that we were too late. We found our location and I just about leapt out of the car to find a place to set up. Fortunately, the sun gave us a bit of time for each of us to find our spots before it peered over the crest. Some of us spread out near the bridge while others shot in the cemetery across the road.

Canon EOS R, 16mm @ 2.5s, f/16, ISO 100, 6-stop Polar Pro ND filter, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Canon EOS R, 20mm @ 1/40, f/16, ISO 100, 8-stop Polar Pro ND filter, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Canon EOS R, 16mm @ 1/8, f/16, ISO 100, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Composite of 35 images with Canon EOS R, 47mm @ 1/100, f/11, ISO 250, EF 24–70mm f/2.8L II USM.

Before the sun got too high in the sky, we decided to move along to Joe’s Pond, hoping that there might still be some morning fog left over. On the way, we spotted a pasture of cows grazing and quickly jumped out to get some shots.

Canon EOS R, 120mm @ 1/500, f/4.5, ISO 200, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 153mm @ 1/500, f/5, ISO 320, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 100mm @ 1/500, f/4.5, ISO 320, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 153mm @ 1/500, f/5, ISO 320, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Alas, no fog at Joe’s Pond. We snapped a few quick photos and rolled on.

Canon EOS R, 158mm @ 1/320, f/8, ISO 100, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

After a quick detour to charge my Tesla, we set off to photograph the picturesque town of Peacham.

Along the way, I spied a small clearing with what looked like some interesting views, so we quickly pulled over. The spot turned out to be Ewell Pond, with glasslike water that created an amazing mirrored reflection of the foliage.

Composite of 22 images with Canon EOS R, 35mm @ 1/125, f/18, ISO 200, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

We finally made it to Peacham. The quintessential view is just behind the town firehouse, which gets you a white church, red barn, vibrant foliage, and distant mountains all in one image.

Canon EOS R, 28mm @ 1/125, f/16, ISO 160, EF 16–35mm f/4L IS USM.

Canon EOS R, 100mm @ 1/320, f/11, ISO 160, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 188mm @ 1/1000, f/5.6, ISO 100, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Canon EOS R, 200mm @ 1/400, f/8, ISO 100, EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM.

Time for a lunch break. We stopped into the Peacham Cafe only to be informed that they had no lunch. The staff directed us to the Three Ponds restaurant. My low expectations were quickly shattered by a delicious smoked salmon sandwich, followed by a maple ice cream dessert.

We spent the afternoon wandering around the cute town of Woodstock. The early mornings and late nights were starting to catch up to me, so I sacrificed shooting for a quick 15-minute nap in the car.

We drove to our final location of the trip: a sunset shoot at the Quechee Gorge. I’d been here a few years ago and shot the gorge from the top of the bridge, but I’ve since realized that the better photographs are actually from down in the gorge taking a photo of the bridge. We got ready to hike down into the gorge only to find that part of the path was closed off. The light was dwindling fast, and it looked like there might not be a way down to the bottom. Jesse, Dani, and Angelika chanced it. Matt lost faith and went back up to shoot from a different vantage point. Chris and I stopped to fly our drones and scout a bit. Overall, we all got some interesting shots of this final location.

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/40, f/2.8, ISO 100

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/30, f/2.8, ISO 100

We wrapped up just as the sun disappeared, and we hiked back up in the dark with the exception of a little light from a headlamp and some phone flashlights.

Tired and hungry, we quickly settled on getting some BBQ for dinner at Fatty’s BBQ which closed in 45 minutes, so we booked it out of there. Over brisket and pulled pork, we did a small reflection of our time together and talked through what we might do differently next year.

Overall, another successful fall foliage trip in the books, this time with some new friends.

Now… where to next year?

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/200, f/2.8, ISO 100

DJI Air 2S, 8.38mm @ 1/100, f/2.8, ISO 100

Choose Your Hard

Dan Mall — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Most difficult decisions are generally a choice between two hard things. This is generally undesirable.

Humans try to optimize for decisions to a choice between something good and something bad. But that’s not a choice at all. Of course we pick the good one! Receive $10 or get punched in the face? Money please!

For decisions that are a bit more ambiguous, we still try to paint one as good as the other as bad when we can, or at least position one as better than the other. That’s the idea behind the common “pros vs. cons” list. The choice with more “pros” is seemingly “better,“ so we pick that one.

In other words, we tend to look for the easy way out—literally.

But for most difficult decisions, there isn’t a clear winner. That’s what makes it difficult.

To resolve that, we have a saying in my house:

“Choose your hard.“

That is: decide in advance what type of hard you prefer. This allows you to skip the part where you look for the more optimal option. There might not be one, or you might overspend your time trying to find it.

When the choice is hard, do you prefer:

Hard physically or hard mentally?
Hard mentally or hard emotionally?
Hard with time or hard with people?
Hard to say or hard to do?

Once you hone in on the type of hard you prefer, it won't always make decisions easier, but it will usually make them faster. In most important decisions, we’re not always looking for the solution as much as we're trying to find agency, some amount of power to affect our own future. Choosing your hard can give you that.

Next time you’re at an impasse, choose the kind of hard you prefer. It’s a great way to help you build some momentum.

Applications Are Open: Hiring a Designer Who Can Ship!

Dan Mall — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Last week, I posted about wanting to hire a designer who can ship.

As of today, applications are officially open!

⭐ 👉🏽 APPLY HERE 👈🏽 ⭐

A word of caution: please read my tips! It’s important to me to work with someone thoughtful and considerate who pays attention, and ignoring my guidelines is a great way to show me that we’re already not a good fit to work together. For example, I asked for a portfolio that’s tailored toward me and the work I’d potentially be assigning to you, but I’d put money on the fact that people will submit their generic portfolios. Don’t let that be you. It’s a great way to get me to skip right over your application.

Applications will be open until Friday, October 18, 2024 at 11:59pm Eastern; you have the next two weeks to submit.

Can’t wait to see your great work and creativity!

Now Hiring: A Designer Who Can Ship

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I run 3 businesses:

Design System University, an online school to help people working at enterprise organizations to design and build at scale through self-paced and live courses.
Great Job!, a platform to help parents and caregivers design their own handbooks for raising amazing kids.
Dan Mall Teaches, private consulting and coaching from me around design systems, design process and leadership, and career growth (though no one ever sees this name)

I’m hiring a designer who can ship to help me with these businesses.

Most of your work across these businesses will be in the order that I listed them above.

The most important thing to me in hiring someone is making sure we align. I’m all for discussion and debate, but the more time we spend trying to convince each other of stuff is time we’re not shipping. Here’s a guide to working with me. I’m very particular. I’d rather we realize now that I’m the kind of person you’d hate to work for that to find that out later.

Skills & responsibilities

The closest phrase I can come up with for the type of person I’m looking for is “a designer who can ship,” but please allow me to explain that further.

I’m looking for someone who can free me up of the tactical digital design work I do. I’m a designer who ships stuff, so, in order for you to free me up, you have to be a designer who ships stuff too. Here are the types of projects I’d like to get off my plate that would be in your purview:

Creating social media graphics
Turning a book of mine into a website people can read for free
Creating promotional material for events
Editing videos
Adding new pages to websites built in tools like Framer and Webflow
Creating web apps with the help of tools like Cursor and Claude
Designing and publishing e-books
Evaluating and setting up third-party software
Creating and modifying marketing and email automations

As I hope you can see, the term “designer“ doesn’t really cut it. If you’re the kind of designer who designs screens, hands them off to someone else, and then sometime later those designs are magically live on the internet, we’re not aligned. If you’re designing YouTube thumbnails, I want you to upload them to YouTube too. If you’re mocking up some information architecture changes to a website, I’d like to see it as live web pages soon.

The core skills of the person I hire will probably lie mostly within UI, UX, digital, and graphic design at a senior level. That probably means you’re very comfortable in apps like Figma and Adobe Creative Suite. I need you to be very good with typography and spacing. I’d also like you to have the ability to ship software that end users can interact with. I’m not particular about whether that means you have expertise coding in languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, PHP, etc. or if you’re proficient in no-code/low-code tools like Framer, Webflow, or Wix Studio. Most of my web stuff uses Framer, but I’m open to changing that if you have a different expertise.

Some nice-to-haves include areas tangential to UI and graphic design but are not required. Still though, let me know if you do have skills in any of these areas:

Illustration
Motion & animation
Video editing
Photography
Sound design
Event production
Copywriting
Marketing/marketing automation
SEO/SEM

Designing beautiful things

I think part of the job of a designer is to make things beautiful. Here are some things I found today on the internet that I think are beautiful.

If your gut reaction is that you’ve created stuff like this before and can again pretty easily, that’s a great sign. If your gut reaction after seeing these examples is that you don’t like them or you couldn’t easiliy create stuff like this, we’re probably not aligned enough for this job to be a good fit for you.

Compensation

I can pay $3,000/month for a remote contract position, paid on the first of every month.

If working together is going well after a few months, I’m open to and expect to increase both the workload and the pay.

I don’t care how many hours you work each month; I’ll look to you to set my expectations of what amount and pace of work to expect from you.

Other perks:

You’ll need your own computer, but I’ll get you all the software, licenses, fonts, assets, templates, mockups, and more that you need to do the work I’m asking for
Full access to me for any career guidance and mentorship outside of the work I’m asking you to do
I have a massive network of friends and colleagues that I’d happily connect you to when mutually beneficial
Full access to all of my paid and/or private resources like courses, books, and private events
I’ll occasionally need help at live events I’m part of, so I’ll pay for your travel and food for any event you agree to attend with me (which will always be opt-in with no pressure whatsoever to opt-in)

Process, timeline, and dates

I published this job description on Friday, September 27.

I’ll start accepting applications on Friday, October 4. I’ll keep applications open for 2 weeks and close them on Friday, October 18.

If earlier posts are any indication, I’m expecting to receive anywhere from dozens to hundreds of applications. My goal would be to narrow down to a list of up to 10 candidates that I interview during the week of October 21.

For those of you that I don’t think are a good fit, I will send you a short email to let you know as much by Friday, October 25. I can’t promise to give any specific feedback in this email. If you’d like specific feedback about why you weren’t chosen, I’ll ask for your consent to make a video or write a post to critique your portfolio publicly so that others can learn from it as well.

After the 10 interviews, my goal will be to narrow down to 3 candidates, each of whom I’d like to hire for a small, 1-week $1,000 project that will start on Monday, October 28 and be due on Friday, November 1. I’ll give each candidate a choice of a few projects that suit their strengths, and we’ll collaborate on a scope that feels appropriate for the time and the pay. I think this will give me a good starting indication of how each person works and how aligned we would be.

I’ll review the projects and narrow down to the final candidate who I’d like to work with most and send them a written offer on Monday, November 4. You’ll have until Thursday, November 7 to accept or decline the offer. Assuming the offer is accepted, I’ll let the other two candidates know by Friday, November 8.

You’ll officially start with me on Monday, November 11,

Tips for getting hired by me

The best way to get me to hire you is to show me that you already have the skills and experience to do the kind of work I’m hiring you to do. My ideal is to spend as little time training you as possible and as much time onboarding you as needed.

A porfolio is ideal way to show me this. And not just a general portfolio, but a portfolio that’s tailored towards the things you’ll be doing in working with me. I’ve written before about my tips for creating a portfolio that gets you hired and have taught them live too; following those tips would definitely get my attention.

On that note, I’ve been sharing stuff about me and the things that resonate with me on the internet for the last 19 years. I have almost 200 blog posts. I have a lot of free videos about how I work and think out there. Please read and watch at least some of these. The more you know about me, the higher the likelihood that you can pitch and propose something that will resonate with me.

If you hated reading this post because it was too long, you’re gonna hate working with me.

If this is one of many hundreds of jobs you’re applying to, I think the chances are low that it’s a good fit for both you and me. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be applying to multiple jobs. (If you’re looking for a job, you probably should be playing the field, especially in this market and economy.) I’m saying I’m a believer in choosing a select few that align well and putting more effort into those. If you don’t believe that, you’re probably going to hate working with me.

I don’t care too much about résumés, but if you think including a résumé is important to telling your story, feel free to include it.

The format of the application will be simple. It will be a form that includes these fields:

First name
Last name
Email address
Portfolio link
Tell me everything (an open text box)

In the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty open-ended. I could be much more prescriptive, but that’s not really how I work. I like working with people by giving them very specific desired outcomes and a lot of autonomy to figure out how to get there. I don’t micromanage, and I don’t prescribe process. If you’re uncomfortable with ambiguity and/or you need a lot of specific direction to know if you’re doing a good job, you’ll hate working with me. I give a lot of feedback when asked, and I also appreciate working with people who can work very independently. This application is my first chance to see that from you.

What a good fit might look like

Here are a few examples of people’s situations that might be great for this role:

You’re a very experienced designer who has taken some time off to raise kids or take care of a loved one and are looking for a soft entry way back into the workforce.
You’re looking for a more lucrative full-time role but could use some cashflow in the meantime. Consider it a freelance gig until you find something else. I’m totally fine with working with someone who I know is looking elsewhere and/or will leave in a few months, especially if you’re the kind of professional who can ramp up.
You run or work for an agency that has retainers or subscription plans around my price range.
You’re a budding entrepreneur who sees a worthwhile investment in working with someone like me to see how I run my businesses. The financial compensation is lower than you’d like, but you see other forms of compensation as just-as or even more valuable to you.
You’re confident about doing the work in a portion of your week, whether that’s moonlighting or you’re a stay-at-home parent with ample time to spare or something like that.

What’s next?

Phew! That’s a lot. Thanks for reading. If you made it this far, I hope that means we might be aligned in working together.

What’s next? Over the next week, put together a portfolio and message for me that shows that you have the skills and experience to do what I’m hiring for.

I’ll share the link to apply next Friday, October 4 at 10am Eastern.

Reply to this post if there are any additional questions I can answer for you.

If you think you might apply, you’re welcome to reply to this post to let me know that. I can look out for your name once the applications are open.

Thanks!

Move Authority to the Information

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Captain L. David Marquet is known for taking the worst ship in the U.S. Navy fleet to the most effective. One of the principles he credits for this change is moving authority to the information.

In typical team structures, authority and information are proportionate inverses. People at the top usually have the most amount of authority but the least amount of information as they’re often a few levels removed from doing the tangible work themselves. People on the ground doing the work have the most amount of information but the least amount of authority.

Most teams try to fix this by surfacing information to where the authority is, typically by ways of reporting: memos, status calls, documentation, skip levels, etc.

Captain Marquet suggests doing the opposite.

Instead of moving information to authority, move authority to the information.

Give people on the ground the authority to make decisions.

When I’m leading a team, rather than using my authority to make decisions on behalf of my team members with the information, I try to instead use my authority to advocate for the decisions my informed team members have made. For example, if I’m working with a design system team trying to decide what to tackle next on the roadmap, I’ll ask our designers and engineers which component they believe can make the most impact at scale in 6 weeks of work from their perspective. Upon their suggestions and decisions, I'll then use my authority to convince other VPs and stakeholders that it’s worth it to allow us the space and time to pursue these areas.

I also use this technique with my kids. That might sound something like, “You can have anything you find in the fridge for dinner. Lemme know what you find and I’ll make it.”

The key in both of these scenarios is the combination of two parts:

A shared acknowledgement of the constraints (“6 weeks” or “in the fridge”)
Full autonomy within the constraints (“any component” or “anything you find”)

Especially with that second part, it tracks with another of Captain Marquet’s principles: “Don’t take control; give control.”

If you want to empower those around you, move the authority to the information.

Gone Fishing

Dan Mall — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In 2014, Josh Luciano was one of my apprentices. He started to tell me about a guy named Chris Do who was teaching on the internet very similar stuff as I was teaching privately in my program. Josh suggested that I should do what Chris was doing. The problem was I didn’t know what Chris was doing. At that time, I probably had never even seen a YouTube video. Instagram was just a place I infrequently posted family photos. Few people referred to themselves as “influencers” or “content creators.”

Fast forward to today, Chris runs a major empire in The Futur, drawing an ambitious line in the sand of teaching 1 billion people how to making a living doing what they love. With millions of followers and subscribers across platforms, I’d say he and his team are well on the way to achieving that goal. I greatly admire what Chris has built and even find myself envious and even a bit remorseful that I didn’t start building my own audience and empire when Chris did.

So when I saw him post about the annual salmon fishing trip he’s taken and invited others to come along, the combination of a once-in-a-lifetime adventure and the chance to spend some time with Chris to learn from him was irresistible to me.

I blocked the dates off on my calendar, paid my deposit, and thought little of it until a few weeks before the trip.

Arrived

I arrived in Vancouver at midnight, 3 hours late due to thunderstorms at my connecting flight airport. I checked into my budget hotel bleary-eyed, knowing that I only had a few hours before heading back to the airport in the morning to board a puddle jumper for 1½-hour to then board a water taxi for a 1½-hour trip to the fishing lodge. I quickly repacked a fraction of my suitcase contents into a smaller duffel bag I brought—we each got a weight limit for luggage due to the smaller plane restrictions—and caught a few hours of sleep.

The next morning, I met up with Josh Loh—the only person on the trip I previously knew from my epic battles in the Relume Design League—graciously offered to let me stash my bags at his house since he was local, and we rideshared off to the airport. Most everyone else had gotten in the night before and met up for dinner, so I was feeling a bit like the odd man out arriving at the airport and not knowing anyone. I quietly introduced myself to Eric Moore and Phil Ellering standing next to me in line, and we quickly connected over being introverts who need frequent energy battery recharging as we boarded the plane.

I picked an empty row and took out a book I planned on reading, partially to the avoid the awkwardness of not knowing who to talk to. Chris boarded and sat kitty corner from me, saying that he hadn’t gotten to talk to me yet and would like to. He asked me what was up in my personal and professional life, and I started to respond. Quickly though, the rumble of the plane’s engine made it hard to hear each other, and Chris asked if he could take the seat next to me to make it easier to have a conversation.

For 90 minutes, Chris kindly let me bend his ear about my challenges and fears with business, from small things like YouTube thumbnail design to large things like positioning and investment capital and audience value. One of the primary things I shared was about generally feeling behind as a content creator. I could have started consciously building an audience ten years when he did. I see where he is now and I have regrets and even some disdain for what it could have been like for me to have started earlier.

Chris quickly stopped me in my whining and provided a powerful reframe. “Dan, how old are you?”

“Just turned 40.”

“I’m 52,” Chris said. ”I started 10 years ago, when I was 42. Even if you started today—which you’re not—you’d still be starting 2 years earlier than I did.”

Wow.

“Dan, when did you start speaking at conferences? How old were you?”

“2007. I was 23.”

“I started 6 years ago when I was 46. Double your age.”

Oh.

“You’re not behind. You’re way ahead.”

Suddenly, I had a whole new perspective.

This trip wasn’t cheap, but this 90-minute conversation made every penny worth it. We hadn’t even arrived yet.

Snorefest

After deplaning, taking a small bus to the dock, and a 90-minute water taxi, we finally saw the dock of Ole’s coming into view. We disembarked and met the staff, who were all lined up on the dock to greet us individually.

We ate lunch and entered the next most uncomfortable part of the trip for me: getting our room assignments and meeting our roommates.

Ole’s has 12 double occupancy rooms so they can accommodate 24 people on one trip. I’m a 40-year old grown man who’s been married for the last 16 years. I haven’t had a roommate that’s not my wife since my sophomore year of college in 2007.

I snore, loud. My wife wears earplugs and we have multiple white noise machines so she can sleep in the same bed, bless her amazing heart and soul. Who knows what other weird sleep habits I’ve picked up over the last two decades that I don’t even know about?

My roommate would soon know, that’s who. We looked at the board with room assignments, and I found Tahe Governor, a marketing consultant from Louisiana.

I introduced myself. “Hey, I’m Dan. I think we’re roommates. I apologize in advance, but I snore pretty loudly. Sorry that you got stuck with me.”

Tahe smiled. “It’s all good man.”

We settled in and unpacked our stuff quickly, chuckling to each other about the “coincidence” of how the two darker-skinned guys on the trip got paired together.

Time for fishing school.

Fishing School

We all went out to the dock to learn how to fish. That Chris had done this trip for years and he’s an excellent teacher meant he was showing all of us what to do. He taught us how to cut bait; bait the hook; manage tension on the line; drive a boat and maneuver inside it with another person; reel in a fish, net it, humanely end its life, and properly bleed it; put on our gear; tie knots; prepare a rod; and so much more. We learned about the different species of fish we might encounter and the fishing regulations and limits for each to consider the sustainability of what we were all doing.

Finally, we were ready to go out and try to catch some fish. One last thing before we went out: Chris asked if anyone wanted to start a friendly wager to see who could catch the biggest fish on this trip. We each decided to chip in $10 towards a $200 jackpot for the winner.

Our initial pairings started with our roommates, so Tahe and I geared up for our first expedition. Since neither of us had any boating or fishing experience, Keith (the co-owner of the lodge) went out with us to help us get our bearings. I put on my gear, grabbed my stuff, Dramamine’d up (since I get motion sickness very easily), and we got going. We got to know each other, got comfortable with the boats and rods, and caught nothing. After about 3 hours out on the water, Tahe drove us back in for dinner. As the other boats started returning, we saw that others had already caught some. Chris and Eric brought in three, each weighing over 6 pounds with Eric’s biggest at 9½ pounds. The bar was set.

We woke up at 5am the next day for an early breakfast in order to get on the water again at first light a little after 6am. Tahe and I geared up again, and this time, Eric went out to join us. The idea was that Eric got a crash course by going out with Chris, so he could show us—who caught nothing the previous day—what he learned and also others could have a chance to go out with Chris. The other change we decided to make as a group was to all go out together to relatively the same location and stay in constant communication with each other. Fish usually swim together, so, if someone even gets some bites they could radio the others to congregate around there.

Our entire group of 20 set out together to a region called Bayly Point that was known to have fish at that time of morning. We baited our hooks, cast our lines, and waited. Since Eric caught 2 salmon the day before, he graciously offered to drive the boat and prioritized Tahe and I to catch. Fog rolled in so quickly and heavily that we couldn’t see anything farther out than a 30-ft. radius from the boat. Luckily, we could still very faintly make out the shoreline, so we at least and some orientation. (Also, we had all been advised to download the Garmin Navionics app, a boating app that could help us navigate without a cellular signal, so we were prepared for the fact that navigating visually might be unavailable depending on weather.)

While we waited, we had a wonderful conversation. The other boats slowly floating by us noticed our raucous laughter and jovial spirits. We teased the other boats on the radio. We played music. I don’t remember if we gave ourselves the “party boat” moniker or if it was granted to us later, but it fit and it stuck.

After about an hour, we noticed a tug on Tahe’s line. We all popped up, put the boat in neutral, and Tahe started to reel in. Eric was ready with the net to bring it. As the hook got closer to the boat, we saw what Tahe was reeling in. It was… my line! Ugh, we were snagged. Deflated, we leaned over to grab the lines to untangle them and realized there was actually a fish on the hook! We were tangled and reeling one in! What do we do? Tahe and I coordinated our rods to be able to bring the fish in, but, at the last minute, the fish got away, breaking the line this time. Deflated again, we reeled in and Tahe spent the next 20 minutes redoing his line.

A short time later, I noticed a small tug on my line. With absolutely no fight at all, I reeled in the smallest rockfish in the history of fishing. Too ignorant to know I should throw it back and too stubborn that if I don’t catch anything else on this trip at least I got this lil guy, I went through the motions to learn how to bonk it and bleed it. That was our entire boat’s bounty for the morning before going in for lunch. I felt awful about it.

We went out again in the afternoon with strengthened resolves to catch something. We got the practice run out of the way and now we were out for gills. We talked movies, books, family, business. We played the “what would you do if someone invested $500k in your business today” game. We briefly interrupted our riveting conversation when my line zipped, and reeled in an 8½-pound coho with the physical and emotional support of my boatmates! I was pumped; they were pumped. As the adrenaline subsided, we returned to our regularly scheduled conversations, enjoying a beautiful, clear, sunny afternoon on the water. As excited as I was about catching my first fish ever, I was more excited about the new friendships and connections I just made.

That night over dinner, we mutually agreed to disband the party boat the next day. Not that we didn’t love it, but we decided to share the love with others too—and have a chance to get to know others on the trip. That was a shared sentiment among most of the others on the trip too. Phil and Josh had gone out together all day, so I asked them if I could join their boat the next day. They agreed but later each had conversations with others who wanted to get to know them as well. It was getting late, so we all decided we’d figure it out in the morning.

The next morning, there was a bit of a mixup about groups. Several people had gone out as early as possible to maximize fishing time, and I was part of the group of 4 last stragglers. We divided up 2 and 2: I hopped in a boat with brand strategist Anneli Hansson while Phil paired up with executive career strategist Loren Greiff. Anneli and I were both a bit hesitant and uncomfortable around both driving and fishing, though she had caught 2 big salmon the day before. While on the water, we got separated from the larger group while trying to reel in some bites that turned out to be nothing, and we spent a good bit of time driving around trying to find where everyone was as we couldn’t find it on the map. We talked book publishing experiences while on the water, and Anneli unlocked a few things for me about some recent fears and lack of confidence I’ve been experiencing around newer parts of my business.

After lunch, I went back out fishing again, this time with Phil. We traded life stories and graphic novel recommendations. Phil also expertly reeled in a monster, which I netted into the boat. This one ended up being a 10-pounder that ultimately won Phil the jackpot!

The next morning, most of the group opted to go halibut fishing instead of salmon fishing. Halibut swim much deeper and are found farther out into the ocean, which meant rougher water and bigger swells. You also need different equipment and technique to fish for them. The increased risk of motion sickness combined with the fact that I don’t really like eating halibut made it an easy decision for me to opt out of that adventure.

Instead, I figured I’d take one more crack at salmon fishing. I went out early that morning with Eric and Loren, and we caught a gorgeous sunrise on the water.

Even close to Ole’s, the water was pretty choppy. It made me realize just how lucky we had been with glass-like water the previous few days. I said a quick prayer for calm water for our halibut-seeking friends. We didn’t last long at this first location before we decided to head to an inlet where we anticipated the waters might be more calm, and the choice paid off as we were greeted by just about a glass surface and a beautifully sunny day. We cast our lines and waited. Both Loren and Eric mentioned an uneasiness about some pricing of some of their services, so I offered that we might roleplay some sales conversions, which they gladly took me up on. We critiqued each other’s conversations in between getting lots of bites, but alas, none of us were able to reel anything in. As lunchtime approached, we slowly made our way back to the lodge as we had to navigate back again through choppy water. I started to feel a bit queasy as we docked. The halibut folks returned empty-handed and reported pretty massive swells during their trip, and Paul Hoke collapsed in relief on the dock after reportedly donating his previously digested breakfast to the water on the way back. I still felt bad after lunch, so I opted for a long afternoon nap and a very hot shower while everyone went out for one last chance at salmon. I woke up feeling much better; all alone on the barge aside from the staff, I called my family as I had been feeling homesick for the past few days and then spent about an hour on the deck in the sun with my thoughts and a notebook before everyone returned for dinner.

“Fishing“ School

Maybe if only to ensure that we all could file this trip as a business write-off, Chris did a fair bit of business teaching and coaching after our meals and between fishing.

After our fishing try, Chris taught a whiteboard session called “Fishing 101 AKA Marketing & Sales.” It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good! He talked about the importance of bait—a good offer—as some entrepreneurs just “fish” with a hook and no bait and then are surprised that they’re not catching anything!

In another session, Chris talked about the hero’s journey, using my fishing experience as an example! He poked fun at me catching my tiny fish as my version of “crossing the first threshold.” Eventually, I went through my tests, enemies, and ordeals to finally catch my 8½ pounder 🤣🤣🤣

At the start of day two, Chris gently scolded a few in our group who tried to fish separately from the larger group. As beginners, why do some of us go off to fish in locations where no fish have been reported as opposed to areas where everyone else seems to be getting bites? Similarly, in business, yes, differentiation is important, but what makes you think that you’ll land clients or customers in a completely unique area? Drop your line where clients and customers are already biting!

Another night, Eric and I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning as he taught me about the Prosci ADKAR model for change management.

All throughout this trip, I learned a ton of lessons about fishing, through fishing, and aside from fishing that I’ll be taking back into my work and business.

Extracurriculars

Even though a lot of the trip was fishing, there was also a good bit of time for other things too. I recorded a podcast episode with Josh. Warren Tingen came prepared as a dungeon master and a few of us played in our first ever Dungeons & Dragons adventure! One night, Eric took about 15 minutes to read a “bedtime story” to all of us that he wrote about our time together so far. During and around the meals, many people shared some very vulnerable thoughts and reflections about themselves and their lives.

Fireside Chat with Chris Do

The final act of the trip was flying back to Vancouver and attending a fireside chat that Chris was headlining that night at The University of British Columbia. I’ve done my fair share of events, and it was awesome to witness firsthand just how someone like Chris does these.

There were a few specific things that struck me.

First up, Chris doesn’t let anyone get away with softballs. A few times, the host unintentionally asked an unclear question and some audience members asked some pretty ill-considered questions. Chris called them to task on it, not in an egotistical way, but in a way that called them up to respect his time and expertise as well as their own. I respect and admire that. When I’ve been in that situation in the past, I’ve often tried to make something out of nothing at the expense of myself and my own boundaries. Watching Chris handle this helped me to realize that I’d like to do a better job of this.

In the chat, Chris voiced a frustration of his that I share. He commented on his bewilderment when people seek out a mentor and ask for council and yet fail to do what the mentor suggests. I have countless stories of spending too much time with people who ask for my help and guidance and yet don’t do what I advise. Isn’t that just a waste of time for both of us? I’m not very cognizant of that and end up getting taken advantage of a lot in that area. I can see how Chris’ boundaries there may help him prevent that.

Last one: Chris really packed this auditorium on very short notice. Not surprisingly, the line to talk to him and take a photo with him was super long as soon as the talk ended. But surprisingly, there was also a small line of folks wanting to talk to and take photos with me! I’m sure that was bolstered by Chris giving me a small shout-out during the talk, but what a boost to my confidence that I could go to a new city without anyone knowing I’d be there and draw my own crowd, no matter how tiny.

Reel Friendships

I’ve already written almost 4,000 words here and I still feel like there’s so much more to tell. That may have to be for another time. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed the time with my new friends Chris Do, Josh Loh, Darren Barber, Phillip Ellering,Loren Greiff, Anneli Hansson, Paul Hoke, Tim Minzer, Eric Moore, Warren Tingen, Bartek Goldyn, Kary Goldyn, Matthew Byrd, Melanie Whitney, Sergey Pantileev, and Tahe Governor. Missing y’all already, and can’t wait for the next adventure.

Be Someone to Blame

Dan Mall — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Especially in corporate cultures, people spend a great deal of time covering their butts. The ever-popular CYA acronym acts as a cautionary mantra to protect yourself from criticism, penalties, or repercussion. The more blameless you are, the better you’re doing your job.

Or are you?

Lately, I’ve been embracing the opposite. Instead of expending effort to remain blameless, I’m putting myself in situations where I’m the one to blame. I’m realizing that this has benefit.

I consult with enterprise teams on their design systems and their culture. Typically, that means I’ll work with a team for anywhere from 6 weeks to a year to show them how to do something I know how to do that they don’t yet, like set up a sustainable design system practice or deepen their cross-discipline collaboration. Inevitably, this consulting leads them to some new ideas that they’re nervous to try. So what do I suggest to get them to try it?

I tell them to blame me.

I’m all too cognizant of the technique to bring in a consultant to take the blame for an initiative that’s already spiraling downwards, unfortunately from personal experience. (More on that another time.)

But sometimes, I can use it to my advantage.

Sometimes, bringing me in is exactly the amount of air cover a team needs to do something “wacky” or “wild” and be a rascal like doing Summer Fridays™ year round or upending a previously established process. If, for whatever reason, the experiment doesn’t work, the team doesn’t need to take the fall for it; if anyone asks, they can say “that wacky consultant guy suggested it… what a weirdo he was.”

(Of course, it only works when the consultant is in a position of power of privilege, specifically with some relational equity to spare. Done wrong, it’s too reminiscent of the glass cliff many women CEOs face to take the fall for already-sinking ships.)

This technique has benefits outside of a work environment too. When my kids get homesick at sleepovers or uncomfortable when their friend groups engage in some mischievous activity, my wife and I tell them to blame it on us by saying their “super-strict dad wants them home sooner than expected, ugh.” It lets them save face with their friends while still elegantly extracting themselves from some awkward situations.

Instead of covering your butt so much, maybe you could be more of someone to blame.

Adults Can Be Wrong

Dan Mall — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I used to go two churches every week when I was growing up.

My mom was Seventh-Day Adventist, and my dad was Pentecostal, so our family went to church on Saturdays and Sundays.

As with all good church kids, we learned the Ten Commandments. One Sunday at the Pentecostal church, we were going through them.

One: you shall have no other gods before me.

Two: you shall not make any idols.

Three: you shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain.

Four: remember to keep Sunday holy.

Fiv— wait, what?

Sunday?

I looked again at my Bible. It said, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”

I raised my hand to ask the Sunday School teacher to clarify. “Excuse me, you said ‘Sunday’ but you meant ‘Sabbath,’ right?”

“Yes.” they said. “Sunday is the Sabbath.”

Um.

That's not what I learned at the Seventh-Day Adventist church. In Sabbath School, they said that Saturday was the Sabbath.

I said as much. They said I was wrong. I insisted. They kicked me out and told me to go sit with my parents.

For a shy, straight-A’s kid who never had anything close to a disciplinary issue before, this was embarrassing and humiliating. Kicked out for something I learned?

As I sat with my parents processing it all in my mind, a thought dawned on me. A group of adults taught me that Saturday was the Sabbath. A different group of adults taught me that Sunday was the Sabbath.

One of these groups of adults was wrong. Or maybe both groups were. Either way, the lesson is the same:

Adults can be wrong.

This was a new idea to me. I was a generally compliant, obedient kid. I listened to my parents, my grandparents, my teachers, my uncles and aunts, and other adult authority figures because I assumed they were always right.

But what if I didn’t have to? What if adults were sharing their opinions and beliefs and not always truth?

This is the kind of thinking that turns some kids rebellious, but it didn’t go that direction for me for whatever reason. Instead of being rebellious, I became curious. I became discerning. I learned to value my own opinions. I didn’t reject what adults said, but I didn’t accept it as truth. I’m rarely insubordinate, but I do value alignment over authority. I’m always agreeable but I don’t always agree. I didn’t become skeptical or cynical; I learned to develop a worldview and measured ideas against it.

I think about this memory often. It plays a big part in my life to this day.

Even though I’m an adult now, there are still “adults” in my personal and professional life, people I think are “supposed” to be respected and whose word is to be taken at face value as truth: elders, politicians, people in charge of something, clients, bosses, managers, and more.

I’m realizing now that it wasn’t about adults vs. kids.

It was about power.

Truth gives you power.

Very few of us actually have truth, but pretending we do—or pretending we at least have more than someone else—seems to give you power too. If someone is “righter” than you, they seemingly have the right to tell you what to do. Adults do this to kids all the time.

I’ve noticed a pattern when I work on client projects with other designers where I’m creative directing. Clients give feedback, so the designers go to make the requested changes. I ask them if they agree with the requests, and they look at me, puzzled. For a lot of designers, it doesn’t occur to them that they don’t have to make the changes. It’s been drilled into so many designers that the job is to make stuff and continuously change it until those with power are happy.

That’s not the job of a designer.

The job of a designer is to use our power of manifesting ideas for good.

Having an opinion gives you power. Boundaries give you power. A strong worldview gives you power.

I’m not suggesting that you push back on client requests on principle or try to be a diva. I’m only suggesting that adults can be wrong. Your client can be wrong, even though they’re paying you. Your product manager can be wrong, even though they have some data. Your CEO can be wrong, even though they have a strong opinion.

Yes, I’ve lost projects by having a strong opinion. But I’ve also gotten projects to the finish line by being an opinionated, trustworthy person. Almost all of my client projects have started with the client innocently assuming that dynamic will be that they’ll say stuff and I’ll do it. That all changes the first time I say, “I don’t think we should do that.” More often than not for me, that’s been the gateway to a different kind of conversation, one that leads to a more collaborative partnership where the power is more evenly distributed.

That’s kinda the point: when anyone can be wrong, that also means anyone can be right.

I try to practice this in reverse now that I’m an adult, specifically a parent. I do take seriously that part of my responsibility as a parent is to teach and train my kids, but I’m open to the idea that I can be wrong. And I even try to let them know that sometimes I’ll be wrong and they’ll be right. Like I train my designers to question their briefs and prompts, I train my kids to know that they can question me, or any adult in their lives. I don’t give them permission to be disrespectful to anyone, but I do encourage them to form their own worldviews and evaluate the things that rub against it. I want them to have power, and this is a way they can get it for themselves when it’s not always given to them.

Don’t Confuse Inputs for Outcomes

Dan Mall — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Too many people confuse inputs for outcomes.

I heard that Warren Buffett—one of the world’s best-known investors—doesn’t schedule meetings more than 24 hours out, a bold simplicity in contrast to the rest of the world that has calendars full of meetings for weeks. A common defense for why others can’t do that is, “Well yeah, he can do that because he’s Warren Buffett.” I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that he didn’t start that when he became the world-renowned Warren Buffett; maybe he became the world-renowned Warren Buffett because he started doing that. What many see as an outcome may have actually been an input.

When I talk to a lot of newly-married entrepreneurs and tell them about my family life, many of them say they’d love to get to a place where their business is doing well enough that their partner can be a stay-at-home parent. I tell them they have it backwards: my wife wasn’t a stay-at-home mom because SuperFriendly was doing well enough for her to do so. SuperFriendly did well because my wife decided to invest in our family and our business by being a stay-at-home mom.

I used to think I’d get an assistant once I made more money. Now I realize that having an assistant is what makes me more money.

I used to think that I had to save up for a time to have a backup computer. Now I realize that having a backup computer saved me many times.

Don’t confuse inputs for outcomes.

Say, Do, Say

Dan Mall — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I’ve worked on hundreds of projects in my 26-year career, and each of them were so incredibly unique.

However, I could distill all of them down to the same 3-step framework that I use every time:

Say what I’m going to do.
Do what I said.
Say what I did.

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This works at a macro level and a micro level, and at any stage in the process. Some examples:

In a pitch, I propose something to a prospective client. If I win the project, I do what I said in the pitch. At the end, my leave-behind is a recap of everything I’ve done for them.
Before I design anything, I’ll write a brief that states what I intend to do. I get a client to agree that it’s pointed in the right direction. Then, I design. Then, when I’m presenting a design, I tell the client what I designed that we agreed upon.
When I start work for the day, I post to my team what I plan on doing. Then I do it. At the end of the day, I’ll post a recap of what I did.

If you follow a standard daily stand-up format with your team, you already have practice doing what I’m talking about.

To even call it three steps is a bit misleading. Really, it’s a 2-step virtuous cycle:

I know it’s vague. I’m sorry if you were expecting something more specific. A lot of designers have—and yearn for—a process that includes words like define, ideate, test, prototype, empathize, deliver, and more. I’ve tried versions that include all of these words, some of them, none of them, and different orderings of each. What I learned was that it doesn’t really matter that much. No particular permutation was significantly better or worse. But, regardless of the process, if I didn’t use this “say, do, say” cycle, trouble arose.

So I stick with this. It’s specific enough to give me instructions and open enough that I can try new things within it. It keeps me accountable to the thing that really matters: delivering value every week.

Underpromise, Overdeliver: The Greatest Lie a Business Consultant Ever Told

Dan Mall — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0000

There’s a “best practice” that we’re all taught.

It constantly shows up in just about every “life pro tip” and “how to be successful” list out there.

And I hate it.

It’s this toxic idea:

Underpromise, overdeliver.

It runs rampant. I spy pages of Google search results for articles with headings like…

Life pro tip: always under-promise and over-deliver
The Art of Under-Promise and Over-Deliver
How to Underpromise and Overdeliver
Underpromise & Overdeliver – All You Need To Know

…that contain passages like…

a strategy that businesses use to generate high customer satisfaction

…and…

a good surprise is much better than a bad surprise

As far as I can tell, the idea was introduced in 1987 by business management author Tom Peters in his article Under Promise, Over Deliver. The idea fits under the umbrella term of expectation management, a crucial idea in the field of client service.

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The premise is simple: clients and customers have expectations. The more your exceed those expectations, the happier the customer. The more you fall short, the more trust you lose. For example, you tell your client or manager that a design you’re working on will be done by 5pm today. If you finish by 3pm (2 hours early), they’ll be happy. If you finish by 7pm (2 hours late), they’ll be upset.

So, the logic here seems easy enough: if you can move the level of expectations down further, that gives you more room to go above and beyond, to overdeliver.

The trap of underpromising and overdelivering

In our previous example, you could tell them to expect a delivery at 5pm and deliver it at 3pm.

Can you spot the trap?

In order to underpromise, you have to know what you can promise, and then intentional set expectations lower than that.

In our example, even though you know you can deliver at 3pm, you tell your client to expect 5pm so that you can deliver at 3pm and “exceed expectations.”

That, my friend, is called lying.

The farther apart what you promise and what you deliver, the bigger the lie.

Those who regularly practice underpromising and overdelivering regularly engage in lying to people. I try hard not to do that to my clients, and I recommend that you do the same.

But even if we put the lying issue aside, there are still a lot of problems with this technique of underpromising and overdelivering.

The irritation of surprise

As a culture, we tend to value surprise, at least in the U.S. We love surprising our love ones with gifts and throwing surprise parties. The idea of surprise often goes hand-in-hand with pleasure and delight.

But for whom?

Surprise parties are usually fun for the people throwing them and the people involved in keeping the secret. What about for the person being celebrated? It’s hit or miss. Some people are delighted by the idea that their friends and family successfully conspired together to hide something from them for a long period of time. For others, even the moment of “Surprise!” being hurled at them is filled with shock, startle, embarrassment, and many more conflicting emotions.

Surprises hijack our cognitive resources. It’s a quick way to get someone’s full attention. That’s exciting for some, which is why it makes sense as a well-intentioned thing to do for a client.

But, in a society where the new etiquette is to text before you call, not all surprises are good. As many who work from home can identify with, there are only a few things more annoying that getting a 11am–4pm window for service from a repairperson and them showing up at 10am while I’m on a Zoom meeting. And they have the nerve to be annoyed because they “overdelivered” by showing up early!

Even some of the most heralded companies in the world are guilty of this sin. I’ve bought more than a few expensive things from Apple, from phones to laptops, all to be delivered to my house. In my experience, Apple never delivers on the date they initially said they would; it’s always been anywhere from a few days to a week early for me. While it’s great that I get my item sooner than I expected, it’s equally problematic. I can’t set a time that I know I can be home to collect an expensive item that might otherwise be sitting unattended on my porch for hours.

You’re showing them who you are

Like the famous quote from Maya Angelou, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Each of your actions trains a client to see who you are. When you underpromise and overdeliver—especially if you keep doing this—you train a client to not believe you. I think Apple products are great, and I also don’t believe them when they tell me when to expect a delivery. If you constantly tell your client 5pm and keep delivering at 3pm, your client may be puzzled that they’ve learned you can deliver at 3pm but you haven’t seemed to learn that yet. That’s the kind of small thought that erodes your brand and reputation over time as it grows.

Again, underpromising is about lowering expectations. The more you do this, you’re literally training your client to expect less of you. That probably doesn’t lead to the outcome you want. I want clients and customers to have high expectations of me that I can deliver on. I want the bar to be high, not low.

Better than underpromising and overdelivering

What’s better than underpromising and overdelivering?

Promising and delivering.

In other words: doing what you said you would.

Do this consistently and you’ll be someone that everyone wants to work with, because they’ll have proof that they can trust and depend on you. That’s how you build accountability.

No One Negotiated

Dan Mall — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In last week’s newsletter, I posted that I was going to try and hire someone to help me soon.

I got a lot of responses to that. According to the survey that I add at the end of every issue, that was my most hated post ever. Many people messaged me through various platforms, and the responses were very polarized. It was almost exactly 50/50: half of the people messaged me to rebuke me on allegedly exploitative practices—including one example that I published anonymously with permission—and the other half applied to what many of them referred to as “the perfect opportunity.” There weren’t many in the middle.

But no one did what I was hoping for.

No one negotiated.

For that half that applied to “their perfect opportunity,” it makes sense to me that they wouldn’t negotiate.

But what about the other half, the ones whose comments seem to imply that the offer would be better if the financial compensation was higher, closer to the “industry standard?”

I said I could responsibly pay someone $3k–$5k/month or $36k–$60k/year.

No told me how they could all but guarantee that their work would help me bring in an extra $40k–$60k next year and that they’d need an extra $20k–$30k of that to get their total comp closer to $56k–$90k.

This is what I do for my clients. I don’t expect them to pay me a lot of money just because they have it. I try to find the extra money for them to pay me with minimal work on their end.

(And just to say it out loud, I’m not playing any sort of game here where I intentionally am lowballing the numbers as a way to get people to negotiate. I hate those kinds of games—more about that in next week’s newsletter—and refuse to participate in them. I’m being honest about what I can afford, and I fully realized that what I can afford is not acceptable to many.)

How to land great clients

Because I’ve had the chance in my career to work with many reputable and popular companies, a question I get a lot from people is how they can get that too. Most of them assume that it’s brand- or reputation-based, that because I have a sizable audience, it automatically attracts high-profile clients who are already predisposed to working with you.

I have not found that to be true at all.

Instead, I think it’s because I’ve gotten really good at pitching over the years, namely showing clients how hiring me would be a profitable activity for them.

Most of the pitches I’ve received for this position are pretty lackluster. They tend to fall into these categories:

“I’m cheaper than you’re offering”
“I’ll learn so much”
“This will be a great opportunity for me”
“I’ve been looking for a change lately”

Rule #1 of a good pitch: talk about your prospective client more than yourself!

Think and act like a designer

Among other things, I’m looking to hire people who identify (at least partially) as designers. I think designers have superpowers, which is why I love collaborating with other designers. One of the superpowers a designer has is to envision a world that doesn’t yet exist and lay out the steps to get there and make it a reality. There’s a piece of that that means some designers never really settle for accepting reality as it is, and they do what they can to influence and shape reality into one that’s closer to what they like. These are the kinds of designers I want to work with more and more.

Instead of seeing an offer you don’t like and responding “no,” is there a version where you can respond, “yes, under these conditions?”

Of course, I’m not trying to force anyone to like what I’m offering. If you don’t and/or it offends you, I take it as a sign that we’re not aligned. You’d probably hate working with me! And we’re probably both glad that we discovered that now as opposed to 6 months into it when it’s going poorly for both of us.

But I know there are also people who want to like the offer, but terms aren’t quite right for them. I’m open to hearing what things need to be tweaked to make them right, especially if you can see a win-win version that I don’t.

I have yet to write a job description to outline the specifics of what I’m looking for. In this job description, I will write as many things in it to tell you how to easily get me to hire you. I want to give you the answers. One of those things will definitely be that you don’t take my word for it. Question the things that I write. Tell me how you see it differently. Show me what you’re seeing that I’m not. Prove to me that you can work under any set of constraints. Give me a glimpse into how creative you can be. These are the kinds of things I love about my favorite collaborators.

I fully intend for my thoughts to be starting points, not ending points. I think it’s almost always easier to revise than create. I like working with people who believe that too.

A Response to “Hiring Help”

Dan Mall — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I posted last week about hiring some design and development help to take some stuff of my plate.

I received a lot of responses in many different forms.

Some saw what I was offering as an opportunity for them. Some saw it as exploitative. And many were somewhere in-between.

One reply in particular was something I’d like to share. This person opted to send it privately, for fear of vitriol towards them and me. They also gave me permission to share it anonymously.

I agree with just about every word in it.

Here‘s the message in its entirety.

Ugh, Dan… I’ve always admired your work and your contributions to the design community. But admittedly, these thoughts on hiring gave me pause. It took some courage to share my concerns, as I'm aware of the potential backlash (let's be honest, as a junior myself, this lone message could completely derail my career), but I felt morally compelled to speak up here.

Offering lower-rate junior-level compensation for someone who can exceed your own expectations (120%?!) is exploitative, especially in the current economic climate. I understand the desire to find someone who can go above and beyond, as you do for your clients. But expecting that level of performance for a significantly lower wage than industry standards, without even the guise of mentorship (again you are asking for senior-level top performers), feels disingenuous. It's one thing to ask for a little extra effort from your employee, it's another thing entirely to systematically underpay them while expecting them to over-perform. I know you have already mentioned that you do not aim to exploit anyone, but the every other word on the page seems to contradict that in practice. I mean, at one point, you even mention that you believe this person would be easy to find specifically because the market right now is tough. You mention that your inbox is bursting. That’s extremely disappointing to hear and is exploitive by definition. I know that $36k/year was on the lower end of the spectrum you listed but just to put some things into perspective, that is less than $18 an hour for a 40 hour workweek. It’s dangerously close to the federal poverty line for a family of 3, not to mention that the poverty line is already pretty outdated and fraudulently optimistic. I would argue that $30k/year (or $36k/year) should be considered poverty for even a family of one, in most American cities. To even suggest that is appropriate is extremely insulting. $60k/year is obviously better, but still very questionable as a junior, let alone a senior-level employee giving the role their all. If we are talking a 20 hour workweek instead (you did mention this) things start to look even more fair. But I would warn you run the risk of attracting candidates that look good on paper but aren't fully committed - not top talent. When you are barely paying enough for survival and offering no additional benefits, it means the only real benefit left is that the role could be a stepping stone. You are almost encouraging a revolving door.

Here is the tough truth: What you can personally afford to pay isn't necessarily what's appropriate to pay. And several paragraphs about why this approach will still work, does not morally excuse it. Sometimes, as a business owner, you have to make tough decisions and investments to ensure fair compensation. Employees are just that, an investment. And investments are a risk. If you are not willing to assume that risk so that the employment is mutually beneficial and fair, perhaps you just need to wait, or make some budget adjustments. I have hope that you are still well intended, and perhaps are just feeling a bit out of touch lately. Being out of touch as a result of your own success is certainly not the worst problem to have, and is something that's forgivable. You mentioned wanting to find a version of yourself from 15 years ago - while I enjoy that sentiment, we do not live in an economy from 15 years ago. I'm also willing to bet that 15 years ago, maybe not always, but at least occasionally, you were feeling pretty exploited too. Would Dan from 15 years ago find this acceptable? You're right, sometimes shifting values is necessary - but I would hope that they strengthen over time, not cheapen. Especially as you continue to gain influence, reach, and notoriety.

I hope you'll reflect on this and consider how your immeasurable influence can be used uplift designers, as you have in the past, not encourage them to settle for less. I have a lot of respect for you and I know you can do better, otherwise I would not have taken the time and the risk to write this.

To end this on a positive note, I do hope that (with some adjustments) you are able to find the perfect employee and that the deal is so sweet from BOTH sides that they’re excited to grow WITH your business, not waiting for the moment they can outgrow the role for a more appropriate wage. I wish you continued success, as long as it isn’t at the expense of others.

Hiring Help

Dan Mall — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I’m looking to hire someone to help me with some design and web development needs.

I’m not quite ready to do that right now, but I will be soon.

I designed and built my first paid website in 1998 and have made thousands since. Doing this work has been part of my professional identity for over 2 decades.

I’ve also been an entrepreneur for almost as long, creating everything from side projects that garnered some heavy attention to startups that never really got off the ground to full-on 8-figure businesses. I know everybody’s a CEO nowadays, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am too.

That dichotomy puts me right in the crosshairs of the maker/manager conundrum that continues to wreak havoc on my schedule and leaves me feeling on an almost-daily basis like I’ve accomplished nothing. Lots of motion, not a lot of progress.

Every productivity matrix, book, and course I’ve come across over the last few years tells me that I need to give up some tasks so I can spend as much of my time, effort, and attention in my Genius Zone. As I wrote about in my 2023 Year in Review, I’m quickly arriving the idea that being a web designer and developer is in my Excellence Zone, not my Genius Zone—which is a tough thing for me to come to grips with after building a 26-year career and reputation on it. Still though, it does feel right to give this up to give me some much-needed focus.

So I know I need to hire. Now what?

Compensation

My first step is figuring out what I can afford to pay for any amount of help. Between money set aside, projections, a little bit of investment money, and my accountant’s recommendations—hi Dad!—I can responsibly pay someone $3k–$5k/month or $36k–$60k/year. (Whether that’s part-time or full-time and contracting or employment is something I’m still deliberating, and I’ll admit that employee benefits aren’t exactly a headache I’m excited to take on right now.)

That financial range determines a lot. Average compensation in tech as of this writing is $111,193/year ($9,266.08/month), about double the high-range of what I can pay. That probably means I may be limited to a 1) a senior person at part-time availability (20ish hours/week) or 2) a junior person at full-time availability (32ish hours/week).

Unfortunately, a junior-level person won’t cut it here. I ran an apprenticeship program for 7 years that 20 people went through. I regularly hired interns and juniors on SuperFriendly projects. For years before that, I managed interns and juniors at other agencies. I’m intimately familiar with the level and pace of work from most junior people. As I’m looking for someone to take over the work that I’d be otherwise doing, an average junior person’s work would probably add more to my plate in order to give them the support to be successful. I get quite a few offers from people volunteering to work for me for free. As much as I appreciate it, I suspect I’ll be helping them more than they’re helping me. I believe strongly that there's a place for that, but not every situation has to be that.

Do I really think I can get someone senior for a rate that would typically be paid to someone more junior? For better or worse: yes, I do. Here’s why:

For one, getting a job in tech is really hard right now. I’ve heard stories of it taking a year or more for some to land a new job with no income in the interim. Perhaps there’s someone really good who could use the interim cash for 6–18 months while waiting to line up something else.

Another factor is that I have other forms of compensation that could be valuable to some people. For someone who mostly needs cash, my offer is probably unappealing. But I believe there are people out there who are skilled and just need the right opportunity… not the opportunity to learn, but the opportunity to demonstrate their already-honed skills, the opportunity to receive some direction and modeling from someone me, and the opportunity to get access to my network to connect them to an even better opportunity for them afterwards. I believe there’s a person out there that would take less cash for those opportunities and see it as a good investment in their careers.

I’m working on writing a full job description that outlines the role and responsibilities in detail, as well as a few suggestions as to who might be the right kind of person for this, but I’m at least a few weeks (more realistically, a few months) away from finishing and posting that. Surprisingly, even a short tweet that I was going to be writing about this has my DMs flooded from people who have already “applied.” I don’t expect anyone to tell me how they’re a good fit without a job description, but if you wanna shoot your shot anyway, here’s a short form where you can tell me why you think you’d be a good fit. Hint: if you’re not following my portfolio tips, you probably won’t be a good fit for me.

Changing values

Even thinking about changing the way I hire is already starting to poke at some of my values.

I don’t subscribe to the idea of “paying people what they’re worth,” but I do believe in compensating someone well, a thing that only they can determine, not me. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone, especially as someone who holds some influence over others. I always want everyone that works for me to feel well compensated, through the combination of cash, learning, and access that’s right for them in this season of their work.

I’m realizing I’ve always hired with the premise that I’d be giving someone more than they’re giving me. Naturally, this biases me toward hiring people that are around one notch below the job I’m hiring them to do so they can stretch and learn that skill—often directly from me.

But I’ve also been reflecting on how I act the complete opposite when my clients have hired me. I don’t expect that I’ll get more than they will. I expect that they’ll get more than I do out of it. I take the default position that what I deliver will be above and beyond what they’ve paid for. I’m fine with that. Even moreso, I think that’s the job of being a great service provider and the key to it.

These two perspectives don’t fit together well. I’ve learned about myself that both of these approaches share the same root: a fear of ever being indebted to anyone. It works, but it also often leaves me at a disadvantage whether I’m the hirer or the hired. So I’ve been giving myself the permission to want to find someone who will happily deliver to me as a client what I deliver to my own clients.

The common wisdom in hiring and delegation—mostly to short-circuit an endless search for a person that doesn’t exist—is to be fine with someone who can do tasks at 80% of the level you do it. Speaking from personal experience, it works! I’ve had that approach for years. But over years, those 20% compromises add up. I want someone who can do a task at 100% of what I can do. Not in the way I do it—I actually care very little how someone works—but in the outcomes they deliver.

Heck, I’m really honest, I want someone who can do a task at 120% of what I can do. When I share that with people, I always get the same pushback: “Come on, Dan; is that really realistic? Can anyone fulfill that expectation?”

Yes. I do, for my clients.

(Oof, it’s really uncomfortable to toot my own horn like that. But hey, it’s my newsletter.)

Some of you have probably seen where this is going already, but who I really want to hire is the 15-year ago version of me. I wasn’t the best then—I’m still not the best now—but I was still helpful to people who hired me. I made their lives easier by taking work away from them, by taking initiative. I was affordable. I recognized the value of opportunity. I recognized that compensation takes many forms. I didn’t deliver every time—I wasn’t perfect and still am not—but I did deliver way more times than I didn’t. I’d love to hire a person who is currently doing their version of what I used to do 15 years ago who wants to do a version of what I do now. Perhaps, by working with me, their 15-year journey shortens to 10 or 5.

Overall, I’m realizing that a lot of my past history and values have been at my expense. I’ve limited the growth of my own businesses by holding these things as sacred and unchangeable. But it’s time for me to try on some other strategies. As the saying goes, “What got you here won’t get you there.”

Time to get there.

The Project Within the Project

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Within every project, I believe there is a project worth doing.

You may get a new client with a problem to solve, like “redesign our website to help us get more customers.” Your boss may assign you some surface to explore, like “create a design system for our data visualization needs.”

You may love it or you may hate it. Most projects fall somewhere in the middle, and often close to the middle.

But I always look for the project that I know I can get excited. It’s almost always buried within the surface-level project. You won’t find it in the brief or the product requirements document, but it exists. Your job is to unearth it.

When I was hired to do a straightforward redesign for a nonprofit, I was indifferent. I respected their mission, but it wasn’t something that personally resonated. It was a job. I knew I’d apply myself and do a good job. But when I discovered that one of my team members wanted to improve their illustration skills, I made it my mission to find a way for them to do that on this project. I was excited to do that. It was a quest, a puzzle. That piece is what would dial up my effort and interest from an 8 to a 9.

When I was hired to create a design system for a tech company, it was business as usual, which typically meant a mental challenge and long hours for a season. I wanted to see if I could do just as good of a job in half the time I would typically spend on a project like this. That became my project within the project.

Over many years, I’ve learned about myself that I’m perfectly content to do just about any project with a good client collaborator that comes in the door, but I get excited when I have the opportunity to learn and/or try something new. That opportunity isn’t always apparent or stated, so I usually have to go looking for it. But when I inevitably find it, it turns every project into something I’m more excited to work on.

What are you working on lately that’s adequate? What can you find in the middle of it that turns your apathy into adventure?

Event Vindication

Dan Mall — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I was on the Bible Committee in fifth grade, and I designed a scavenger hunt that scarred me.

I went to a small Christian school from grade 1–8. In the older grades, we had class officers, but I didn’t really care much for student office. We also had a Bible committee, a group of students that were in responsible for the religious growth of the student body. As someone who prided himself in Bible knowledge, this was much more my bag. (Yes, I was a huge nerd as a kid, which explains why I’m still a nerd now.)

One year, the Bible Committee was given the opportunity to do something fun and out of the ordinary for the class. As a fan of game shows where you had to find clues and solve puzzles like Where in The World is Carmen San Diego and Legends of the Hidden Temple, I suggested we do a scavenger hunt, and everyone agreed.

I had it all mapped out in my head, so I took the lead on it. I think all the other kids on the committee were content for our committee to get the credit with me doing all the work so they didn’t have to. I didn’t mind. I was excited.

I wrote clues on notecards that contained Bible verses with clues on them that led people to different locations behind our school, like the small forest or the tiny creek flowing nearby. I hid the cards in all the locations and the class got set up to play our game.

I explained the rules, and everyone got started. The game went fairly well, and we gave the team that won their prize.

As I was cleaning up and making sure I didn’t leave any trash outside, I walked past different groups of kids, talking and loitering after the scavenger hunt. I stopped to pick up a notecard on the ground, within earshot of the girl I liked and her group of friends.

“That was so corny.”

I froze.

“What a stupid game,” they laughed.

One of the girls who was facing me slightly nodded in my direction, alerting the group to the fact that I was nearby. They turned to look at me, slightly embarrassed at first about being caught but quickly sneering.

I felt my bottom lip start to quiver.

Oh no.

Then tears started welling up in my eyes and trickling down my face. No! Not in front of a group of girls! I tried hard to stop it to no avail.

My crush burst into laughter.

Thirty years later, that’s still a vivid memory for me. I believed that I wasn’t any good at creating events and experiences for people that they could enjoy, even if I enjoyed them. But, in the last few years, I’ve started to try again, despite this belief.

I’ve realized that my rich life includes playing basketball and eating at Michelin-starred restaurants. So I’ve started to see if other people are interested in doing these things with me.

I recently attended Render, and I organized a dinner for 20 people at Michelin-starred Atlas.

I recently attended Config, and I organized a dinner for 18 people at 3-Michelin-starred Quince on one night and a pick-up basketball game for 40 people the next night.

10-year old me would never have believed this in his wildest dreams.

There’s more.

Not only did 38 people come to 2 dinners, but nearly 300 people applied to attend these dinners.

Almost 200 people registered to play basketball.

Sponsors gave me money to make these events special for everyone that attended. We made shirts and bags and gave out books and cookies and so much more. (Thank you to my friends at Omlet and Wix Studio for believing that these are worthwhile things to do for a community.)

There’s something really powerful about finding your tribe, finally realizing that there are people in the world who like the same things you do, who want the same things you want. The trick is finding that tribe. I’m learning that sometimes I have to be the one that gives us a place to meet.

The clincher for me—the thing that filled my heart—is hearing from people who attended each event that it was the highlight of their conference experience. Funny enough, that’s also partially what made those events the highlights of my conference experience.

Also, just to give 10-year old Dan his flowers, I printed up notecards for the dinners with conversation starters on them. They were a hit.

What Should I Work On?

Dan Mall — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I woke up at 5:30am this morning, well-rested, energized, and excited to get to work.

I sat down at my desk. I couldn’t decide what to work on.

Here’s what I did.

I opened up my daily journal, something I haven’t done in 2 months, and I started to write stream-of-consciousness. I realized that I’m anxious about something I’d like to finish for a client today that I’m a bit behind on. I COULD work on that, but something about it doesn’t feel right as the thing that should occupy this slot of early morning work—what I’ve typically called “mission work.”

It dawned on me that I’ve spent the last few months focusing on the urgent stuff—hence the 2 months of not journaling—and almost no time on important stuff. I decided I should use this time to work on important stuff, even though there’s a ton of urgent stuff looming.

My auto-generated daily journal note template contains my quarterly goals, and I realized I haven’t looked at that in weeks. I realized it’s the first week of the quarter, so it’s a good time to assess last quarter and recalibrate for Q3.

I set some pretty ambitious goals last quarter for Design System University in terms of both revenue and student enrollment. I ended last quarter at 52% of my revenue goal and 63% of my enrollment goal. It felt a bit crummy from a percentage standpoint, but, when I looked at the actual dollar amount and number of students enrolled, I’m super pleased! I have some ideas as to how I want to recalibrate those goals for this quarter, and I’ll save that for later in the week.

I glanced up at the one post-it note I have stuck on my monitor, which says, “Am I being creative right now?” I realized I haven’t done something creative in a while, and it dawns on me that doing something I consider important and doing something I consider creative are probably more tied than I was aware of.

So, I’ve carved out some time to do 2 things: record a set of videos I wanted to make for a while and design something I’ve been thinking about for months now. The thing I want to design is going to take some time, and I normally wouldn’t start it unless I’ve already blocked out the calendar time to know how and when I’m going to finish it. But I’ve realized that that’s been blocking me from even getting started.

So I’m gonna start today without knowing when I’ll be able to pick it up next. That’s uncomfortable and unusual for me, and maybe that is the reason to do it.

My Design Contract Template

Dan Mall — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In the last post, I talked about how to make sure your projects are profitable for both your client and you. In my final installment of this series, I’ll show you how to articulate all of that to set you up for a successful relationship with your client. In other words, I’ll show you how to write a great contract.

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This article is part of a 4-part series brought to you by Wix Studio about running valuable projects that grow your clients’ businesses and yours too. Wix Studio is a platform built for agencies and enterprises to create exceptional websites at scale. If you're looking for smart design capabilities and flexible dev tools, Wix Studio is the tool for you.

In this series

Attracting 5-, 6-, and 7- Figure Clients
Early Conversations Are Where You Shape the Work
Pricing Profitable Projects
My Design Contract Template

Necessary disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, so none of this is legal advice. It’s only stories from my experience. I’m fortunate to have worked with my lawyer to evolve and iterate on my boilerplate agreements for over a decade. (If you’re looking for a great lawyer to work with on your freelance or agency business, look no further than Matt Sherlock.)

About contracts

Before we get into the details of a contract, I’d like to share some of my own ground rules around contracts.

First: what a contract is not. A contract is not a proposal. I’ve seen many freelancers and agencies treat a contract like a proposal, a way to provide a few options that a client can choose from. That’s not what a contract is for. Contracts should only contain obligations: what you’re obligated to do for your client and what are they obligated to do for you. The more “coulds” and “shoulds” you have in your contract, the more ambiguous and difficult to enforce it becomes. Shift the “coulds” and “shoulds” to “musts.”

Many treat contracts as a zero sum game: in order to get the most, your client has to lose the most. That’s the game that’s played: write a contract that incredibly one-sided, knowing that your client (or client’s lawyers) will negotiate it the other way, and eventually you’ll land close to the middle.

I think that’s garbage.

Why start a project with either you or your client feeling duped or even defensive? How do you expect to do a fun, collaborative project from there?

I always strive to write my contracts in a way that’s fair and just and benefits both them and me equally. I try to write contracts where I would agree to every clause if I was in their shoes and where they would agree to every clause if they were in my shoes. Many clients have said that they and their legal/procurement teams think my contract is the most balanced contract they’ve ever received, so they didn’t feel the need to redline much or anything at all. I think that’s a massive compliment that I’m immensely proud of.

The two reasons to have a contract

Every time you do work for a client, it’s generally a good idea to have a written contract between you. Most service providers know this, but they don’t always know why. From my experience, there are 2 main reasons to have a contract: accountability and risk mitigation. (A lawyer may reverse the order of those.)

One of my biggest reasons for having a contract is to articulate what we’re mutually agreeing to. If you’ve followed the steps I’ve suggested for a valuable sales process, you’ve had many conversations about the possibilities. That’s great at those stages, but now you have to converge all of those conversations from “here’s what we could do” to “here’s what we’re going to do.”

Contracts can be short, they can be long, or they can be somewhere in-between. Heralded design firm Segura has a famously short 13-line contract. This type of short agreement is incredibly seductive to the design business that wants to quickly get past the sales phase and get on to the project.

As Basecamp CEO Jason Fried points out in that article, “…there are many ways to do business. One way is working with clients you trust — people who appreciate this approach to work. And if you guessed wrong, and someone fucks you, rather than pursuing legal remedies which cost even more time, money, and hassle, there’s an alternative: Take your losses, wash your hands, and don’t work with them again.”

Which bring us to the second reason for having a contract: risk mitigation. Every project contains risk. The amount of risk you’re willing to carry is inversely proportional to the length of your agreement. If you can carry a large amount of risk, your contract can be short. If you aren’t willing or able to carry a large amount of risk, your contract probably needs to be longer.

Useful contracts answer the question “what do we do if {this specific situation} goes poorly?” in advance. Useful contracts outline the specific agreements you and your client are making, and the implication is that anything different that occurs is a breach, which is a fancy way of saying that the agreed-upon, binding terms have been violated or broken.

“A contract” usually means two contracts

In order to create a useful contract, a common practice is to actually have two separate agreements:

A General Services Agreement (also known as a Master Service Agreement or a Framework Agreement) that outlines the terms of every project you do with that client
A Statement of Work (also known as a Work Order), a shorter document that outlines the terms of a specific project that adds more detail and/or may differ from a term in your General Service Agreement.

Here’s a link to the General Services Agreement template and the Statement of Work template I used at my former agency SuperFriendly.

Overall, we’d always insist that we use our agreements as a starting point, not our client’s agreements. Even though it sounds like I’m being a diva, it’s actually for a more practical reason that I’m happy to share with clients when they ask. I tell them that we’ve done thousands of projects like this, probably more than they have, so we have a better sense of what makes for a great project than they do. Especially if we’ve had a great probative conversation with them where they now see us as an expert and their preferred partner, this usually makes sense to them and they agree.

Let’s walk through each, clause-by-clause.

General Services Agreement

Our General Services Agreement has 29 clauses in it! Remember: this is the document that governs every project we do with a specific client, which sometimes lasts over several years. These 29 clauses are the non-negotiables that are table stakes for a project for us. Unless it’s tiny revisions on these, we typically don’t accept major reworkings or removals of anything in here. Clients that don’t agree to these are usually not a good fit for us to work with.

Here are the 29 clauses in my General Services Agreement and what they mean:

Services. They’re hiring us to perform services outlined in a separate document.
Fees. They’ll pay us the amount and on the dates we agree to in a separate document. We’ll make sure they approve any additional expenses before we incur them.
Term. This agreement stays in place for a year. For clients we worked with more than a year, we write up a small addendum to agree to extend that term, which is much easier than spinning up a whole new agreement.
Control of Services. We’ll work our way, not the client’s way.
Tool and Equipment. We’ll use our own equipment.
Relationship of the Parties. We’re an independent contractor.
Licenses and Permits. We’ll make sure to have any licenses or permits we need to complete the work.
Taxes. We’ll pay our own taxes.
Warranties. We promise to be professional, make good stuff for them, and not disparage them. They promise that everything they send to us is legitimate.
No Conflict of Interest. We might work for their direct competitors, but we promise that that won’t stop us from doing good work with and for them.
Pauses. They can pause the project anytime, but we can’t promise we’ll pick it back up when they’re ready. If they pause for over 60 days, we have every right to say the project is over and we can terminate.
Termination. Both of us can walk away at any time for any reason, as long as we give 30 days notice. If we do end the project, they’ll make sure we’re paid up for the work we’ve completed, and we’ll make sure they get all of the work we’ve done and the rights to it.
Publicity. We’re allowed to say they’re a client, but we won’t talk about the work unless they approve our ability to do so.
Consequential Damages. Both parties will only be responsible for direct damages if this agreement is breached.
Insurance. The type of business insurance we carry for clients.
Force Majeure. What we do about events beyond our reasonable control.
Indemnification. If we do certain things wrong, we’ll be responsible for making it up to the injured third party. You agree to do the same for us.
Ownership. This is a big one. Most clients want their service providers to do “work for hire,” which is a fancy way to say that they own the work as soon as we create it. I don’t like it because I think we give up too much leverage here. We instead say our clients own the work as they pay for it, not sooner. If they pay for 50% of the project, they own 50% of the work. The only time they own all of the work is when they’ve paid in full.
Confidential Information. We’ll keep their secrets as long as they tell us they’re secret, and we’ll expect them to do the same for us.
Limitation of Liability. We’re not liable for anything more than they’ve paid us in the last year of working together.
Trademarks. We’ll only use their trademarks with their permission, which they’ll grant unless they have a good reason not to.
Assignment. We won’t assign this Agreement to anyone else without their consent.
Notices. Notices must be sent by mail or email to the address specified.
Compliance with Laws. We, um, follow the law.
Entire Agreement. If we change this Agreement, it must be in writing. Everything we agreed to do is in this document and its attachments.
Governing Law. This document should be interpreted using a specific locality law. Because our lawyer was in Pennsylvania, we started by stating Pennsylvania courts as the venue for any disputes. Many clients prefer to change this to the state of their lawyers, so we deferred to our lawyer about which state laws he was comfortable with.
Headings. Because we include plain-text explanations with the legalese, we made sure to say it’s added for convenience, not to change interpretation.
Severability. If a court determines that any portion of this Agreement is unenforceable, that part will be removed and the rest of the Agreement will remain intact.
Execution in Counterparts. If we sign separate copies of this Agreement, including electronic copies, that’s still a valid contract.

Phew! That’s a lot of clauses. A lot of these are in our contract because we’ve gotten burned before by not having them. You may not need all of these specific clauses in your contract, but learn from your past projects and add clauses that help you ensure your most common good things happen and the most common bad things don’t.

Statement of Work

The Statement of Work (SOW) is a shorter agreement that outlines the specific terms of a specific project. Here are the 13 clauses in my standard Statement of Work:

Project Name.
Key Outcomes. This is an important section. This isn’t a list of services or deliverables; that comes later. I use this section to bring some of the language about the outcomes the client wants to realize from our previous value conversations into the actual agreement we’re now making. That’s usually phrases that include some kind of “change” language, like “increased design system usage for more designers across the organization” or “less time spent on content entry by executives.” These aren’t guarantees, but they are obligations that our team promises to work toward. These are the basis of the project. If these outcomes change, the project—and the timeline and the price—changes. But even in the services and deliverables change but the outcomes stay the same, we’re still in scope.
Services. A list of services we’ll perform. Those are generally things like “copywriting” or “user interface design.”
Deliverables. A list of deliverables we’ll give to the client throughout the course of the project. Those are things like roadmap documents, creative briefs, web pages, animation exports, and more.
Client Materials. A list of the things the client will give us. Those might be brand assets, access to a particular team, access to certain repositories and files, etc.
Work Plan. This is a general project plan in sequence that includes estimated start dates and end dates. The most unique thing here is probably the column entitled “Project value.” For every item in the Work Plan, we assign a percentage value in relation to the project. For example, the kickoff might be worth 5% of the project while the first round of design might be worth 10%. It’s completely subjective, but it’s worth documenting. This becomes incredibly useful in the case of termination. Let’s say your client’s funding gets cut and they have to stop the project part of the way through. How much do they owe you? With assigned project values, you can add them up to determine that you’ve completed 36% of the project already and therefore are owed 36% of the total fee.
Termination of SOW. There’s a termination clause in the GSA already (section 12), but the one here adds some detail about what I just described above.
Project Cadence and Feedback Process. This states what cadence we expect our client’s feedback in. This example says 3 days, but we changed this from client to client depending on their culture and the pace of the project.
Scope and Term. Another very important one. Our client’s aren’t paying a time-based rate, but we’re also not working indefinitely. Based on the Work Plan, we give an amount of cushion to allow for the fact that it’s hard to keep complex projects on a strict timeline. We’ll pick some reasonable amount of cushion—like an extra month on top of a 4-month project—that we’re happy to flex out to. But, if the project hits that date, we have to be finished, even if we’re not done the work. In order to extend the time, they’ll have to pay us at a time-based rate determined by the value of the project. For example, if we’re doing a $40k project (determined in the value conversation) that we’ve estimated to take 4 months, we effectively have $10k monthly rate. If the client wants to extend another month on top of the extra month we’ve already given them, that’s the price we start at.
Payment Terms. Outlining the expectations of when we’ll get paid. The typical way we do this is to get 50% up front and then amortize the remaining balance across the remaining time of the project. For example, if we’re doing a $100k project that we’ve estimated to take 6 months, we’ll specify $50k as the first payment, then $10k on the 1st of the month for each of the remaining 5 months. It’s important for every business to be able to manage cashflow. That’s why we always specify a date that we expect payment and never upon delivery of a particular deliverable.
Key Personnel and Key Positions. We always commit the people who will be leading specific efforts on our end and ask the same of our clients. Without that, it’s difficult to create obligation and have accountability.
Fee Exclusions. A standard clause to say we’re only charging them for our expertise, attention, and effort. Any other materials will be acquired and billed separately upon their approval.
Effective Date. A standard clause to outline that the SOW becomes effective once it’s signed by everyone.

Preparing, framing, and delivering contracts

As you’ve probably gathered from the previous articles in this series, this is a lot of work to do before the project even starts! I’m a big believer in the fact that getting this stuff right makes the project go smoothly, and not getting it right is the leading cause of poor projects.

The audiences for a contract

I always walk through the agreements with my main client. Maybe not the General Service Agreement, at least not in its entirety, but definitely the Statement of Work. I want to make sure they understand the nuances enclosed and also see the things we’ve talked about in previous conversations memorialized in the agreement we’re about to sign. If we haven’t gotten the Key Outcomes clause (section 2) right, I might go a few rounds of back and forth with them to dial that in. This process, though laborious, has the added benefit of showing them the type of collaboration we’ll have during the project before we even start. Clients who hate that would hate working with us, and clients who are great collaborators here turn out to be great collaborators during the project too.

The other big reason to go over the SOW (and pieces of the GSA) with your main client is that they may not be the primary audience for the contract, especially at a larger company. It might be their boss that’s signing. It’s also likely the legal and/or procurement teams that have to be on board. Because of that, the client is your main advocate; that’s why it’s important that they feel like it’s as much their contract as yours. If they’ve co-authored it, they’ll be able to go to bat for it—and you—much more effectively.

The aesthetics of a contract

As a designer, I want all of my documents to look good. Branded contracts, invoice documents, and the like are things that designers are proud to make in order to put forward a cohesive brand. Generally, this kind of attention to detail also helps build subconscious trust from your client that they’re hiring a competent design professional that sweats the small stuff.

I’ve learned that contracts are an exception to this rule.

I used to have branded contracts that use beautiful typefaces and pristine hierarchy, but in the last decade, I’ve learned that contracts written in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Pages set in Times New Roman at 12pt get the job done better. Functionally, it’s easier to add comments and make redlines to a DOCX file than a beautiful design exported to PDF. I’ve also learned that the visual language of a Times New Roman doc is more familiar to someone in legal or procurement. Beautiful typefaces and simple English impress people looking to buy good, simple design, but it makes someone from legal think you’re an amateur. Sending them a doc that both looks and sounds like something they’re familiar with is a better way to get them on board, which is the real job of a contract. So, put away that Indesign or Illustrator template and think of Bold, Italic, and spacing as your only design tools here.

In summary

To round it all out:

Attract the right clients who already trust you and would kill to work with you before you even have the first conversation.
Have the right conversations with your prospects to multiply the trust they already have in you exponentially.
Make sure the projects you’re architecting are profitable for both your client and you—in that order.
Capture all of that in contracts that make your client—and their procurement department—champing at the bit to send the first payment and get started.

Now the table is set properly for you to do the best work of your life.

That brings us to the end of this series! I hope you’ve enjoyed and learned something from the way I set up my projects. This was the first big series I’ve done in my newsletter. Did you like it? Should I do more series? Should I write more of this series? What would you like me to write about next? Reply and let me know.

Pricing Profitable Projects

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In the last post, I talked about the importance of the early conversations you have with your prospects. Ideally, you’ve dreamt a bit out loud with them, and you now have a good sense of the kind of future they’d love to see materialize. Now it’s time to price your work in a way that’s profitable to both your prospect and you—in that order.

In this series

Attracting 5-, 6-, and 7- Figure Clients
Early Conversations Are Where You Shape the Work
Pricing Profitable Projects
My Design Contract Template

Quantifying value

If you’ve had value conversations with your prospect, you’ll likely have heard phrases about their desired future state that you can start to turn into a price. Some phrases are easier to convert than others. The easiest one is making more money.

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Making more money

Imagine your prospect said that they can see a future where they’ve turned their current $1 million in annual revenue into $5 million in annual revenue. The value of this particular scenario—shorthand for “the total bounty able to be generated“—is $4 million. A well-positioned agency might envision a combination and sequence of services that might generate an additional $4M in revenue that include improving design, transitioning to a new e-commerce platform, and search engine optimization work.

The next question is how much to charge. I typically start at 10% of total value of the scenario, as it’s often small enough to the prospect to be a not-so-painful investment with a great return, and also large enough for me that it’s lucrative. For an opportunity that could generate $4M, I’d set my price at around $400k. If the prospect asks where I got that price, I’d be honest: “The opportunity seems to be generating $4M in additional annual revenue for you, and I typically start at 10% as I thought a 9× return on investment would be great for you and lucrative enough for me to keep my business running.” Every time I mention the price, I’m always sure to talk about it relative to the value. Saying “$400k” certainly induces sticker shock, but saying “$400k to create $4M of additional annual revenue” puts it in much-welcome perspective.

And the negotiations begin there.

Some clients may try to talk you down to 8%. Would you take $320k instead of $400k to generate $4M? For some, the answer is “heck yeah!” For others, they might prefer to keep 10% as their floor.

The type of negotiation I’ve found to be more common in this scenario, however, is that the prospect explores what it would take to negotiate you up. Because you’ve unearthed the idea that a 9× return on investment is on the table, they’ll often say something like, “If we were going for an additional $8M in revenue, does that mean you’d do that for $800k?” Regardless of your answer, what an amazing conversation to have with your prospect! Because you’ve spent the time and effort to dream with them across 4 conversations, they’re now starting to dream with you! It’s a world of difference from the kind of conversations where you’re sharing an hourly or weekly rate and doing simple multiplication to determine a fee.

Fuzzier forms of value

What if your prospect isn’t interested in making more money? What if they’re a non-profit? What if they’re a higher-ed institution? What if the work is about improving their market position? Those kinds of value are generally more difficult to quantify, but it’s certainly possible. All projects exist to bring about some change—more of something, or less of something—for the prospect; otherwise, it’s a vanity project, and I try to steer clear of those.

Assuming it’s not a vanity project, every change can be quantified and needs to be quantified in order for you and your prospect to have a shared articulation of the change so you can recognize it when it happens. Non-profits want more donors or a larger constituent base. Higher-ed institutions want more applicants. Enterprises want less overhead. In his book Pricing for Profit, Dale Furtwengler outlines 9 different things that buyers generally value: speed, friendliness, integrity, dependability, convenience, image, service, innovation, and knowledgeable salespeople. Every one can be quantified.

For example, Furtwengler describes how to quantify the value of improving a prospect’s image. He uses the example of clothing brands. People who shop at places like Nordstrom or Saks Fifth Avenue pay on average 10 times what they’d pay at a place like Walmart. Taking a prospect’s image from being the Walmart of their industry to being the Nordstrom of their industry might be in the zone of 10×-ing whatever it is that they’re doing, and you can start your price at 10% of that.

The point here is that these aren’t formulas. They are rationales for the starting point of conversations with your prospect. You might be wrong about how you’re quantifying value; let your prospect correct you. The important thing is that you’re constantly steering the conversation to talking about value.

Profit first

Once you’ve quantified the value of a project and a potential price, you should make sure you can be profitable at that price before you share it with a prospect.

The typical understanding of profit is that it’s “revenue minus expenses.” In other words, it’s what’s left over. That’s a terrible way to determine profit; that’s a good way to ensure you have the thinnest amount of profit possible. If you’re anything like me, this formula doesn’t work. I’m a spender. I love making money and I love spending it. I’ll spend every dollar I have. For years, I was barely ever profitable… not because revenue wasn’t high enough, but because I wasn’t disciplined about expenses. And the strategy of “well then get more disciplined about expenses, idiot” didn’t work for me.

The solution for me was the Profit First mentality from Mike Michaelowicz. In general, the basic idea is to flip the formula from “Revenue - Expenses = Profit” to “Revenue - Profit = Expenses.” Rather than profit being what’s left over—often nothing—profit becomes the first thing you allocate. I was familiar with this idea in regards to personal finance as “pay yourself first” when I read David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire years ago but never thought to apply it to my business. The genius of this approach is in recognizing that whatever’s left off tends to fluctuate. But you don’t want profit to fluctuate. So set it as fixed instead. We think of expenses as generally fixed, but what if you could set that to fluctuate instead?

In Profit First, Michaelowicz suggests 4 separate categories that revenue tends to be allocated towards, in this order:

Profit
Owner’s Compensation
Taxes
Operating Expenses

Michaelowicz also suggests standard allocations into each category, depending on the average annual revenue of a business. For example, for a company making $1M–$5M annually, he suggests this allocation as a starting point:

Profit: 10%
Owner’s Compensation: 10%
Taxes: 15%
Operating Expenses: 65%

To play it out, let’s say you landed a $400k project. Here’s how you would allocate a budget for that project:

Profit: 10% - $40k
Owner’s Compensation: 10% - $40k
Taxes: 15% - $60k
Operating Expenses: 65% - $260k

Project Value Sheets

I’ve taken the logic of Profit First and created a spreadsheet we used on every project at my former agency SuperFriendly. We called them Project Value Sheets. Here’s the template you can copy and play around with.

As you can see, I’ve taken the Profit First base and improvised it based on what my agency needed. Here are the major sections:

The top of the spreadsheet articulates the overall value of the work and how we arrived at it. This is the first number I change.
Of the next four sections, three follow Profit First: profit, taxes, and owner compensation. I’ve added a fourth category: Core. This has two purposes: 1) to specifically reserve money to pay core members of my team (managing director, executive assistant, accountant, lawyer, etc) even though they were all technically contractors and 2) that the extra 10% makes a round 50% number of a project’s budget that generally goes to the back of the house first. This is the kind of reserved money I’d use to improve the company: sending people equipment, trying out new software, etc. All of these numbers change automatically as the top number changes.
The front of the house are generally the contractors that would be working directly on the project with the client and the expenses they might need to do their best work, like flights, hotels, software licenses, etc. (For those who don’t know, SuperFriendly’s business model was to assemble a custom team of contractors for every project, so we needed to calculate this every time.)

This kind of set up gave us an easy way to remember our starting guideline: 50% goes to back of house, 50% goes to front of house. It also—in conjunction with the business model—took full advantage of a Profit First mindset: expenses could fluctuate. For example, in a $400k project, I knew I had $200k left for contractors. Could I make that work? If I needed a designer and an engineer, I couldn’t spend $150k each. Instead, I’d have to find a designer and an engineer who would and could do the work required for $100k each or less.

Where this really came in handy was on smaller projects. What if we took on a $25k project? I’d have $12,500 for contractors. If I needed a designer and an engineer, I’d have $6,250 for them each. Could I get a world-class designer for that? You might think not, but I could—at the right scope. A world-class designer in the world might say, “I’d do it for $6,250 if we could limit the work to 1 revision and we kept the project to 2 weeks max.” Then my job as the architect of the project would be to build those constraints into the way we did the project. Voila: I now have my world-class designer in a way that works with my budget.

This is the kind of stuff that turns project architecting and estimation into a creative exercise, not rote multiplication. You can be as creative as you want and get the numbers to play nice if you think of your expenses as flexible and your profit as fixed. What I love about this approach is that it gives me as a spender the permission to spend all the money without worrying because all the important stuff is already paid for. It turns the question into “How much can I spend on this?” instead of “how much can I not spend?,” and that nuance makes all the difference. When every project is profitable, the higher the likelihood that the entire company is profitable.

In the next post, I’ll go over the final step of the sales process: turning a profitable price that a client agrees to into an agreement, and I’ll walk you through my open-source contract line-by-line.

Early Conversations Are Where You Shape the Work

Dan Mall — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In the last post, I talked about how important it is to identify a strong and unique position and getting in front of your prospects frequently and at the right times. If you’re able to successfully do that, you’ll start to see a steady stream of clients inquiring about working with you. What do you do next?

In this series

Attracting 5-, 6-, and 7- Figure Clients
Early Conversations Are Where You Shape the Work
Pricing Profitable Projects
My Design Contract Template

Many service providers would schedule a conversation to learn more about the work. In that conversation, they’ll ask about the requirements of the project. Once they have requirements, they’ll estimate the amount of time the project will take, multiply it by some time-based rate like an hourly or weekly rate, and send the client a contract with the requirements and rates outlined for verification. Hopefully, the client agrees with everything outlined, signs on the dotted line, and you’re off to the races.

Not so fast, tiger.

When projects go south, everyone thinks it’s because of something that happened within the project. Usually, it’s because something didn’t happen during those early conversations.

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Shaping work

I appreciate the language that the team at Basecamp use in their book, Shape Up. The way they describe it, all work needs to be “shaped” before it can be worked on effectively.

When shaping, we focus less on estimates and more on our appetite. Instead of asking how much time it will take to do some work, we ask: How much time do we want to spend? How much is this idea worth? This is the task of shaping: narrowing down the problem and designing the outline of a solution that fits within the constraints of our appetite.

If you’ve successfully 7-11-4-ed your prospects, they’ve been hearing from you for a long time. They’re eager to talk back to you. They want to tell you how your ideas fit into their world. The first conversations you have with them is that opportunity. It’s where you can shape the work together.

Signaling a working model

These early conversations are also where the dynamics of the relationship are formed. You’re modeling for each other how you want to be treated. At a fast food restaurant, customers walk up to the counter, declare exactly what they want from a fixed menu of items that’s affordably priced, and receive their order within minutes. At a Michelin-star chef’s tasting menu, you may have no idea what you’re going to be eating before it’s served to you, but you trust that the chefs are going to make you something delicious, and you know you’ll probably pay a pretty penny for it too. Which kind of restaurant is your design business? (There’s a world of options in-between too.)

Many freelancers and agencies act like fast food but try to charge Michelin-star prices. It doesn’t make sense.

So, instead of doing a requirements-gathering session like a fast food counter, how could you act more like a Michelin-star restaurant in these early conversations?

The four conversations

That’s not a typo: I did say conversations… plural. You want a client to pay you 5, 6, or 7 figures and think that can be arranged over one 30-minute phone call? You don’t want your business to be an impulse buy. You want it to be something a client saves up money for and feels like they won the lottery when you finally do start to work together. Get used to doing a little courting, and expect it to take a little time. (For reference, the 7-figure projects I’ve sold in the past had an average sales timeline of 12-18 months.)

Pricing coach Blair Enns calls it The Four Conversations:

The probative conversation, in which you prove your expertise to the client or the prospective client, and you move, in their mind, from vendor to expert practitioner.
The qualifying conversation, where you vet a lead against some standard sales criteria to determine if an opportunity exists and what the next steps are. This is the typical sales conversation most salespeople have where you're sifting through budget, decision maker, needs, timeframe, etc.
The value conversation, where you uncover or determine the amount of value that you might create for the client, and therefore what fair compensation for you would be.
The closing conversation, where you transition the prospective client to a client.

The more well-positioned you are, the easier the probative conversation is. You're probably most experienced at the qualifying conversation. So let's focus on the value conversation.

Again, Blair Enns has invaluable resources about this. Here's his framework for a great value conversation:

Uncover or commit the client to their desired future state
Identify the metrics of success
Determine the value of hitting these metrics
Set pricing guidance

If you're a novice at these kinds of conversations, try to follow the steps strictly; it’s the easiest way to practice and get better.

Keep ’em dreaming

Once you have more experience, you can riff and improvise. I like to move parts of the value conversation into every conversation, especially the part about identifying the desired future state. The more I can keep the prospect talking about the future they want to see, the more I can show them how I can be an integral part of helping them get there—while also avoiding getting too in the weeds about details that don't matter at this stage, like technical minutiae and logistical details.

The key is to keep them dreaming. Designers are some the best in the world at this. It's a creative exercise. The more you make sales a creative conversation instead of a financial transaction, the more you separate yourself from your competition and the more excited your prospect will be to start working with you.

Here are the types of questions and prompts I use to to talk about the future with my prospects:

“Does your company have a 3-year, 5-year, or 10-year vision? What is it?”
“Tell me everything.”
The Dan Sullivan question: “If we were having this discussion three years from today, and you were to look back over those three years to today, what has to have happened, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy about your progress?”

In the “Defining Value” section of my Pricing Design book, I share the questions I used to ask prospects in a value conversation. (You can see an earlier draft of those questions here.) I say “used to” because I realized years later that I too was conflating a value conversation and a qualifying conversation.

Stop asking and start telling

At lower-end restaurants—like fast food—the customer tells the service provider what to make. At higher-end restaurants—like Michelin-starred restaurants that have a chef’s tasting menu as the only option—the service provider tells the customer what they’re going to eat.

If your prospects and clients are telling you what to make, it might be that they see you more as fast food than a Michelin-star restaurant. You can’t just raise prices. You have to shift your positioning first so that your new prices feels appropriate.

A good first step there is to stop taking orders. Most service providers think that means saying “no” more or standing your ground when a client demands something. That’s certainly part of it, but that’s the most extreme version. That assumes a toxic relationship between a dictatorial client and a lowly, subservient service provider. It’s the nuances to pay attention to. You may still be politely asking your client what they’d like, and they’re politely answering your question. The problem there is you.

The biggest change in my conversations with prospects over the last few years is that I’ve stopped asking them what their budget is. Real talk: asking about budget often comes from a scarcity mindset; you wanna know how much money they’re willing to spend because you’ll come up with something to do for that cash. Strong positioning is about making clear what you don’t or won’t do, regardless of the money.

I talk to my prospects about their hopes and dreams as much as possible so I understand their desired future state as well as I can. Then, as the expert, I tell them what they should spend in order to achieve it.

This only works if you’re advising from a place of experience, abundance, and humility, not selfishness, scarcity, or arrogance. From the first conversation, I try to act as if I’m on the same side as the prospect and finding ways on their behalf to break even at the very least, if not earn a massive return on investment.

Being well-positioned to help teams with design systems means they already trust that I know more about it than they do before we ever talk. Many of my prospects have worked on 1 or 2 design systems; I’ve worked on hundreds. When you have that much more experience within your positioning than your prospect does, they feel awkward or embarrassed answering questions that you might know the answer to better than they would. I stopped asking my prospects what their budget was because every time, they’d answer something like, “Well, what should we be spending on something like this?”

The key to making this work is knowing what kind of value they’d get better than they do. For example, because I know that establishing a design system that helps a financial organization ship an important dashboard 6 weeks faster with a team of 4 in a way that will save them at least $250k–$450k this year alone, I can honestly advise that it would be worth a $50k investment to get a 5×–9× return. See how specific that is? Most of my prospects don’t know that, or it would take them a long time to figure that out. I’ve already made their job easier before they’ve even hired me. Imagine how much more helpful I could be if they hired me. Which is exactly what you want your prospects to think and feel about you.

Once I’ve identified a few ways to make sure my prospect will be profitable, only then will I explore whether or not I’ll be profitable too. In the next post, I’ll show you exactly how to do that by giving you my never-released-before Project Value Sheet template and breaking it down line-by-line.

Attracting 5-, 6-, and 7-Figure Clients

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 11:00:00 +0000

When agencies think about their dream projects, they’re often thinking about this combination:

Projects that have generous budgets
Clients that trust them
Work they can be proud of

All three of those outcomes get cemented long before a project officially starts.

In this series

Attracting 5-, 6-, and 7- Figure Clients
Early Conversations Are Where You Shape the Work
Pricing Profitable Projects
My Design Contract Template

For the next 4 weeks, I’ll be writing a series of newsletters for freelancers and agency owners who want to take their work to the next level in terms of professionalism, income, and reputation. These newsletters will draw from my experience of doing client services for the last 20 years. From 2004–2012, I worked at agencies, honing my craft, and freelancing regularly on the side. From 2012–2022, I ran my own agency called SuperFriendly. In my first year, I made $416,636 working primarily by myself with 2-3 contractors to help out every once in a while. 8 years in, SuperFriendly made $3M in revenue with 1 full-time employee—me!—and a team of 70 contractors. We worked with some of the most well-known clients in the world like Nike, Google, Apple, The New York Times, ESPN, FX Networks, and more. I’ll share some of the lessons I learned along the way to help you learn how to do your version of this in your own practice, whether you’re a sole freelancer, run your own small studio of a handful of folks, or lead a big agency.

The 6-Day Revenue Roadmap

A free 6-day email course for design freelancers and agency owners who need revenue fast—without a funnel, large audience, or fancy pitch deck.

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Fix your pricing problems with better positioning

Almost every inflection point in running a design business requires the same thing: more money. That’s why “how do I make more money” is a constant question that lives rent-free in the minds of freelancers and agency owners. The common answer is to raise your rates. It’s true that many professionals are undercharging for their services due to some combination of insecurity, lack of understanding of their market, and their limiting views of money.

But I see a more rampant problem. Too many freelance and agency businesses aren’t positioned well enough to even have conversations about highly-priced work. What I’ve learned is that fixing your positioning solves a lot of pricing problems.

In their quintessential book Positioning, marketing strategists Al Ries and Jack Trout advise that “positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.”

If you wanted a new pair of running shoes, what brand would you buy? Some would say Nike. Others would say Brooks. Still others would say Saucony. No answer is wrong, or right. Each company has enough people that would think of them first to stay in business.

The reasons for naming each company are different too, and different for each person. Some would pick a company for functionality, like comfort. Others may have a preference due to fashion. Still others would pick a company strictly out of brand loyalty. Again, no answer is wrong, or right. For whatever reason, one company rises to the top of the list over others. That’s their position in the mind of their prospects.

The same is true for web design and development businesses. Where are you or your business in the mind of your prospects? When people think about who to hire to make a website for them, are you close to the top of the list for enough prospects to keep you in business? The sad truth is that many freelancers and agency owners don’t have a strong enough position with their prospects to even come to mind, much less command a high price.

Best in the world

Management researcher Jim Collins and his team studied 28 companies over 5 years to determine what made some of them great and others not-so-much. Their findings became the book Good to Great. In it, Collins identifies that all great companies have a relentless focus on one simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of three circles:

What you can be the best in the world at
What drives your economic engine
What you are deeply passionate about

When most freelancers and agency owners start, they’re almost exclusively focused on #2: what drives their economic engine. When I first started SuperFriendly, I took on any work that paid money, any amount of money. That’s a decent survival strategy, but it doesn’t make for a good business.

From my experience both personally as well as with other owners, #1 is the most difficult. It’s also the one that goes the furthest in helping you establish your positioning. Famed art director and ad man Bill Bernbach once remarked, “The essence of positioning is sacrifice. The most difficult part is deciding what you’re not. If you stand for something, you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”

Many freelancers and agencies try to describe themselves as “full service” as part of their positioning. This is a terrible idea. The biggest reason is that it’s actually driven by a desire to solve the economic engine question more than it is to establish a positioning. The logic in the mind of the freelancer/agency owner usually goes like this: “the more types of work we’re able to do, the more money we can make. The more work we turn away, the less we’ll make.”

While this is logical, it doesn’t take into account the fact that this positioning makes it more difficult for the right prospect to find you, much less hire you. As consumers, we look for specific service providers. We want a “wedding photographer,” not a “creative professional that has experience with a wide range of image making.” We crave pizza or burgers, not restaurants that contain every type of cuisine. The more services you offer, the more diluted your offering feels to your prospect. It’s like saying you provide both oil changes and pizza; it’s hard to believe, and not very appealing.

Financially, you’re incentivized to specialize more than generalize. Specialists make more than generalists. General practitioners make $130k/year on average. Neurologists make $285k/year on average. Anesthesiologists make $340k/year on average. Orthopedic surgeons make $400k/year on average. Cardiologists make $474k/year on average.

For the first 6 years, my agency SuperFriendly was a 6-figure business. We did everything digital: websites, apps, digital strategy, information architecture, design, front-end development, and back-end development. It wasn’t until we visibly started specializing in design systems in year 7 that we consistently broke $1M in revenue each year. Certainly anecdotal, but I recall a conversation with a prospect where they said to me, “You came so highly recommended that we couldn’t find anyone like you. Who else should we be talking to?”

I answered with a smirk, “No one else that I can think of.”

That’s what good positioning can do for you.

As business consultant Tim Williams teaches in his book Positioning for Professionals, “Instead of attempting to compete in the already-existing market of MP3 players, Apple created a new category with an online music service that now dominates the music industry. The strategy wasn’t just to be different, but to even look different. Apple made the color of the earphones and cord of the iPod the opposite of the rest of the industry: white. The ultimate value proposition puts you in a category where you’re the one and only player. Eventually other brands may come along and try to imitate what you’ve done, but being first in the category creates a powerful competitive advantage that is exceptionally difficult for competitors to overcome.”

Remind them that you exist

Once you work on your positioning—what you offer and, more importantly, what you don’t—you’ll be equipped to have much more valuable conversations with your prospects. In order to start conversations with them, you have to know where they hang out. Part of the beauty of narrow positioning is that it’s much easier to find this out about your audience. Prospects of a full service agency live everywhere. Prospects of a web design agency that only serves dentists in the western United States live in a very specific place (um, the western United States, for starters). These dentists probably read a handful of specific industry publications. They probably attend a handful of specific industry conferences and events. They probably all follow the same Instagram accounts and read the same blogs.

There’s a finite amount of places these dentists hang out. The best way to attract these prospects is to show up in these places constantly so that your business is the first one to come to mind when they’re ready to think about getting their websites redone. Buy ads and get articles published in the publications they read. Find your way into the speaking rosters of events they attend. Do partnerships with the Instagram accounts they follow.

Better yet: become the places your prospects visit. Instead of buying ads in the magazines they read, start a magazine for them. Instead of speaking at events they attend, throw your own events made specifically for them. Instead of doing partnerships with Instagram accounts they follow, establish your own social presence that they can’t resist. These things are more difficult to accomplish but have better returns if you can pull them off successfully.

This is all a technique that entrepreneur Daniel Priestley calls “7-11-4” in his book Oversubscribed. He says, “If we spent 7 hours together, had 11 interactions between us, and met up in 4 separate locations, we would feel a bond. It would seem like we are more friends than acquaintances… The more people you can clock up time, interactions, and locations with, the more people will see you as different, unique, and part of their tribe. [Celebrities] are merely people who have used media and technology to 7-11-4-people… The market consists of people who might buy your product. Your market are people who have been sufficiently 7-11-4-ed by you or your business brand.”

In summary:

Identify a strong and unique position
Understand what you can be best in the world at
Find ways to rack up at least 7 hours and 11 interactions in 4 different locations in front of your ideal prospects

Now they’re ready to buy from you, and buy big.

In the next post, I’ll show you how I run sales conversations to identify projects that are immensely valuable to the client and both lucrative and profitable for you—in that order.

The Quickest Way to Get Promoted

Dan Mall — Fri, 31 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The quickest way to get promoted is to get your boss promoted. Do something that makes them look amazing to the people that are evaluating their work. Making your boss look good gives you the highest likelihood that they’ll bring you along with them in rank and/or compensation as they move up too.

How do you get your boss promoted? Find out what their job depends on, and tie your job directly to theirs. Here are some ways to find that out:

Ask.
Talk to your boss’s boss about it.
Find out what got your boss’s former peer promoted.

Some examples of what you can do to get your boss promoted at any level:

If you’re an independent contributor designer, your boss is probably some form of design manager. Design managers are often evaluated on the quality of the craft of the work they’re overseeing. Volunteer to run critiques, and give your boss a monthly report in a format they can pass along that shows how the design team is improving month-over-month.
If you’re a design manager, your boss is probably a VP. VPs are often evaluated on whether their impact is felt on a company level. Identify an important initiative your VP has committed to and take on the responsibility of becoming their right hand person on it. Make it your professional mission to help this initiative succeed this quarter. Think of yourself as your VPs head of public relations to make sure that everyone knows how your VP is making impact.
If you’re a design VP, your boss is probably part of the C-suite, like a Chief Design Officer or a Chief Executive Officer. At this level, they can no longer be promoted any higher, so their incentive is less about rising in the ranks and instead making some kind of progress. Lucky for you, many C-level folks are very plain about their missions; it’s all they talk about. For some, it’ll be something like increasing their status in the world on behalf of their company, so perhaps you can suggest and even line up speaking events and podcast appearances they might enjoy. For others, it'll be a pet project like starting a new branch of their team or changing something major about the way their division works, so consider yourself part of the insider crew that they’ve trusted to help these things come to life. Channel your inner rascal and get to work.

That’s the quickest way to get promoted.

Starting is Easy. Sustaining is Hard.

Dan Mall — Fri, 24 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

It's easy to open a gym membership. It’s hard to schedule time to go to the gym every week.

It's easy to start a blog. It’s hard to schedule the time write a blog post every week.

It's easy to buy a bunch of plants. It’s hard to remember to water them every week.

It's easy to create a bunch of design tokens. It’s hard to carve out time to answer the Slack posts from all the people using your design tokens.

It's easy to sign up your kid for swim class. It’s hard to find the motivation to drive them at 6am every Saturday.

Before you start the next new thing, decide how long you want to try and sustain it. Then make a plan to do so.

Enough to Know

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Thrice, I’ve been involved in business-related lawsuits.

The first time, an agency subcontracted my agency SuperFriendly to do work for a client through them. The work was ambitious and exciting, and it had a ridiculously tight deadline. Our team came up with some pretty creative solutions that worked within agreed-upon constraints. In the meeting where I was supposed to present the ideas to the client, the agency’s CEO—who hadn’t been involved in the work at all—took over the presentation and promised all sorts of outrageous things to the client that were nearly impossible to pull off and certainly by our very real deadline. The client was thrilled; my team was mortified. The next day, we decided to withdraw from the project. I asked the CEO to pay us a prorated amount that they owed per our contract for the work we had done. He threatened to sue me instead for leaving them in a tough spot with their client.

The second time, we finished a project for a client. We delivered everything as expected and sent a final invoice for $12k. The client, who, to this point, had constantly showered the team with compliments and assurances of how thrilled he was with the work, said how unhappy he was with the work and refused to pay the final invoice. I decided I would eventually be willing to sue him to get that money.

The third time, I hired a team to do some work for me. They made a serious error in their work that I didn’t learn about until months later, costing me tens of thousands of dollars. I decided I would be willing to sue them for at least the incurred fees and the fee for their service.

As an added kicker, all three of these things happened within weeks of each other.

I never thought I’d ever sue anyone in my life, or even consider it. I’m generally a “it’s not worth it” kinda guy. I tend to see most things as a learning experience, even at my own expense. Typically, I would have walked away from all of those scenarios: I would have tried to convince the first CEO to call it even, I would have accepted that I’ll never get that $12k, and I would have ate the fees and concluded that the lesson was to “never hire that company again.” Add to that my childhood belief growing up in church that suing someone was un-Christian-like.

So what made me decide to go through with these lawsuits?

A conversation with my wife.

Em said, “You’ve never been through a lawsuit before, so you don’t know what it’s like. Why not go through it enough to know what it’s like? You won’t be any worse off than you are now. It’ll only cost a little bit of money and time, and you’ll learn a lot more than you would by walking away. If it gets to be too much time or money, you can always walk away then, which would still have you learn more than if you walked away now.”

She was totally right. I was afraid of being in a lawsuit, because it’s scary. But, I realized that I didn’t even know what was actually scary about it. The idea was scary, but was there actually anything to fear? It seemed worth finding out.

When you’re facing something you dread, consider doing it just enough to know if you’d do it again.

Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick Three?

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The common wisdom in project work is that you have two choices between three options: a project can be good, fast, or cheap. It can never be all three.

Good, fast projects are usually expensive.
Good, cheap projects are usually slow.
Fast, cheap projects are usually low quality.

Each combination of two can be a viable business model. Let’s look at a few examples.

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Good + Fast

Doing good and fast work is the typical standard of excellence for most businesses, because it’s the most straightforward and understood path to making good money. This is true across most industries. When you hire a plumber, if they do good work fast, that’s usually considered a good hire. The same is true for agencies and freelancers.

From a customer perspective, knowing who sells this combo is tricky. Portfolios can cue you into whether or not work is good. But how can you tell whether the person or team works fast? Very few people include the timeframes of their projects in their portfolios (though I’d love to see more of that). And, even if they did, it’d be pretty easy to lie about. This explains why a lot of happy customers find their service providers through word of mouth.

Types of services you can provide if you want to have a reputation for being a good and fast (and, subsequently, expensive) designer/firm:

An emergency repair service, like fixing botched branding or design projects from other firms
A very specialized service that you can deliver quickly, like customized assessments
A luxury offering, like printing on diamonds (!) or making apps for celebrities

Good + Cheap

If a customer wants good work but wants it to be cheap, they can probably expect it to be slow. Conceivably, good service providers are busy with many customers, and the most common way to incentivize them to work with you is to pay a lot. Those not willing to pay a lot are usually relegated to waiting.

In Philly where I live, one of my favorite restaurants is Dim Sum Garden. Their specialty is delicious soup dumplings, and they’re very reasonably priced. They don’t take reservations, so almost every time I go, there’s a line out the door. I once waited 2 hours to be seated, and it was worth every minute.

Fast + Cheap

When I ran SuperFriendly, we were sometimes more expensive than clients wanted to pay, so some would ask if we could staff a team of junior people or even supervised apprentices for them in return for pay less than they would for a more senior team.

The assumption here was that the work would be “lower quality” but they’d get fast and cheap. We usually turned down this option, because we knew it would often mean slow and cheap, which is hard to deliver even if the client asked for it.

So how can this version be viable? The key here is not to be low quality, but lower quality. Lower than what? Many think it’s to be lower than the industry standard, but that’s usually unacceptable to customers. What many have figured out is that you can have a secondary service offering that’s faster and cheaper than your main service offering, which allows you to deliver an acceptable “lower quality” to a customer. Rather than thinking about is as “low quality,” it’s helped me to reframe it as “good enough.”

Fast food is a perfect example. I play basketball once or twice each week for 2-3 hours, often burning up to 2,000 calories. My typical recovery meal is a plate of rice, salmon, and broccoli or green beans; it has the carbs to replenish glycogen stores and the protein to repair broken-down muscle. But sometimes I play basketball an hour away from home. I can't wait an hour to get home to eat. So I go to McDonald’s or Taco Bell. It’s not my preferred meal, but it’s fast, cheap, and good enough.

Good, Fast, and Cheap: You Wish

The general expectation—one that’s led to this iron triangle concept—is that you just can’t have good, fast, and cheap. That’s why people are rightly skeptical about anything that promises it, despite how alluring it is.

That explains the pushback against the growing popularity of design subscription agencies, because they seem to promise good, fast, and cheap:

If it’s truly good and fast, why sell it cheap? Is that the sign of a halfwitted founder? Or maybe they’re so altruistic that they don’t mind leaving money on the table?
If it’s truly fast and cheap, can you really expect the quality to be high?
If it’s truly good and cheap, wouldn’t everyone sign up? And if that’s true, wouldn’t it be slow?

That’s just one example of why the common mantra here is that you can only pick two.

But there’s a big assumption here: that the only three desirable qualities are “good,” “fast,” and “cheap.” If we reframe all of the qualities as desirable, there are a few more combinations that really do allow you to pick three.

Good + Expensive + Slow

My favorite restaurant in the world is Royal Sushi in Philly. The food is astonishingly delicious, it’s super expensive, and it took me 3 years to get a reservation. Almost everyone that eats there has the same experience. Chef Jesse Ito has been running it for years and is booked long into the future. Sounds like a great business to me.

Could you run a freelance practice or an agency that puts out the highest quality work, charges premium prices, and has a line of clients waiting years to work with you? Many people have.

Fast + Expensive + Low Quality

I’ve done a few projects like this over the years. A founder typically gets in touch with some kind of emergency:

They have a big pitch tomorrow and need some comps made or the deck designed
They’re launching something at the end of the week and could use some marketing materials, some final pizazz, or a last minute fix
They just spent a lot of money on another designer whose work just doesn’t cut it and they need someone to fix it before, say, engineers start building.

I usually offer something like, “I can give you a day of work. No guarantee about what I can finish, but I’ll do my best.” Usually, the customer trusts me enough to believe that whatever I produce will be better than what they currently have and/or me not doing it. I charge an astronomical price for the rush, they wire the money same-day, and we’re off to the races. It’s never my best work, but they (hopefully) never expected it to be.

The common factor is a short deadline. It’s not that they want it fast; they actually need it fast.

Cheap + Low Quality + Slow

I think this is the most difficult version to sell, but who says you have to sell it? This model fits the “free“ part of “full price or free.”

Which model should you pick?

I recommend you pick on a project-by-project basis, rather than choosing one to base an entire business around. I’ve done all of these versions in my career and business! Some examples:

Good + Fast: this is the default I strive for in all of my work.
Good + Cheap: my default when I do favors. I did some branding and website work for my dad’s new business for free. If it were a Good + Fast project, I would have done it in a week. Because it was a Good + Cheap project, I took 3 months to do it.
Fast + Cheap: great for MVPs (minimum viable products). When I’m testing something, I give myself a lot of permission to not worry about the quality of it.
Good + Expensive + Slow: I don’t have a lot of space right now to do 1:1 coaching, but lots of people ask me to. So, I have a pretty decent-sized waiting list, and the few people I’m doing this with are paying a pretty penny for it.
Fast + Expensive + Low Quality: rush jobs based on a real rush.
Cheap + Low Quality + Slow: I use this model when I’m learning a new skill. I wanted to try adding photography as a service with one of my clients. I told them I’d do it for free just to say that i did it, and I set expectations that it might not be that good and I might be slow to deliver it. I also convinced them that it wouldn’t at all impact them negatively.

Do you have a favorite model? How do you use one or more of these in your work? Reply and let me know.

Don’t Judge a Book By Its Timestamp

Dan Mall — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000

I moved into my first apartment when I was 19 and a sophomore in college. Until then, I had lived with my parents for the first 18 years of my life, then lived on campus in a dorm for a year. I decided to get an apartment with a roommate so I could practice some adulting.

Along with getting my first apartment, I decided I should learn to cook, something I had never done before. I started with simple frozen meals that needed to be defrosted in a skillet.

I didn’t have a skillet.

So I bought the highest recommended one on Amazon within my price range.

When it arrived, the box was heavy… way heavier than I anticipated. Turns out I had bought a Lodge cast iron skillet. I didn’t know what a cast iron skillet was; I thought it was just a really heavy skillet, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want that.

I decided it sucked. Luckily, I mentioned my plight to a co-worker. He mentioned that he was in the market for a cast iron skillet and offered to buy it from me for exactly what I paid for it. I gladly gave it up and bought the kind of skillet I was initially imagining.

20 years later, I cook a lot more. My cast iron skillet is one of my most-used kitchen essentials.

It wasn’t that the cast iron skillet sucked then and it’s better now. It’s that I wasn’t ready for it.

My kids are pretty adventurous eaters. One of them read somewhere that taste buds change every few months. If they perceive that it’s been a few months since they’ve had a particular food, they’ll try it again even if they hated it before. They don’t accept that a food is bad; they seem to take it more as they didn’t like it before but now they might have new taste buds that react better to it.

If I read a book I don’t like, I don’t assume that the author is a poor writer or that the book itself was somehow inherently bad. I choose to think that it wasn’t the right time for me to read it, which keeps me open to reading it again some time in the future.

Before you write anything off as good or bad, consider the timing.

Behind the Curtain

Dan Mall — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

“Looks like you’re killing it.”

“Someday I want to be where you are in your career.”

“You seem so grounded and focused about pursuing what you want.”

“It seems like this new phase of your career is going well.”

These are just a few messages I’ve received lately from some of my friends and social media followers.

I’m incredibly flattered by these messages. It feels good to be recognized.

I also feel wholly delusional about it, as what people seem to be seeing about me doesn’t match the way I feel about what I’ve been doing lately. I seem to have done what I abhor: sharing only the Instagram version of my life and career and obfuscating the bumps.

Honestly, I’m struggling.

Of course, I’d like to qualify “struggles” here. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs gives me some helpful concepts and language.

I’m lucky and grateful that I’ve almost never had to struggle with getting physiological, safety and security, and love and belonging needs in my life. I’m struggling with self-esteem and self-actualization needs, which is a privilege and a problem.

I recently came across this framing, which gives me even more helpful language. I’m experience growth needs, not deficiency needs. Here’s how Maslow distinguished growth needs:

[Growth needs] don't stem from a lack of something, but rather from a desire to grow as a person.

Yes! I feel seen. I’m thankfully not lacking anything, but I feel stuck on how I can be growing right now. I don’t know if I fully believe this, but I can’t stop thinking about the William S. Burroughs quote: “When you stop growing, you start dying.”

I’m not sharing this to denigrate myself or garner any pity. I’m sharing for 3 reasons:

To find others that might be feeling similarly. Sure, misery loves company, but so does community.
To document it for myself so I don’t forget this part of the journey.
So that you might learn from my experiences and maybe avoid the struggles I’m having before they arise for you.

Oh, and to put a fine point on it, I’m fully aware that I am smack dab in the middle of my mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises are often brought on by a trigger event. In the last few years: I shut down my business of 10 years, had some significant family events, turned 40, and experienced a global pandemic with the rest of the world. I think those qualify as ample trigger events.

Even though I’m aware of this, I know I can’t do anything to stop it. I’m accepting going through it and identifying what’s both in and out of my control. Here are some things I wish I could control that I’m working on accepting instead.

Money

A lot of my current struggles have something to do with money. This comes in different forms, from different angles.

Overall, I don’t have as much money as I used to or that I’m used to. A lot of feelings comes with that.

I made way more than a comfortable salary when I was running SuperFriendly, and that doesn’t even include the perks that came with running my own company in terms of the things a company can pay for on behalf of its owner.

A few years ago, my wife and I bought our dream house. It was way more than I ever thought I would or could spend on a house, but we could afford it. A few years later, the combination of: lower salary in starting a new business; the tech industry—generally, my main customer base—landscape changing drastically due to massive widespread layoffs; economic impact of a global pandemic; and a variable interest rate on our mortgage kicking in has drastically changed my financial picture. It’s stunning what a doozy the 1-2 punch of less income + higher expenses can be.

I was blindsided by a higher tax bill this year than I anticipated or than I can afford to pay outright, so I have an installment plan with the IRS to pay it back. I feel really embarrassed about this for a few reasons.

First, I’m supposed to be An Experienced Business Owner™ at this point. Taxes aren’t supposed to be a thing that surprises me anymore.

Secondly, when I first started freelancing 20 years ago, I didn’t know about paying self-employment taxes. I owed a giant amount that took me 7 years to pay off. Even though my current taxes bill is much smaller so I can pay it off much more quickly, this does feel like a regression. I can justify it in the fact that I had a CFO at SuperFriendly so I didn’t have to pay attention to this myself in a way that I have to do now, but I still feel shame from it.

The third reason I feel embarrassed about it is that, for years, my personal brand has partially been about transparency around money. I even wrote a freakin’ book about it! The truth is I’ve always been good at making money, which is what I wanted to share about in my book. But I’ve never been good at saving or managing money, which is why the book isn’t really about those topics. I’ve gotten better at those parts over the years through learning more about them and having help, but it comes much less naturally for me. Making a lot of money conveniently obscures the lack of discipline in saving and managing it, but that deficiency comes back with a vengeance when margins get thinner.

Work and time

One of the reasons I stopped running an agency is that I wanted to explore different ways of making a living than directly selling my time. That’s the appeal of selling products, which is the gateway into the emerging and growing idea of the creator economy. Most creators pursue a portfolio approach—or, as ConvertKit CEO Nathan Barry calls it, a strip mall approach—where their revenue is an aggregate of multiple categories like digital products, memberships, royalties, sponsorships, patronage, affiliates, physical products, services, and more.

When many creators first start out, their revenue distribution tends to look something like this:

One of the things I learned from Matt Ragland recently is what he called the Barbell Effect, where, over time, the ends of a creators revenue (digital products and services) grow faster than the middle areas. Specifically, digital products start to overtake services.

My revenue graph looks like this:

I have an unfair advantage from working in and running services for the last 18 years, so I know how to make more money delivering services than digital products. Services and consulting pays most of my bills. The common wisdom is to double down on what’s working, so the “smart” bet is to see how far I can push the services/consulting stream.

But 1) I’ve done that before and 2) I want to get away from selling my time as the primary source of my revenue. I can’t give it up though to focus on products because I can’t afford to. And consulting is taking up so much of my work hours and brain space that I don’t have much bandwidth to focus on much else or take much more risk without giving up nights, weekends, sleep, family time, and other things that are also priorities to me. I’d like to work smarter, but I’m not really sure how right now. Which leaves working harder, but that also feels like not the right move. I feel stuck here.

The easiest thing is to keep doing what I’m doing right now. But that feels like treading water. I want to work in a way that compounds, that helps me get ahead. I don’t know what that is right now.

The shame I feel around this is exacerbated by the fact that I coach people around this very same problem. Companies hire me to solve this part of their strategy. And I’m really good at it. But I can’t seem to do it for myself. Which makes me feel bad. Which makes me worse at it. Which makes me feel even worse. It’s a vicious cycle.

Have you had similar situation or feelings in your life or work? How have you gotten through it? What advice might you give me? Even if you don’t have solutions, I’d love to hear from you, even with a “I’m with ya” response. Reply and let me know if any of this resonates with you.

Replacing a 9-Figure Company’s Corporate Typeface

Dan Mall — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:00:00 +0000

In 2011, I had the chance to work with another dream client. Crayola, a company that makes somewhere between $500M and $750M every year, hired Big Spaceship—the agency where I was working—to revamp their digital strategy. I was fresh off another successful dream project—art directing the Star Wars website—and I got promoted to design director to have my own team to lead. My bosses decided the Crayola work was a great first project for us, and I was excited to show what we could do.

I led the project from the very beginning. I was in on all the sales calls, and I helped shape our strategy and pitch.

I remember the specific moment in the pitch meeting where we earned their trust. We showed a slide that was our strategy boiled down into a simple diagram—drawn with Crayola crayons, of course.

I saw in their eyes that they felt that we “got it.” This was the first important moment that allowed me to be able to suggest things that they wouldn’t have accepted otherwise. The more you accrue moments of trust with your clients and stakeholders, the more influence you gain.

We officially won the work and started the project. It started like many projects do: trading files, onboarding, get our collective heads around what we're doing, and learning to work together.

From the moment we received their brand guide, there was something that immediately bugged me: their corporate typeface, Cronos. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it; it’s a beautiful typeface, drawn by the expert type designer Robert Slimbach. But it just didn’t feel right to me for speaking to parents, educators, and kids—and, as I shared in last week’s post, feel is a big part of how I choose typefaces.

The usage of Cronos also revealed how inappropriate it was for the task: making it fit seemed to require a lot of cheap design tricks like bevels, embossing, drop shadows, extreme gradients, glows, warped text, thick strokes, and more. I was determined to change this, or at least shoot my shot.

Eventually, we got to the point where we were ready to show designs for the new site.

Before showing any designs, I brought up our strategy slide again and asked if we were all still aligned with focusing on inspiring and enabling parents, educators, and kids. They confirmed, so I continued.

I walked through the new homepage my team and I came up with:

Most notably, there’s no Chronos in sight, on purpose. Instead, we opted to use Omnes from Darden Studio as the primary typeface. One thing I love about the first round of design is that it’s often the opportunity to show my most daring ideas… in this case, showing an option that might require a massive—read: expensive—change to all of their packaging and collateral. If the feedback I get is that it’s too comfortable of a move, I can always show something more conservative in a subsequent round.

Before I finished my walkthrough, I showed 3 simple slides to really drive the point home. Slide 1:

Rather than pontificating about the virtue of geometric sans serifs, I instead showed the alphabet chart that kids learn in school to point that it’s made of simpler forms like circles, lines, and triangles because they’re easier for kids to draw.

Slide 2 showed a specimen of Chronos, and I showed the text description directly from the foundry. I tried to hammer home the point that using a typeface that’s “elegant and distinguished” isn’t really what we’re going for strategically.

In contrast, the last slide I showed was an Omnes specimen and some text from a review from Armin Vit on Typographica, praising different weights as appealing to both kids and adults.

Because my clients were thoughtful and also because we’d earned some trust already, they took our recommendation seriously and said they'd think it over. Of course, they wondered what this design would look like with Chronos instead of Omnes. And, of course, we already had that prepared because we’d anticipated that it would come up. We showed it to them, prepared for the possibility that they might decide to go with it but emphasizing that this felt much less appropriate to the strategy we were all pursuing together.

A few days later, we received the feedback: they wanted to go with Omnes for the site! Hooray!

A few weeks later, our client surprised us when they shared some sketches of packaging for some new products that used—you guessed it—Omnes!

A few years later when my kids were at the school age where we shopped for crayons and markers every year, imagine my delight to find full aisles of Omnes-led Crayola packages in every Target and Walmart we went to.

I reflect often on how remarkable this outcome was, because there were a number of reasons stuff like this often doesn’t happen:

It’s expensive
Change is uncomfortable, no matter how objectively good
Presumably, someone made the original decision for a reason, so we run the risk of discrediting the original decision (and person) by suggesting a change

I think the ingredients that made this possible were:

Talking about typography as a strategic asset, not just a visual preference or choice
A client who was willing to hear and truly consider all ideas
An experienced team with the skills to make valuable suggestions

Of all of the factors, I think the most important ingredient that was a prerequisite was the decision to say something in the first place. I’ve seen too many designers decide too early that it’s not even worth it to suggest anything because the downsides seem too large. For years, we designers yearned for a seat at the proverbial table. But we failed to realize that, before we get access to the table, we can work on being strategic and clearly communicating how design is a strategic exercise. That’s the kind of stuff that keeps our seat at the table because everyone else sees the value of continuously inviting us back.

How I Choose Typefaces

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 12:56:00 +0000

I have a book called Where Chefs Eat. As a reluctant foodie—who still enjoys a Big Mac from time to time—I bought it as soon as I saw it. I figured if I want to eat good food, I should imitate people who know good food.

I think that advice holds true for becoming a better designer too, in areas like choosing a typeface, for example. There’s no shortage of guidance on the internet about how to pick a typeface—over 10 million results, to be exact—but many of them seem written for non-designers and amateur designers with sections like “what is typography?” and “fonts vs. typefaces.” There’s still a large number of designers who know the basics and the theory but still struggle with the practice. So, in the vein of Where Chefs Eat, this is How a Professional Designer Picks Typefaces.

No vanilla ice cream or plain black tees

Let’s start with how I don’t pick typefaces: I try to intentionally avoid choosing typefaces like a non-designer or an amateur designer.

The way I recommend picking typefaces to those groups is to pick something popular. Grotesques and geometric sans are very in right now. Two of the most popular typefaces on Typewolf are Grilli Type’s GT America and Lineto’s Circular. You can’t go wrong with those. They look great and they won’t offend anyone.

The strategy for non-designers and amateurs isn’t to pick a great typeface; it’s to avoid picking a bad one. Vanilla ice cream never tastes bad and a plain black t-shirt will never go out of style.

But a bold flavor or fashion-forward respectively they are not. You won’t attract any attention with this approach, which is part of the important job of a great typeface choice. From the book that initially helped me learn typography: The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst.

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion.

Web browser

In order to pick a great typeface, you have to know great typefaces. In order to know great typefaces, you have to know typefaces.

I spend a lot of time looking at typefaces and browsing type foundry websites. It’s like finding anything special. To find a special record, you might have to go to many record stores. To find a special pieces of furniture, you might have to go to many antique shops. Amazon works great when you know exactly what you want that’s widely available. But finding something you don’t even know you’re looking for means you have to browse.

Start with heart

I’ve been playing the piano since I was 3 years old. I play by ear and am fairly good at playing pop ballads and contemporary songs.

But I’ve always wanted to play jazz, something I’ve never been good at. Improvisation in particular escapes me.

So when Herbie Hancock Teaches Jazz from MasterClass came out in 2017, I watched it immediately.

I got to the lesson about Improvisation and was ready for all of Hancock’s best tips. Finally, it seemed like he was going to share the secret. He said:

You’re born with ears. You’re born with a heart… There’s no method for using them. If it feels right and sounds right, you’re pretty much on the right track.

WHAT.

I was furious. I stopped watching the videos immediately and wrote them off as nonsense.

Years later, as I reflect on that lesson, I realize that’s how I pick typefaces.

I’ve since gone back to watch the rest of the lessons. I realized that he wasn’t saying that’s all there is to jazz. But that’s the first step. If it feels right, you’re on the right track. You’re not finished the work yet, but you’ve moved from step A to step B. (There’s a reason Herbie Hancock is one of the best jazz pianists of all time. I’m embarrassed to say I doubted that for a while.)

Here’s how I start to test if a typeface feels right.

Again from The Elements of Typographic Style, some first principles:

Typography exists to honor content.

Read the text before designing it.

Discover the outer logic of the typography in the inner logic of the text.

Choose a typefaces or a group of faces that will honor and elucidate the character of the text.

I pick a “brand” word that embodies the vibe what I’m trying to design. For example, if I was designing for an automotive company that was trying to create fast, aerodynamic cars, I might pick the word “speed.” I would then type out that word in anywhere from 4 to 100 different typefaces that I pick at random and see if any of them feel right.

(If I’m designing a logotype, I usually use one word. If I’m picking a headline or text face, I might type out a sentence instead.)

Ivory: nothing about this speaks to me. Pass.
Athena: something about the italic feels fast. I'd keep this one, and I’d make a note to do another round of exploration like this with just italic fonts.
Brule: the curves of the “S” remind me of a windy road with switchbacks that might be fun to drive in a fast car. But the other letters feel too playful. I’m split on this one.
Unison Pro: the “S” feels like a race track. And something about the extended letters—specifically in “EE”—looks a little bit like motion lines. It’s a keeper.

At this stage, these evaluations are completely subjective. How they feel to me might be way different than how they feel to you… that’s fine!

Zoom in

Another thing I like to do to identify great typefaces is look closely at the letterforms to see if they mirror the message of the text. I wish I could remember where I read it, but I heard long ago that good typography should communicate what the text is saying before your brain actually reads the words.

Check out the typeface Faro from Luzi Type. Per their own description:

The font that can smile or be sad. Everything you type has a face, a typeface! Each word you type takes on a unique personality through this versatile typeface. Faro encompasses two distinct moods: Lucky and Sad, allowing you to convey different sentiments in your texts.

If I was setting text about something happy, I might choose the Lucky style where the letterforms change to be a bit more convex to look like the text is smiling.

This is a particularly helpful trick when designing logotypes, as you can further modify the letterforms to help make the point. Check out the logotype Order designed for Ribbon, a company that levels the homebuying playing field by allowing people to make an all-cash offer on a new home. The smart typeface choice allowed them to elegantly modify the “r” and “n” to echo a house + roof shape.

It doesn’t even have to be literal or metaphorical: a great typeface choice can even be purely functional. Angus Hyland’s team at Pentagram chose a stenciled serif style for Sapora to create a very natural-looking “ra” ligature that’s otherwise a pretty tough kerning pair to work with.

In my experience, a great, unique, appropriate typeface choice is one of the most powerful ways to set a brand apart. Any amateur designer can choose a popular, safe typeface, but the best that’ll do is help a brand blend into the sea of homogenous others. An experienced designer can use typography to make a brand stand out from the pack in all the good ways.

In my next article, I’ll show you I once convinced a $750 million company that you probably know well to change their main corporate typeface across all of their properties and packaging even though I was only hired to revamp their digital strategy.

You Are Special

Dan Mall — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a beautiful thing to have friends who aren’t afraid to compliment you through an insult.

Over lunch one day, I was whining to my friend Wil Reynolds about how frustrated I was that a few members of my team weren’t seizing the opportunities to push the limits of work on the projects I had put them on.

Wil asked me what kind of support I was giving them to get them to do that, and I replied that I was putting them in situations to succeed.

Then Wil really laid into me.

“You know what your problem is, Dan?”

Oh boy. Those are trigger words for me. I was ready to fight.

“You think you’re not special. You think that all you had was ‘a shot’ and all you did was take advantage of it to create the success you’ve had, so all everybody else needs is ‘a shot.’ No, you’re talented and ambitious and you have a superpower in turning a opportunity into a good outcome. Other people can’t do that on their own. They need help. They need support. They need guidance and mentorship and coaching. You think you’re being humble by thinking you’re not special and that everyone can do what you can. You’re actually being really arrogant by thinking that and not setting up your teams for success.”

Holy backhanded compliments, Batman! I felt praised and insulted and seen and challenged all at once.

Wil was right. Starting that day, I revamped my agency’s structure such that everyone working on a project got a direct coach and sponsor, from our junior people all the way to our managing director.

I think about Wil’s admonition often. There are probably a handful of things you do that you think are unremarkable, that anyone could do them given the chance.

You're wrong, just like I was.

You're special, just like I am.

Don’t sell others short just because they don’t have the same superpowers you do. Use those powers to set them up for success.

The Crystal Email

Dan Mall — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 08:40:00 +0000

A few years ago, my former agency SuperFriendly started a new high-stakes project. We were one of a few different vendors handling different parts of a brand new digital product we making together.

Our main project sponsor was the client’s Chief Marketing Officer, and she was used to orchestrating multiple parties that often ran behind schedule and needed specific and clear direction.

She kicked off the project by sending us a 305-word email with some polite instructions about what she would like us to do next. Talk to this person. Set up this meeting. Look into these assets.

There was nothing wrong with this email. On one hand, I appreciated the pointers for our team and some clear next steps on a gigantic project that might have otherwise been ambiguous.

But my Spidey-sense was tingling. An email like this from a client could indicate that they see us as just another party to have to manage. That’s not the kind of project we liked to run at SuperFriendly. We wanted our clients to feel like we were taking care of them, not the other way around. They were paying us to make their work easier, not give them another thing to do.

Luckily, before I could even figure out what I wanted to do about this, our executive producer Crystal Vitelli swung into action. She replied to our client’s 305-word email with a 655-word response of her own.

IT 👏🏽 WAS 👏🏽 MASTERFUL.

In her email, Crystal pleasantly acknowledged that tasks our client sent and excitingly informed her of how we had already completed them. Crystal then added 4 more things we had on our radar that our client wasn’t aware of, our status on each, and when she could expect them to be completed.

What was our client’s reply? A 10-word email that said:

Crystal, what a great email, thank you. Already love ya. ☺

From that point on, our status changed in our client’s mind. We moved from being “just another vendor to manage” to a preferred partner and advisor, always on the inside track. We ended up doing 4 more large initiatives with this client, growing the original 6-month project into 2-years of work. It was one of our best accounts by every measure.

Since then, I’ve labeled this technique “sending the Crystal email.” It’s particularly effective when you feel like you’re starting to get micro-managed by a client or a manager, so you signal back that you’re more on top of things than they are.

Some may call this a power move, but I don’t look at it that way, even if it is accurate.

To me, it’s not about power.

It’s about service.

It says, “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you. You’re in good hands, and we won’t let anything slip through the cracks. Here’s some proof.”

That’s one of the best things you can give to a client—and it’s something clients are always willing to pay a premium for if they’re certain you can deliver it.

Often times, your client or stakeholder is in triage mode. They’re living very much in the chaos of the present, directing traffic and diagnosing issues real-time. A kind way to short-circuit this frenzy is to signal that you’re not only on top of what’s happening in the present but that you’ve already thought about and prepared for what will be happening in the near future.

When you’re ahead, you quietly and naturally emerge as a leader that others are relieved to follow.

Shoot Your Shot

Dan Mall — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 20:19:00 +0000

When you’re faced with a challenge that seems unlikely to lean in your favor, the common wisdom is to “shoot your shot.” I was unable to track the origin of the phrase, but I’ve always heard it in relation to sports—basketball in particular. The most common translation is that, between the choices of doing something and not doing something, you might as well do anything to give yourself a chance. It’s related to the quote most famously attributed to both Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” so the implication is that you might as well take a shot… any shot, because it’s better than no shot at all.

But I think that’s the least useful interpretation of the phrase.

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Steph Curry is regarded as the greatest basketball shooter of all time. He’s also dang fun to watch, because he’s like a video game. He can seemingly launch the ball from anywhere on the court and it has a high chance of going in:

Is this because he’s always “shooting his shot?” Yes, but in a very different way than I mentioned above. Curry isn’t just throwing up the ball randomly because any shot is better than no shot. That’s the kind of thinking that gets players benched.

Curry is so fun to watch because he’s shooting his shot. Not just any shot, but shots he routinely practices. These are shots he has confidence to make because he’s made them before, and he continues to practice making them. What might be wild shots for any other player are high-percentage shots for Curry. That’s what makes them his shots.

Here’s Curry from an interview talking about those unconventional shots:

All of them that you see on the floor aren’t the first time I’ve taken them. I practice kind of unorthodox, one-footers, unbalanced shots, hand-in-your-face, all of that stuff, I’ve done it before.

Here’s Curry’s coach Steve Kerr talking about how he learned that what is a terrible shot for other players is a great shot for Steph Curry:

Kerr says:

The numbers don’t lie. That’s a shot [Curry] makes 40% of the time.

When you’re going for something that feels like it might be unreachable—whether that’s applying for a dream job or putting your name in for a promotion or pitching a top-tier client or thinking about a big life change—don’t settle for shooting any shot. Shoot your shot, the one you’ve practiced hundreds of times before, the ones that are ridiculous for anyone else to take but the ones you’ve seen work for you plenty in your past.

Making a brand new portfolio? Don’t build it on a fancy new tech platform when you’ve seen that your YouTube channel has been steadily growing for years… make a video! That’s your shot, because you’ve been practicing it and you’ve seen it work.

Applying for a new position? Don’t just turn in a resume when you know you connect well with people in person. Show up at the office and politely insist to sit down with the hiring manager. That’s your shot.

Don’t settle for a “well I’ll just try anything” attitude. Look for your highest percentage opportunities. That’s what it really means to shoot your shot.

6 Techniques for Group Decision Making

Dan Mall — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 09:05:00 +0000

I think the best work comes from a team working tightly together. But team dynamics bring challenges, one of which is how to make decisions together.

Here are 3 common and 3 not-so-common techniques for moving forward as a group.

1. Majority wins

Probably the most common way that teams make decisions is to take a vote. For example, you might show your team 2 designs in a critique and then show stakeholders which version most team members think is best. This approach usually works well enough and feels inclusive of all participants. The biggest downsides are that it can be slow or you might end up with a tie if you have an even number of people.

Bonus tip: sway the results of the majority wins technique by using The McDonald’s Theory, where you break the ice with the worst possible idea, and watch people come up with better ideas to ward off the bad ones.

2. Most urgent

Sometimes, urgency makes it easier to know what to do next. If you have a looming deadline or a glaring customer support bug to squash, it’s often prudent to do this before anything else.

3. Seniority

Bosses and managers can be both a blessing and a curse, but one advantage is they’ll sometimes tell you what to do. You might not like what they’re telling you, but at least it’s clear.

4. The Sliding Scale of Giving a F*ck

Design leader Cap Watkins wrote The Sliding Scale of Giving a F*ck a few years ago, and I’ve integrated it into my decision-making process with teams ever since. Here’s how it works: when there are 2 or more conflicting opinions, ask how strongly people feel about their opinions on a scale of 1 to 10. Then go with the opinion of the person who feels the strongest. As Cap mentions:

Having an internal barometer for what's important and what's less critical is incredibly useful for helping others trust your responses to ideas and proposals… If you can let go of the things that don't matter so much to you directly, you can build currency with others and earn their trust when you do wind up pushing back.

5. Project Champions

At the start of a project, elect a project champion, someone you know cares a little more than everyone else and will help bring the project to a high-quality completion. Officially elect this person to make the major decisions on the project and especially act as the tie breaker when there’s an impasse.

A few years ago, I worked on a project for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The junior designer on our team was a huge UFC, so we elected him to be project champion, realizing that he probably cared about this project a little more than the rest of us did.

Electing a project champion has a few benefits:

It actively combats the assumption that the most senior people on the project make the calls.
It allows a more junior person to try out some leadership in a temporary situation with the support of the rest of the team.

6. Take Turns

At the beginning of the project, decide that everyone on the team gets a week where they’re the primary decision maker. Again, this helps flatten any power dynamics and/or hurt feelings that would have existed on the team otherwise. Also, by picking a short timeframe, people don’t mind living with decision as much as they know that it may change in a week when someone else is in charge.

What else?

What techniques have you used to help your teams move forward? Reply and let me know.

Math: A Great Design Tool

Dan Mall — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 21:22:00 +0000

I’m an ambitious person, which means I attempt things that might be scary or intimidating to other people—starting businesses, public speaking, etc. It’s not that they’re any less scary to me. It’s that I’ve assembled tools over years that help me get over the fear or trepidation more quickly than others.

For example, one of the upcoming projects I’d to tackle soon is to revive the dormant social media accounts for Design System University

But ugh. Emotionally, it feels like a mountain of work that I’m not looking forward to.

That is, until I introduce it to one of my favorite design tools to make work feel more approachable. Emotional mountain of work: meet my good friend, Math.

Math suggests, “Let’s put some specificity to the vague ‘revive social media accounts’ brief. How ’bout 1 month’s worth of posts?”

As soon as I start adding specificity—specifically by adding a number—it gives me some more action to take. What is 1 month’s worth of posts? Maybe it’s posting 3 times per week, for a grand total of 12 posts (3 posts per week × 4 weeks).

Suddenly, making 12 posts doesn’t seem so daunting. I can make 12 posts.

How long would it take to make 12 posts?

Let’s say it takes me about an hour to make 1 post, which feels pretty generous. That’s 12 hours. If I block out the next day and a half for this, I’ll be done in 2 days max.

Knocking out 2 days of work feels much more doable than a nebulous “1 month’s worth of posts”… even though they’re the same thing.

Scoping is a key part of valuable design work, but very few designers are ever shown how to do it. All it takes is a little Math.

Spine

Dan Mall — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:48:00 +0000

A few years ago, a company hired my agency SuperFriendly to create a new marketing site for one of their products. Some snippets from our Statement of Work:

Key Outcomes. SuperFriendly shall design and build a new marketing site for Client with the goal of creating a relevant and attractive marketing and communications plan for Client’s Product’s business. Client agrees that it is hiring SuperFriendly as an expert with appropriate experience and ability to perform actions in a workmanlike manner.

Deliverables. SuperFriendly shall deliver the following deliverables (each a “Deliverable”) according to the work plan described in Section 6 of this SOW (the “Work Plan”):

Up to 3 distinct design directions
Up to 2 conversations with stakeholders to communicate and defend design directions
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for up to 6 pages
- SuperFriendly will test pages in the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE11, and Edge as of the Estimated Completion Date
- SuperFriendly will need access to a PHP/Apache server provided by Client in order to deploy the final site

Payment Terms. Client agrees to pay SuperFriendly $32,500.00 USD (the “Fee”). Client agrees to pay the Fee in the following installments and in accordance with the schedule below:

Payment	Invoice date	Payment due date
$16,250.00	Upon signing	Due upon signing
$8,125.00	November 1	December 1
$8,125.00	December 1	January 1

I signed up to creative direct personally, and I hired a designer, engineer, and producer to work with me. We were off to the races!

I facilitated a few workshop sessions with the client team to understand their process and pain points, and I did interviews with a few customers to get their perspectives too. Our team brainstormed a bit, and my designer and engineer put together some of the most beautiful and coolest designs and prototypes I’ve seen to this day. We narrowed it down to our best idea that we felt solved our client’s problems most elegantly, uniquely, and creatively.

We presented our direction to the client and had a great conversation about it. At the end of the meeting, they softly hinted that they’d have loved to see another direction as a point of comparison, and I softly countered that we felt great about this concept hitting all the marks they needed it to in a new marketing site. They thanked us and promised to get back to us with consolidated feedback after discussing.

A few days later, I received their feedback via email. Some snippets from the message:

First and foremost we appreciate the thoughtful exploration. We want to acknowledge that you’ve absorbed the brief and the interviews and generally everything you discussed came from a considered point of view.

In sum we think there’s a lot of possibility in the direction you presented, and it could be iterated on further, but even with iteration, it commits to a certain kind of boldness mixed with a bit of hubris. That may be the right approach, but we do see value in showing a contrast, a direction that maybe feels more inviting and still confident.

What that will do -
-Provide the proper context for evaluating the pros and cons to different approaches in voice and tone
-Give people a frame of reference to make a decision and move the project forward
-Help achieve consensus faster by inspiring the confidence that different approaches were considered

In consideration of that and the timeline, we’d like to prioritize a second distinct direction over iteration of the first one if there are trade offs to be made. Ideally we can achieve both but we understand the time frame and there may be some easy lift updates to the current direction that would make it more bullet proof.

(The rest of the message contained specific feedback about what they think worked and didn’t work about the concept we showed, the details of which I very much appreciated.)

I talked with my team and confirmed that none of us wanted to explore other directions just for the sake of it. It’d be one thing if they thought the direction was bad. But they thought the direction was good and still wanted to see something else anyway. That hinted at the fact that they didn’t exactly know what they wanted but also didn’t trust us our suggestions, which didn’t fare well for the rest of the project. We decided to stick to our guns, even knowing that it was a possibility we may get fired for it.

I replied via email. I started my reply with thanking them for their feedback, asking a few follow-up questions on some small details I needed extra clarification on, then eventually got to my main point:

We’re definitely gonna iterate on the first one. We think there’s enough great things that came out of the conversation yesterday that deserve at least another look at it.

Regarding doing another direction, I’d still prefer not to, for a few reasons. I’m speaking candidly here, so I hope you don’t take any offense at these:

I’m not sure we have any ideas for another direction. We really believe in the one we’re working on—“Bold! With a pinch of hubris.”—and think it’s a great vehicle for doing the jobs we intend for the site. Doing another direction would really be for the sake of it, and I don’t wanna sandbag with a direction we think is garbage. I’d totally have a different tune if there was another idea we feel strongly about that we want to explore, but that’s unfortunately not the case right now.

Again, no offense intended, but I’ve seen multiple options culture tend to lead to picking “the best one of the bunch,” as opposed “one that’s good.” I think that’s a slippery road to travel, and I’d prefer not to accidentally end up there.

So, that’s not to say we’re opposed to another direction. Perhaps we could use your team’s previously explored directions as points of comparison. Or, perhaps maybe some of your designers can take a crack at something new, if that’s more preferred. Totally open to that, so happy to talk through that if it’s helpful.

If neither of those are feasible for any reasons, here’s what I’d like to do: we’re gonna do a bit more audience research so we can be more confident in our approach than we have been previously. And, like you suggested yesterday: we’re gonna absolutely kill it. In our next conversation, we’ll tell you why this will work for you. And you all can decide whether or not you believe us ;)

As always, happy to get on the phone to talk through any of this if it’s easier.

Thanks friends!

He replied quickly:

I’m at an offsite so I cannot fully respond at the moment, but I have to say this is disappointing. I’m not sure we’re on the same page in terms of how we want to work together on the project. The inflexibility in terms of exploring other directions is not building confidence with the team.

This just doesn’t really cut it frankly. While we brought up several times wanting to have more than one option to explore, were open to letting you prove out a single idea and then “go from there” and make a decision if we needed to see more exploration. We’re at that point and we’re asking, rather politely, to see further exploration.

This isn’t our first rodeo. We’re all accustomed to making considered decisions based on the right criteria.

Dan, if this isn’t the way you prefer to work, that’s fine. Let’s have that discussion. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to talk till end of day tomorrow, but I’ll make time if necessary.

I took him up on the offer to chat, as I’ve learned that a phone call is a much calmer way to have these kinds of conversations most of the time. I gently doubled down on the idea that we’d only show directions we’re confident about and didn’t feel good about doing other directions for the sake of it. He was a bit taken aback, as I think he expected that I’d acquiesce on this call.

He confirmed. “Dan, are you really willing to walk over this?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. Well, I guess that means it’s the end of our project.”

I proposed that since they had paid half up front as a deposit and we were about halfway done the project, that we call it even. I’d package up our work-to-date, and they’d own all of the rights to it to do whatever they pleased. We wouldn’t owe them any more work, and they wouldn’t owe us any more money. He agreed, and I was ready to end the call and part ways.

Then he added this.

“You know, Dan… I don’t think this project went the way that either of us would have wanted. I do wish more people like you worked here. I haven’t worked with many people who are willing to stand by their principles to that degree, and I think I and the company would be better for it. One day, I’d love to buy you a drink and tell you about how, in a lot of ways, this project is how we do things here, for better or worse.”

I thanked him for the kind words and told him I’d look forward to that.

I told my team the bad news, and they handled it graciously. I paid them all in full.

A few months later, I saw that their new marketing site had launched, created by another agency. It looked exactly like their old site.

The Advantages of Imposter Syndrome

Dan Mall — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 10:12:00 +0000

Whenever asked about imposter syndrome, my default answer has been that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it. (Case in point: listen to the conversation I had with Ross Hatton, timestamp: 48:44.) That’s mostly because of what I understood imposter syndrome to be:

By definition, an imposter is “a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain.” I’ve never pretended to be someone else to deceive others.
By definition, imposter syndrome is when “people doubt their skills, talents, or accomplishments, despite external evidence of their competence.” I’ve typically had confidence in my competence, largely because I also have enough objective evidence of where I’m incompetent that I can clearly spot the difference.

In her fantastic article “If you want to be creative, you can’t be certain,” Ida Persson paraphrases Seth Godin’s thoughts on imposter syndrome:

Everyone who is doing important work is working on something that might not work. And when things might not work, you’re acting as if. And that makes you an imposter.

I can get down with the idea that an imposter is “someone who acts as if.” By that definition, I’ve definitely been an imposter. The difference is that I’ve been an imposter on purpose.

Being an imposter on purpose can be a useful part of being a designer. A designer’s job is partially to imagine a world that doesn’t exist and work to make that world a reality. In other words: to act as if. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp had to act as if we live in a world where it’s acceptable to get into strangers’ cars, and Uber was born. Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia had to act as if we live in a world where it’s acceptable to stay in strangers’ houses, and Airbnb was born.

Thinking about it in this way helps me to realize that imposter syndrome sometimes goes by different names. Delusional. Zealous. Visionary. All things that are strengths as much as they are weaknesses.

Choosing to be someone different than who you are can be a powerful strategy, as Todd Herman describes in his book, The Alter Ego Effect. Having an alter ego can help you achieve and attain skills, traits, and qualities you may not want or be able to associate with the real you. Bruce Wayne’s Batman alter ego helps him beat criminals to a pulp. Sasha Fierce. Ziggy Stardust. Black Mamba. Hannah Montana.

One alter ego technique my wife and I use all the time in our house is to try on the persona of a person who has made a certain decision. For example, if we were trying to decide to sell one of our two cars to try and live with one car, we might pretend to be a family that has only one car when we go to bed. When we wake up, we’d wake up in the mindset of a family that has only one car. We might even take it further and ignore one of our cars for the week to see how it feels to be that kind of family. It’s like a new outfit you can try on to see if it fits.

This gives a different meaning to another phrase/idea I’ve historically detest: “fake it til you make it.” Assuming an alter ego lets you try on an idea without becoming it. There’s nothing fake about that. Imposter syndrome gets people down when they suddenly realize they feel like someone else; it’s the surprise part that’s jarring about it.

I appreciate Adam Grant’s framing on imposter syndrome in his book, Think Again:

In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge.

As Grant describes it, imposter syndrome is where competence exceeds confidence.

The way to combat imposter syndrome—and it’s counterpoint, Armchair Quarterback Syndrome—is to balance confidence and competence.

When my confidence has been lower than my competence, I’ve questioned whether my achievements in that area are largely due to luck. A few years in, my agency SuperFriendly broke a million dollars in revenue. So, am I a person who can create million dollar companies? Technically yes. But it doesn’t feel like it to me. Pardon the pedantry, but “a person who can create million dollar companies” is different than “a person who created a million dollar company that one time.”

The next year, SuperFriendly broke a million dollars in revenue again (well, two million, to be exact). So now am I a person who can create million dollar companies? Again, technically yes, but it still doesn’t feel like it. Because maybe it was just riding on the momentum of the previous year. You can see how my confidence being lower than my competence leaves room for imposter syndrome.

So before I leap to that judgment, I’m trying to do it again with a completely different company. If I can do it three times, that’s usually enough evidence for me to believe that it’s not luck; it’s me.

The Journey to a Dream Client

Dan Mall — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 06:40:00 +0000

As a kid growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, my life outside of school consisted of drawing, watching cartoons, and playing/watching basketball. I was a big fan of Michael Jordan—who wasn’t at that time?—and anything with a Nike logo on it was the epitome of cool. The iconic “Just Do It,” “Mars Blackmon,” “I Am Not a Role Model,” and “Bo Knows” ads were bold, creative, and played in mind non-stop. I wanted so badly to wear some Air Jordans, Air Griffeys, Uptempos, Air Max Plus, Penny’s, Pippen’s, or any of the popular sneakers at the time. But these were hundreds of dollars, and that was definitely not in the budget for our lower middle class family in north Philly. The only Nikes my mom took me to get once a year was from the clearance rack at Kmart. I was still grateful, but one day, I wanted to fully embrace the Nike culture I admired so much. Somewhere within the Chicago Bulls’ NBA championships from 1991–1998 as adolescent me was learning Photoshop and Flash and FrontPage and starting to dream about career choices, I figured Nike would be a cool place to work.

Nike work

Fast forward to 2006. I was in my senior year at college, heavily steeped in a digital design education, I came across one of the best websites I had ever seen to this day: the brand new Nike Air website.

There was video, animation, visual effects, sound… it was like a movie, but in a web browser. I was sold: I wanted to make stuff like this for my career. I had to work for Nike. I made some soft plans to find my way to Beaverton, Oregon where Nike was headquartered so I could work from the mothership.

In my research, I eventually realized that Nike themselves weren’t always responsible for doing the cool work I’d seen for years, but that they hired agencies to make this stuff for them. That shifted my thinking: maybe, instead of working for Nike, I could work for the agencies that made this stuff for them. I was in luck: I already had an internship at a web design agency (the now-defunct Pixelworthy), and later that year, I would be one of the founding members of the Philadelphia office of Happy Cog.

The problem is that Nike wasn’t one of our clients. Far from it, actually, at least in my opinion. If I wasn’t working for Nike, I could settle for Adidas, or other sportswear companies, or other big brands at least. But our first few clients were places like small production house Paramount Vantage or indie gaming publisher Kongregate or Irish culture center Comhaltas. And we weren’t crafting big ad campaigns for these companies; we were building a few dinky web templates for them.

I complained to Jason, my creative director. “Why don’t we get clients like Nike?”

“What’s ‘a client like Nike?’” he asked.

“Clients that have lots of assets for us to work with, with big budgets and generous timelines where we can make things really immersive.” I retorted.

Jason replied with wisdom that has stuck with me for years, something that I think about on every project I work on to this day. “Nike’s not going to come to us because we’re not doing work that already looks like Nike. Start making that work with our current clients without all the big budgets, fancy assets, and long timelines, and the Nike work will come. Work on your work now as if you were working for Nike.”

The next project that came up was a website redesign for Carlisle Wide Plank Floors. I initially did a boring design, as I was thinking “standard e-commerce website.” My boss Greg, knowing my wishes, pushed my thinking. He encouraged me to think less of it as designing a website and more about designing your dream home. “Make it experiential,” he said. “How would Nike make you design your dream home?”

I thought about things like Nike ID, where you could customize your own pair of sneakers and explore a sneaker model in 3D space with the choices you made. At the moment, I didn’t have the skill, the time, or the ambition to build my own 3D models, but I did have the ability to do some heavy Photoshopping and had access to lots of great photography from the client, so I evolved my direction to be much more photographic and interactive.

The client ultimately didn’t choose my direction, but this project gave me confidence that the only limit on my work was what I could come up with, not the budget or the client or the timeline or the assets. I started slowly investing in and growing my ability to create my own assets, from photography to motion to illustration. I tried to bring as much of that approach to all of our work for clients like ADP, Liberty Mutual, Housing Works, MICA, and more.

Do what I do best

Somewhere along the way, I learned that the Nike Air website I had admired for all those years was created by an agency in Brooklyn called Big Spaceship. I tracked down and pored over a few of their case studies and attended events and talks from several of their employees. I became a big fan.

Eventually, I got a job at Big Spaceship, and many of the people who worked on that Nike Air site became mentors, colleagues, and friends. I went there to learn how to make sites like Nike Air, and honestly, I struggled. I remember trying to make a site for GE my Nike Air; it wasn’t. I tried to do it on some projects for Wrigley; it didn’t work. In fact, my boss Mike called me into his office one day to talk to me about my sub-par performance. He didn’t mince words that my work wasn’t up to snuff. But he also gave me these words of encouragement: “While we do want you to learn how we’ve done things, we hired you so that you could bring what you do really well to the table.”

That guidance changed my outlook again. Instead of trying to design everything with visual effects and particle systems and motion graphics, I approached my next project—designing the Star Wars website—with what I did well: bold typography, tight grid systems, and solid platform design. I knocked this one out of the park. Building momentum, I carried it forward on my next big project: overhauling Crayola’s entire digital ecosystem. These were some of my first big efforts in learning and architecting design systems, even though I wasn’t thinking of them as such at the time.

Eyes on the prize

I started my own agency SuperFriendly shortly thereafter, and I kept the “do this project as if you were doing it for Nike” mentality in all of my work for a dazzling and humbling directory of clients like Apple, ESPN, Mastercard, Google, AOL, Time Inc, The New York Times, Canon, Aetna, Dotdash Meredith, ExxonMobil, Harvard, FX, Khan Academy, Carnegie Mellon University, Toast, United Airlines, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pfizer, Herman Miller, The University of Pittsburgh, Twilio, Peloton, and more. And yep, I'm listing all of those to brag, because I’m super proud of that list. All the while, I’d been developing a specialty and a reputation in design systems. Nike wasn’t on that list, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. I had several friends who ran their own agencies that had Nike as a client. I volunteered many times to all of them to act as an intern for free on any of their Nike projects anytime, but no one ever took me up on it.

A lot of that work over the years won me a few shelves worth of design awards, which also resulted in being asked to sit on a few award juries. In 2019, I was invited to be on the jury of that year’s Communication Arts Interactive award show At the Communication Arts office, among the other jurors I met was Hayley Hughes, then a UX manager at Shopify. We bonded over mutual friends and connections as well as an appreciation for the grind of design system work. Two years later, I saw Hayley announce on social media that she got a job as a design director at Nike, working specifically on design systems. I sent her a note to congratulate her and express my jealousy that she had my dream job. Three months after that, Hayley sent me a message that said, “Soooo, it turns out that we’ve got an upcoming design systems project at Nike that I’m hoping might be a good fit for you and your friends at SuperFriendly.”

After breezing through some paperwork, I’m proud to say that I finally got to do my dream project with my dream client in 2021, spending a few months working a team of 30 of Nike’s best and brightest designers, engineers, and product folks to reignite their design system practice.

I built my first website in 1998, and I worked with my dream client in 2021. I just spent about 1500 words telling you about the winding, 23-year journey that got me there. While there’s a small part of me that wishes it would have happened 20 years sooner, I’m more glad that I was able to take the scenic route there. In a lot of ways that I hope you can see through my story, a project with Nike was always the destination in some form, but I’m happy that I didn’t make it the one and only stop. The small projects I was complaining about still had big moments within them. Kongregate was the first VC-funded project I worked on that then got acquired for $55 million. Comhaltas enabled me to take a trip to Ireland where I proposed to Em on a horse & carriage ride through Dublin. I worked on a billion-dollar rebrand. I tried kolaches for the first time with ExxonMobil. I designed an iPad app that controlled a 10,000-pound robot arm to move furniture around a room. I helped make travel better for United Airlines customers. I sat at a high-rollers table at The Cosmopolitan when I worked on their rewards program. I made resources for restaurant owners with Toast.

So yes, identify your dream client and take the steps you can to work with them, but do give yourself the liberty to meander on your way there. En route to your dream project, you may end up having a dream career. I did.

Creating Portfolio Pieces

Dan Mall — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 06:37:00 +0000

Like many others right now you might be working on creating a new portfolio. You may realize some of the pieces you intend to show actually aren’t the best reflection of your work or you don’t have the permission to share it fully because of NDAs or your specific role on the project.

What do you do?

Create projects that showcase your abilities.

But there’s an art to choosing projects that both tell the appropriate stories you want to communicate and that you can execute quickly.

A pitch, not an archive

The biggest mistake I see in portfolios is that people treat it like an archive of their work. “Here’s some stuff I did” is the main signal it sends.

That’s a weak story. Just because you worked on it doesn’t mean it should go in your portfolio.

Instead of thinking of your portfolio like an archive, think of it as a pitch or a proposal. You want something from someone: a full-time job, a contract, etc. So, show them what’s in it for them if they hire you.

In order to do that, you have to know something about who you’re pitching. The more specific, the better. It’s good to know that you’re pitching Google on hiring you; it’s better to know that you’re pitching Angela from Google on hiring you. You might discover that Google tends to hire designers who have prior tech experience, but it’s even better to know that Angela from Google has a soft spot for hiring people who have pets.

Setting constraints

The most difficult time to decide what portfolio pieces to include is when you’re desperately looking for a job. You’re making decisions under duress, which often leads to think more about what pieces you have over what message you want to send.

Resist that urge. Take a deep breath and think about your thesis. What’s the one thing you want a hiring manager to think about you above every other candidate? Some examples to get you started:

Subject matter expertise: “Dan knows more about design systems than every other applicant”
Personality trait: “Dan seems more fun than every other applicant”
Alignment: “Dan is really into basketball, just like most people on our team”

Another useful constraint to set is the number of pieces you intend to show. Some rough guidelines, depending on the signal you want to send:

3 projects: “I don’t have a lot of experience, but I have some. I can prioritize and be decisive. There’s more where these came from.”
5–9 projects: “I’m fairly senior and can add value in a lot of different places.”
15+ projects. “I’ve seen it all and I want you to be inundated and overwhelmed by my experience.”

The last constraint that’s useful to decide before you start making new pieces: how much time you’ll spend on one piece. Especially if you’re trying to get a job quickly, the last thing you want is to spend months on a new portfolio. How much time will you allow for each piece? If you give yourself a day per project, a senior-level portfolio will take you about a week to create. If you give yourself a week per project, a junior or mid-level portfolio will take 3 weeks to create.

(One last note about this: even though you may be in a rush, be reasonable about your portfolio as an investment. You may be looking for someone to pay you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. To think that can reasonably happen through a portfolio you slap together over a weekend is a longshot. If it was easy to spend two days on something that earns you 6-figures, everyone would be doing it. As much as it sucks to accept, spending 3 weeks on a portfolio might be a worthwhile investment to give you job security for the next few months or years.)

Sideline the “side project”

A frequent go-to for people looking to fill some portfolio slots is to dig up an obscure side project to show. That Github weekend excursion where you tried to learn Processing? Those series of “Hello World” experiments with SwiftUI? Certainly, these show that you’re open minded to learning new things, right?

Stop that. No one wants to see your unkempt sock drawer.

Every piece of work in your portfolio should be a complete thought. Side projects often aren’t, which is still valuable for you as a thought exercise, but they don’t often belong in a portfolio.

Instead of thinking of what side projects you can quickly pull off, reframe it like this: what story arcs can I share? A good story arc has exposition, rising action, a climax, falling action, and a resolution.

Project ideas

Armed with a pitch mindset and appropriate constraints, here are 7 different strategies I would use to create portfolio pieces that send a strong message that I’m the right person to hire.

The “Gimme Some More”: Every project in your portfolio should be a project you would love to do again. Do you love illustrating animal mascots? Have at least one portfolio piece showing how well you illustrate animal mascots. It might take a while to find a client or company that wants you to illustration animal mascots, but once you do, you’ll be in heaven.
The “Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent”: Say you did some amazing work for Bank of America, but you can’t show any of the work because it’s under NDA. Create a duplicate of the project but change the name to RoboBank or something fictitious. Swap the main brand red for brand blue. Change the Open Sans corporate typeface to Inter instead. Disclose in your portfolio piece that all of the names and data have been anonymized so as not to be recognizable as the original project, but otherwise keep everything else the same.
The “I Use This Every Day”: No one cares about your unsolicited redesign of Instagram, because no one believes that you have any more insight about Instagram than anyone else. Instead, redesign something otherwise unglamorous that you use every day. For me, it’d be the terrible website for the credit union where I pay my car loan. I can never find the right contact info, my account number, and the autopay always fails so I have to manually process it anyway. I’d re-architect the navigation, remove some content, and give it a visual facelift—and it’d probably only take a few hours of work.
The “Pro-Bono”: A variation of the “I Use This Every Day,” if you’re gonna do an unsolicited redesign, do it for an organization that needs it, not Facebook or Netflix. For me, I’d do a redesign for the local theater company my daughters are part of. And hey, if I’m really feeling great about it, I might even offer it to the company for free if they want it.
The “Redux”: Got a project that you wish you could do over again? Do it over again. Did it not have the outcomes you initially wanted? Make it have the outcomes you wanted. Think about what it would have needed to change, and show what it would be like if that change had occurred. Acknowledge in the portfolio piece that you went back and did the project again after it was done. Hiring managers are suckers for that kind of stuff. I did a project for Microsoft years ago that I totally botched: I tried to do too much, and the end result was really confused. I’m dying to have another crack at it, and I know what I’d do differently: I’d pick a much more constrained idea, and I’d spend all of my time perfecting one specific part of the execution (SVG quality).
The “Play to Your Strengths”: I’m not the strongest visual designer, but I am really good on camera. Because of that, my portfolio would probably be more video-based than image-based. Bonus: it’d be more unique and memorable to the hiring manager because of it. Obfuscate your weaknesses in your portfolio and emphasize the things you’re really good at.
The “My Story, not The Story”: If I had a dollar for every portfolio that used a “The Brief, The Challenge, The Solution” format, this newsletter would be sponsored indefinitely. Stop writing case studies like you’re the agency that did this work. That’s The Story™ of the project, not Your Story™, which is much more interesting. If The Story™ is that “conversion increased by 16% year-over-year,” Your Story™ is that it was the first time you used A/B testing software and you learned that button position actually had no effect on conversion rate. It’s your portfolio; tell your story.

Why do this kinds of examples work? Because they’re real. They’re complete thoughts. They’re not abbreviated ideas. They show that you’re talented, thoughtful, resourceful, ambitious, and original—all the things hiring managers want from a direct report and individual contributors want from a teammate and colleague.

Do you have a similar idea and want some feedback about whether or not it’d be a good portfolio piece? Reply and let me know about it and I’ll give you my perspective on it.

My 40th Birthday in Peru

Dan Mall — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 20:16:00 +0000

I wanted to go somewhere memorable for my 40th birthday, so I figured a world wonder was a good place to start. February on the east coast of the U.S. is cold, so I started looking to go somewhere warm. My research pointed me towards Machu Picchu. I had never been to South America at all before, so this seemed like a good time.

Day 0–1: Monday–Tuesday, January 29–30

Em and I boarded a red eye flight from the U.S. and landed in Cusco, Peru (via a Bogota, Colombia connection) at 11:15am. We had hoped for some decent sleep on the flight; she got some and I didn’t, which is usually the opposite for us.

We exchanged money to local currency (Peruvian soles) and headed outside to meet Marco, the driver we had hired for the week. Marco didn’t speak much English, so I busted out my rusty Spanish in combination with the Google Translate app and we arrived at our hotel.

Cusco, Peru is over 11,000 ft. above sea level. Our prior research told us that many people get altitude sickness anywhere above 8,000 ft., so we didn’t plan much the first day to get acclimated. We checked into our hotel room and Em took a nap, as she was already feeling the elevation. I was starving, so I headed straight to the hotel restaurant for some local flavors of ceviche trucha (trout ceviche) and lomo saltado (strip steak with fried onions and peppers). After lunch, I took a 30-minute nap.

Em woke up feeling better and ready to explore the town. I woke up with a mild headache. Before heading out to the town, we took advantage of the hotel’s complimentary oxygen service for 15-minutes. It helped for a bit, but 5 minutes after we got to the main town square, I had a full-on migraine, so I went back to the hotel to sleep it off while Em explored on her own. I was down for the count for the rest of the night.

Day 2: Wednesday, January 31

I woke up 12 hours later, gratefully feeling like normal since we had a full day of excursions ahead.

The plan was to spend a few hours seeing some popular sites in the Sacred Valley before boarding a train to Machu Picchu town (Aguas Calientes) so we could catch the earliest bus to Machu Picchu the next morning.

However, I received an email from the train company, notifying me of a “suspension of railway operations” due to local protests. I did some quick Google searching, and The New York Times confirmed the news.

The only other way to Machu Picchu that I had read about in my trip planning were a few multi-day hikes. I hate hiking, and, even if I didn’t, one day wouldn’t be enough time anyway. I asked the hotel concierge for other options, and she pretty quickly conceded that we were out of luck.

By this time, Marco was outside to pick us up for the day, so I went out to tell him about our change of plans. He replied, “Don’t worry. I’ll make a plan.” After a few minutes of doing something on his phone and making a few calls, he filled us in. He said he could drive us to the hydroelectrical station, and we could do a 2-hour easy walk along the train tracks to Aguas Calientes. I had read about this option when researching, but it sounded like something the locals did a lot that wasn’t really a great tourist option. Marco volunteered to do the trip with us as long as we would pay for his food and expenses along the way. I liked that plan and was up for the extra adventure, especially as the alternative was to miss Machu Picchu all together.

We had our rollerboard suitcases with us, which wouldn’t be great to take on a 2-hour walk. Marco offered that we could pack light backpacks with one change of clothes and we could store our suitcases at his house. We met his adorable wife and daughter, dropped our bags, and off we went!

The drive to the hydroelectric station was a 5½-hour drive up and down mountains. I get motion sickness pretty easily, so it was Dramamine and windows down the whole way. It helped that the drive was incredibly beautiful. We even stopped to get rocoto rellenos (stuffed peppers) from some women selling them on the side of the road.

We drove through several different microclimates along the way. One portion was windy and cool; another was in a cloud, damp with no visibility; and then it got hot like a tropical island on the way down.

One leg of the trip was on the edge of a cliff, and we came to a standstill for about an hour as a construction crew was clearing boulders from a landslide. While loitering outside the car and stretching our legs, we met Marta and Pedro from Spain, and coincidentally learned that they were also planning to walk from the hydroelectric station to Aguas Calientes. The construction crew eventually cleared enough of a path for all the stopped cars to continue the journey.

We eventually arrived at the hydroelectric station at around 5pm, parked the car, and began our walk. Marta and Pedro joined us, and we learned they were a father and daughter on their first adult trip together. The walk was beautiful, along train tracks through a forest, and we even passed some ruins on the path.

It started to get dark around 6:30pm and began pouring rain. We were prepared with raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof bag covers, but it was still pretty demoralizing to walk 3 miles in pitch black through rain and mud.

Eventually, 7 miles in total, we arrived to the town of Aguas Calientes at around 7:30pm. Our hotel was a few minutes from the entry port of town, and we bid farewell to Marta and Pedro. We checked into the hotel, booked Marco his own room, and asked about the best local place to eat nearby. We quickly hung up some clothes to dry and went for a quick dinner. A local dish of aji de gallina—a chicken stew comfort food—lifted my spirits. We went to bed tired but excited that we had earned our way to Machu Picchu.

Day 3: Thursday, February 1

We woke up at 4:30am to quickly pack up, catch a 5am hotel breakfast, and meet our Machu Picchu tour guide. From Aguas Calientes, there are 2 ways up the mountain to Machu Picchu: a 1600-step, 2-hour, difficult hike with a 1,280-ft. elevation gain, or a 20-minute bus ride. We opted for the bus ride.

One piece of silver lining from the combination of train protests, the fact that this rainy season was the off-season for Machu Picchu, and taking the earliest bus up was that there was no one in line when we got there! We basically walked right in. We had a small hiccup as the admission guard was convinced we had tickets for the wrong day. It turns out there was a new format of ticket that used American-style dates (month, then day) as opposed to the more common worldwide format of day then month, but that got resolved quickly and the guard apologized profusely while ushering us in.

We made it! Walking into Machu Picchu at 6:15am, the whole place was moody and foggy, which is exactly what I wanted. As the sun came out that morning, we were treated to incredible views of a magical city in the clouds, revelead little by little. Our tour guide André was just what the doctor ordered: knowledgeable, spiritual, experienced, funny, and probably a little buzzed from all the coca leaves he was chewing.

We were pretty beat from walking around for a few hours, waking up early, and the previous day’s trek. We caught the bus back down the mountain and found a local restaurant to have a proper brunch. I got an email that the trains were running again, and Marco suggested that we take the train back to have that experience while he walked back to his car and make the journey back over the mountains by himself. He offered that one of his other drivers could meet us at the train station with our luggage to take us to our next destination. We agreed and parted ways for the day.

We boarded our train back, found our seats, and immediately fell asleep. We were woken up 15 minutes later by a big thud and a screech of brakes. Apparently, the train ran into a giant boulder that had fallen onto the tracks. We waited an hour for a construction crew to come and remove it so we could continue our journey.

Marco’s colleague Diego picked us up and took us to our next hotel in Urubamba. The hotel was a charming set of beautiful villas, and I think we were the only ones there. We walked around town for a bit before sitting down to an underwhelming dinner at the hotel restaurant before crashing for the day.

Day 4: Friday, February 2

Marco picked us up at 8am to take us to our next location: an immersion experience at Mil.

We had a lunch reservation, but part of the experience is to first tour the laboratory, farmlands, and understand the local economy and agricultural before eating the food that comes from different altitudes.

We were greeted with an infusion of muña (local mint), coca leaves, and other herbs as a way to help acclimate to the altitude. Our host Agnes—a writer from Portland who backpacked through Peru 10 years ago and never left—walked us through the laboratory and showed us how the team at Mil were working to preserve and integrate local culture and customs through their experiences.

We met and walked around with Efrain, a farmer who introduced us to different local plants and vegetables and showed us how the Incas made many different uses of their surroundings from food to weaponry. I even got to try out an Incan slingshot!

Efrain led us through a typical morning ritual of making and drinking chicha de jora—a fermented corn drink—and offering the first parts to the gods of the earth and the mountains as an offering of gratefulness.

We spent time with sisters Sepherina and Juana, who showed us how the make and dye textiles from sheep and alpaca using natural colors from the local foliage. It’s incredible how resourceful their community is in creating such variety from the limited materials they have access to.

Finally, we were ready for the meal service. We started at the bar with a few cocktails made from local plants and roots from the region.

Then we moved to the dining room for an 8-course tasting menu, with each course representing a different altitude of the region.

Preservation: chuño, corn, uchucuta sauce, oxalis
Highland: cabuya, lamb, kañiwa, cushuro
Extreme Altitude: alpaca, black quinoa, multigrains, ayrampo fruit
Corn Diversity: piscorunto, chullpi corn, urubamba corn, fresh cheese
Central Andes: potatoes, stems, chaco clay, markh’u leaves
Andean Forest: tarwi, duck, callampa, rocoto pepper
Frozen Cordillera: qolle, muña, tuber ashes
Sweet Huatia: mullaska, cacao, malva

Around the 6th course, we were getting so full and sleepy that we asked for a break to stretch our legs and enjoy sun in the central courtyard before continuing. All in all, this was definitely one of the best meals of my life.

That afternoon, Marco took us to the famous Salineras de Maras (the salt mines of Maras). The salt mines are 3,000 natural salt wells, fed by a natural hypersaline underground spring. Each salt pan is owned by a different family in the Maras community, and selling salt is part of their way of making a living.

Day 5: Saturday, February 3

We spent our last day in Peru back in Cusco. Since I didn’t get to see the town the first day due to altitude sickness, the plan was to spend our last day walking around Cusco before heading to the airport, but we decided to sleep in and have a slow morning packing before heading out.

Overall, being in Peru for my 40th birthday was an amazing experience, and I recommend it to anyone if you get the chance.

How Long Does It Take to Design a Landing Page?

Dan Mall — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

I once worked at a web design agency where we spent a long time honing our process. For new clients, we’d present three different initial concepts for them to choose from for what their new website would look. Each concept consisted of showing them a homepage direction and some detail page that we chose. We usually gave ourselves about a week to work on a concept.

Then I got a job at a different agency. On my first day, I met the team and onboarded to the project I’d be working on. I was assigned a concept, and I asked when it was due. Expecting the answer to be one week from that day, I was surprised to hear that it was due at the end of that day. Being the new guy and not wanting to seem incompetent, I nodded as if everything was normal. But I was freaking out inside.
It takes one week to create a concept. How could I do it in a day?

One week seemed normal at my last agency. But one day seems to be normal at this new agency.

Were we taking too long at the old place? Were we rushing at the new place? Who was right and who was wrong?

How long is it supposed to take to design, say, a landing page? Here are the answers on the first page of Google search results:

1 hour up to a week
50–75 hours
Between 4-8 hours
4-8 weeks
A few hours to a day
5 hours
1–2 weeks
1–2 days
4–6 weeks
3 hours
Not a long time
It depends

Usually, the “it depends” answers aren’t very helpful and the specific answers are. But, in this case, the specific answers are so varied that they’re even more confusing.

What would you do in this scenario? What did I do?

I sat down to work. I tried not to show it, but I was working furiously. I somehow had to fit what I was used to spending a week on into just a few hours.

I actually got it done, and not in some “cut-every-corner,” “phone-in-your-worst-design” kind of way. I liked what I had done. I was proud of it, and proud to show it to the client.

So… had I been wasting weeks for the last few years at my previous agency?

Without realizing it, I learned about Parkinson’s law that day. It says:

Work expands to fill its allotted time span.

And more specifically, the Horstman corollary to Parkinson’s law:

Work contracts to fit in the time we give it.

How long does it take to design a landing page? When I had a week to do it, it took a week. When I had a day to do it, it took a day.

That moment happened to me 14 years ago. I’ve designed many landing pages since then. Looking back at old timesheets, here’s how long it’s taken me to design landing pages before:

30 minutes
1 hour
1 day
A few days
1 week
4 weeks
3 months
6 months

Now I see how that page of Google search results makes sense. It’s not that any particular answer is true. It’s that any of the answers can be true.

Certainly, you could argue that makes sense because every landing page is different. Some have different features and content, stakeholders, timelines, budgets, etc.

Which is true. But that’s not the reason it takes different amounts of time. It takes different amounts of time because we give it different amounts of time.

I used to think that the different variables of a project meant I had to make my process different. But I learned that, instead of changing my process, I could change my mind.

A “Definition of Done” Template

Dan Mall — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Some tasks have an implicit definition of done built in. For example, “take out the trash” is straightforward to evaluate without too much of a framework: if the trash is still inside, this task is not complete. Once the trash is outside in the trash can, I can stop thinking about this task and move on to something else.

In knowledge work, however, stopping points aren’t always as apparent. Most times, it’s because we have to choose where to stop; otherwise, they could go on indefinitely.

For example, my task might be to design a new personal website (which I’m about to do soon!). Those of you who have designed a personal website before know that you can design a personal website in a day and you can also design one that takes a few years to complete. (Raise your hand if you’ve been working on a personal website for the last few years 🖐️ 🤣 🙊 )

Because this task could take anywhere from 1 day to several years, many of us resort to a helpful technique to help—force?—us to be done: timeboxing! Instead of waiting for the task to naturally come to an end, we pick a deadline: “by next Friday at 5pm Eastern” or “by midnight on May 1.”

(Timeboxing is a great way to hold yourself or someone else accountable.)

Timeboxing is a great gateway to choosing a definition of done. I’d like to show you a few other variables for making this kind of choice.

(My starting point came from Dan Martell’s book, Buy Back Your Time, one of my favorite books I read last year. I’ve since made a few additions.)

Here are three important factors I suggest identifying in your definition of done: facts, feelings, and future.

Facts are what most people naturally use in their definitions of done. What time should this be done, how many of something do I need, etc.
Feelings are the big one we usually leave out. How do you expect or want to feel when this is done? Relieved? Excited? Rested? Exhausted?
Future is about what change you want to be enabled to make by doing this task. If nothing changes, why do it?

With those factors in mind, here’s the template I like to fill in:

Project: {{ PROJECT TITLE }}

Facts:

This project should improve {{ BUSINESS METRIC/MEASUREMENT }}
The deliverables I expect to see are {{ DELIVERABLE }}
This must be completed by {{ TIME }} on {{ DATE }}

Feelings:

When this is done, {{ PERSON INVOLVED }} will feel {{ FEELING }}

Future:

When this is done, {{ PERSON INVOLVED }} will be able to {{ ACTION ENABLED }}

So, for my personal website redesign project, my definition might look something like this:

Project: Redesign DanMall.com

Facts:

This project should improve my ability to earn income as an independent creator.
The deliverables I expect to see are a new website built with Webflow, deployed to danmall.com.
This must be completed by 5pm Eastern on April 1, 2024.

Feelings:

When this is done, I will feel excited to have a new online presence.
When this is done, I will feel reinvigorated to work harder and smarter on my business.

Future:

When this is done, I will be able to share my thoughts online in new formats.
When this is done, I will be able to drive more traffic to my book, courses, and other products
When this is done, more people will be able to find more valuable content on my website.

Then I print this on one sheet of paper and have it sitting next to my desk so I can glance at it often and remind myself what I’m working towards.

How do you usually define done? Reply and let me know so I can update my template with other helpful techniques.

Talk About Yourself

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

In his excellent book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier wisely points out, “Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

While I generally agree, I’ve also found some interesting exceptions.

I ran an agency called SuperFriendly. Whenever I’d appear on podcasts or speak at a conference, people would introduce me as, “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet,” or some variation of that. Most of these people have never met me before. I’d bet that it was because the word “friendly” was in my agency’s name.

If you follow me on Instagram, YouTube, or Threads, you might have noticed that my username is “danmallteaches” in all three places. Since starting these accounts only a year or less ago, people introduce me differently. I’ve noticed that many of them now say, “Dan is an excellent teacher.” Most of these people have never taken any class or course of mine.

If you want people to think of you a certain way, you sometimes have to start thinking of yourself that way and then saying it out loud a lot. Make it your username or add it to your email signature or put in the footer of your Instagram posts. Don’t be afraid to talk about yourself.

How to Get Free Mentorship from Someone You Admire

Dan Mall — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 10:07:00 +0000

For years, the design industry suffered from a shortage of mentorship. Services like ADPList came along and helped to create a marketplace for mentorship. Many professionals offer an option where you can purchase an hour or a few of their time for a fee. Intro gives you access to experts you may not have thought was possible to talk to.

Why do some experts want you to pay anyway? It’s because most of them actually don’t want to do it. Compensation for their time sweetens a pot a bit, but it’s still begrudging, even if they truly want to help others. Of the 522 million search results for the phrase “can I pick your brain?” most of them contain at least some advice on how to politely say no.

The second biggest piece of advice is to have a more specific question in mind than, “Can I pick your brain?” Anna Goldfarb’s NYT article, “The Right Way to Ask, ‘Can I Pick Your Brain?’” doesn’t bury the lede: “Know what you want” is the first phrase in the subhead.

[Change] the language from, “Can I pick your brain?” to the more friendly, “I would like your advice.” People respond more positively to that phrasing because it conveys intention; that you’re approaching a certain person for very particular reasons.

Here are 5 steps to getting the kind of mentorship that’s helpful to you for free from someone you admire.

1. Do your homework.

If you’re a student who wants advice about a career as a designer, don’t just pick a random designer. Pick a designer whose career you might like to emulate. Study their work. Watch their YouTube videos. Follow their Instagram account. Listen to the podcasts they’ve been on. Gain some familiarity with them to understand what they have strong opinions and experience on.

2. Write down 3 specific questions you want answered.

The more specific, the better. Instead of vague questions like “what was your career journey?” ask pointed questions like “how did you decide to quit your job to start your own company?”

Pro tip: in his book Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte suggests organizing information for action:

The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”… There are relatively few things that are actionable and relevant at any given time, which means you have a clear filter for ignoring everything else.

Only ask questions that pertain to something you’re working on right now (or very soon). Otherwise, the risk is high that you’ll just forget the advice because you don’t have anything to apply it to right now.

3. Try to predict what their answers would be before you ask them.

This is why it’s important to not just contact any random person but someone who you’ve already researched. If you don’t know them at all, your predictions will be generic at best. If you know them a bit, you might have a high degree of accuracy about their unique perspective, which is why you want their mentorship in the first place.

4. Ask ChatGPT to answer like them.

If your role model is public/published enough, there may be enough existing data for a large language model like ChatGPT to approximate their answers. So ask! For example, Kevin Feige is a person I admire for his ability to architect the teams and stories behind so many Marvel Cinematic Universe movies over so many years. I’d ask for his advice with a problem I’m having right now: not being able to work well with one of my colleagues. I asked ChatGPT instead:

How would Kevin Feige recommend I deal with a team member who’s difficult to work with but talented?

To which the reply is:

Kevin Feige might approach this situation with a focus on balancing the team dynamic while recognizing the value of the individual's talent. Here's a potential approach he might recommend:

Private Conversation: Have a one-on-one conversation with the team member. Acknowledge their talent and contributions, but also address the challenges faced when working together. Be specific about behaviors or issues affecting the team.

Highlight Impact: Illustrate how their behavior affects the team's dynamics or project progress. Feige often emphasizes the importance of teamwork in achieving Marvel's goals, and he might stress the impact of individual behavior on the overall success.

Set Clear Expectations: Define clear expectations regarding behavior and collaboration. Emphasize the importance of working well within a team while utilizing their talents effectively.

Offer Support: Provide support or resources if the difficult behavior stems from external factors. Feige often values the well-being of his team members and might suggest offering assistance or guidance if needed.

Mediation or Facilitation: If necessary, consider involving a mediator or facilitator to help improve communication and resolve conflicts. Feige might prioritize finding solutions that maintain team harmony while leveraging the individual's talents.

Monitor and Follow-Up: After the conversation, monitor the situation and follow up regularly to ensure improvements are being made. Encourage open communication to address any ongoing issues.

Feige might approach this situation with a balance between acknowledging the individual's talent and addressing the impact of their behavior on the team's effectiveness. Ultimately, the goal would be to foster a more collaborative and harmonious team environment while leveraging the individual's skills for the project's success.

5. Apply the advice

Try it out.

That’s it!

Wait, where’s the step where you actually contact them?

That’s the beauty: you don’t always have to. This conjures the powerful psychological techniques of self-talk and self-distancing When you imagine giving advice to a friend or someone else in a situation similar to your own, it creates a psychological distance that can offer you a fresh perspective on your own challenges or decisions. This approach allows you to step outside of your own immediate emotions and biases, enabling you to consider the situation more objectively. By mentally distancing yourself from the issue and imagining advising someone else—or imagining someone specific giving you advice—you might find it easier to be more rational, compassionate, and objective in your guidance or decision-making.

(Yes, this is the modern secular equivalent of WWJD.)

Eventually, you’ll be able to turn “What would Kevin Feige do?” into a confident “What do I think I should do?” Once you try out an option, document it somewhere: a private journal, your blog, Twitter, etc. The bigger library you build up of your own options, the more you’re able to consult your own experience of what’s worked for you and what hasn’t. “What do I think I should do?” turns into “What have I successfully done in the past that I can do again?”

With enough time and documenting, maybe Kevin Feige will want to book time with me someday.

2023 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

Continuing the tradition from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2023. (Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links for some of the products I mention and/or recommend.)

Work

2023 was the first full year that I wasn’t an employee of a company since 2007. (I worked for other agencies from 2007–2012, and then I was a salaried employee of my agency SuperFriendly from 2012–2022. Dan Mall Teaches is an LLC, so I’m now a sole proprietor for the first time, not an employee.) My big work goal for 2023 was to transition fully away from selling my time, but I wasn’t able to do that. Still, I’m very grateful to the small list of clients who trusted me to help them this past year: Peloton, The New York Times, NSMBL, Supernova, Figma, Zeplin/Omlet, and The Valoram Group.

As someone who has only worked at agencies or run his own, the in-house position grass is constantly greener. Combined with drastically changing my business and a looming recession, that field is downright emerald. I have a running alert on LinkedIn for jobs I might be suited for. From the end of 2022 to now, I’ve participated in 3 interview processes:

I talked to a team I had done contract work with about coming on board full-time. I found the interview process so confusing that, in one of my five interviews with the team there, I stopped to ask one of my interviewers why they asked me a specific question and how the answer would affect their evaluation of me. They said it was on their sheet of things to ask me and they weren’t sure why. I got an offer from their head of product, which I countered. Their response? “The base you’re asking for is higher than anyone else at the company. CEO, CFO, CTO. You’re asking for more salary than what they make. There is no way I can make that happen.”
I was contacted by a principal designer who had followed my work for years. There was a job opening to be their manager, and they wanted to see if I was interested. We talked, and I agreed to go through the interview process. I didn’t hear anything more for weeks, and this designer got back in touch to let me know that the company already filled the position with someone who never talked to anyone on the team. I got a message from the principal designer a few months later for some advice about finding a new job.
I was contacted by a lone designer at a new, well-funded startup to be their head of design to help grow the design team. I interviewed with the co-founder for 30 minutes, and they talked about their background and the company for 20 minutes. Three weeks later, I saw that one of my connections started a new job as their head of design. Eight weeks later, I received an automated message that said, “While we really appreciate your interest, we recently hired for the role you applied for, so we won't be proceeding with your application at this time.”

I’ve heard many stories of others who have had much worse job-hunting experiences than I have, but even my small sample size has turned me off to the idea that there’s a place out there that would value me as much as I would value them. I think I’ll keep my professional destiny in my own hands for now.

Mentorship, advising, and coaching

In last year’s Year in Review post, I mentioned wanting to explore how I could make mentoring, advising, and coaching part of my year.

I experimented with this in two ways. First, I did medium-term mentorship with 2 people this year:

A Principal Designer who wanted to learn how to be a better leader (met monthly for 6 months)
A UX Product Design Manager who wanted to learn how to thrive as a manager (met monthly for 3 months)

I loved every second of working with them. Both are super sharp and hungry to learn and improve. The strategies we formed together allowed me to bring my experience and creativity to the table.

But both were paying for these sessions personally and could only afford so much, despite seeing tremendous value in it.

I also opened up a week at the end of the year where people could book a paid hour with me to talk about anything they wanted to. A few people did this; they all said it was helpful, but I didn’t feel like I was delivering enough value for what they were paying.

So far, I can’t find a business model in personal mentorship or coaching that works with my opportunity cost. Until I do, I think it’ll have to be charity work in my free time (of which I currently have very little).

The team coaching has been a bit more fruitful. I worked with three different companies this year to coach their teams in either design systems, process, or leadership. For two of the teams, I had standing sessions twice a week; for the other team, I met with them once a week.

I saw a lot of positive change here. But with all three engagements, I ran into the same problems:

I could be more helpful but am limited by my scope
Talking only goes so far. If the team doesn’t take action on what we discuss, we eventually start revisiting the same topics over and over and it starts to feel repetitive and not worthwhile.

I know I have a lot to offer here, but I think I need to figure out a viable business model before pursuing these options further.

Relume

One unique experience I had this year was being invited to the Relume Design League challenge, where two designers go head-to-head to design a landing page in 30 minutes. I hadn’t participated in something like this since FullCodePress, an event in New Zealand to build a full website for a charity in 24 hours. I’m pleased to say that I advanced to the finals but was ultimately defeated by the great Joseph Berry.

Design System University

In last year’s Year in Review, I mentioned a goal of “launching a secret project I’ve been working on for a while.” I had been working on a way to consolidate all of my design system offerings into one place. That place turned out to be Design System University, which I launched in June.

I’ve never been a mainstream designer; I’ve always tried to make my style unique. Still, though, I’m constantly envious of designers whose personal style just happens to be trendy. I could never bring myself to adopt Swiss typography and strict grid systems unless a specific project called for it. Fortunately, Design System University gave me just the excuse I’ve been looking for to play with those kinds of elements in its identity in a way that feels appropriate. This is just a smattering of the early stuff; I have a lot more in store here that I’m eager to play with in 2024.

I initially launched DSU as a combination of courses and community. It was two separate offerings:

A $79/month paid community that offered weekly discussion prompts, monthly working sessions, and admission to a monthly guest speaker event
Self-paced courses ranging from $9 to $499 that could be purchased on a one-off basis (with a 15% discount for community members)

Even in the 6 short months that DSU has been live, I’ve learned a lot about what’s resonating for my audience. I had hoped that the weekly prompts would inspire folks to share their stories; instead, they were empty every week. Despite having incredible guest speakers and highly requested working session topics, attendance dwindled.

I wondered if it was because the industry is generally less interested in design systems as a topic anymore. I tested that hypothesis by trying out a few free events with the same amount of marketing I had put into the DSU events. Hundreds of people registered with a pretty high percentage turnout. (I’m proud of these events and will likely host more in 2024.)

I learned some new lessons through these experiments:

The industry is still very interested in design systems. My offer is wrong.
Community management is a skill that I’m really bad at and have little interest in improving.

I shut down the community after 4 months and am repositioning DSU as something a lot closer to my original vision that I had somehow lost sight of along the way: teaching my design system curriculum through self-paced and live courses. I’m hoping that offering will be a lot simpler and much more accessible to more people.

One of the things that has led me in this direction—and one of my favorite work experiences all year—was teaching the inaugural live cohort of my Design System in 90 Days program. Once a week for 12 weeks, I met with a group of 30 people from organizations like The Obama Foundation, ConvertKit, BOK Financial, Scholastic, Texas A&M, Handshake, and more to do a deep dive with them on their design systems. I love this kind of deep teaching and the opportunity to get specific with students in the individual challenges they’re facing. I know the cohort has been transformative for all the students who put the effort in to make the most of it.

The only downside to this cohort is that it was much less lucrative than I wanted/needed it to be. I think I marketed it poorly and ended up giving away a lot of discounted seats, so that’s something I’ll be working on in 2024 as I plan to run this again at least once or twice. I have a few ideas as to how it can be valuable and affordable for all kinds of students as well as profitable for me.

All-in-all, lots of changes are on the way for DSU in early 2024.

Dribbble

In last year‘s review, I mentioned being excited about launching a course with my friends at Dribbble. That course was called “Scaling Design Systems,” and it was the most comprehensive video course I’ve made to date: more than 10 hours of video teaching over 81 different modules, paced to release over 8 weeks. It launched in February 2023 and was met with great reception. Unfortunately, it was short-lived as Dribbble shifted its education business away from longer-form content, so my course was only live for about 8-9 months and came down in October 2023.

In early 2024, I’ll be re-releasing this course under the Design System University banner. It was pricey before: ranging from $1,499 to $1,999. I want more people to learn about design systems and I can afford to release it at a lower pricepoint myself as I don’t have a lot of overhead, so look for this course to be priced around $199 with purchasing power parity enabled too.

I wrote a book

After two long years of writing, I finally got to hold a copy of my book Design That Scales in my hands! I’ve written two other books before, but because the first one was an e-book and the second one was self-published, this one still felt like checking a new item off my bucket list.

I’ve gotten a few requests and seen a few independent instances of book clubs forming around this book, so that’s something I’m gonna look into a bit more for 2024.

An evolving professional identity

One day this past year, I woke up and nonchalantly decided, “I’m not going to build websites anymore.” It wasn’t a big revelation or anything; just a brewing sentiment over the last few years, which is partially why I wondered aloud if web design still matters.

Though the decision was made casually, it feels heavy. My professional identity over the last 2 decades can be overgeneralized as “web designer/developer,” and I still make websites by hand to this day (for example, writing this very post in a code editor in Markdown). I’m more than proficient in design tools like Figma and Photoshop and programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But these things—especially the coding side—have been bringing me less and less joy over the past few years… and often frustration too. Combined with the rise of no-code and low-code tools, my desire to build websites by writing code myself is at an all-time low. Every website I’ve made this year is built on either Webflow or Framer, and I see that trend only increasing for me.

Following up on a goal I had last year of doing less of what I don’t like doing and more of what I like doing, I’ve been on a journey to discover exactly what those things are. In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks calls it the “Genius Zone:”

Your genius zone is where your creativity flows freely. In your zone of genius, you are actively pursuing the things that offer you fulfillment and satisfaction.

In Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell calls it the “Production Quadrant” (I like calling it my “Prosperity Quadrant” instead). His definition is simple: “makes you lots of money; lights you up.”

The Genius Zone and Prosperity Quadrant are both alternatives to Hendricks’ Excellence and Competence Zones and Martell’s Replacement Quadrant. They all mean the same thing: things you’re good at or even great at that might even make you a lot of money but drain your energy. It seems like an obvious statement, but it was eye-opening for me to learn about. Web design is my Excellence Zone, but it’s not my Genius Zone. I’m only now realizing that those two can be separate things.

That’s a problem when all of my business and projects rely on good websites. The solution? Hire people for whom web design is their Genius Zone to free me up to spend time with mine. My inbox is currently full of great proposals from partners I’m excited to work with who will be taking over as much of my websites as I can afford to delegate.

I had a goal to hire an intern in 2023. I didn’t do that at all, but I instead hired a new executive assistant. I went through Athena and I’m incredibly pleased with my experience so far. (Here’s my referral link for anyone interested.) It’s been almost 3 months now and I’m completely free of managing my inbox, almost free of managing my calendar (still holding onto this one a little too tightly, but I’m working on it), and have a good chunk of time freed up to stay in my Genius Zone as much as I can.

This strategy also feeds into a secondary goal of mine: prioritizing working with more people who come from backgrounds typically underrepresented in design and tech. Because SuperFriendly’s model relied on teams full of contractors, we were able to work with lots of folks in these categories, but we also didn’t too, which always left me feeling like I could be doing more in this area. Though I had much less opportunity and ability in 2023 to work with contractors, I’m proud to say that I’m doing better in making this a priority. I’m grateful to have been able to collaborate with Zulal Ahmad, Imruz Babayeva, Malika Chatlapalli, Ayisha Chowdhury, Pooja Jadav, Lenora Porter, Nadine Sarraj, and Camz Uyamot this past year. Looking forward to more of this in 2024.

As a Pakistani + Filipino person, I’ve never had the chance to hire Pakistani and Filipino contractors in the same year. Glad to report that 2023 was the first time I was able to do this!

Two other impactful things happened this year that also encouraged me in this direction:

I took Shawn Blanc’s excellent Focus Like a Boss course this year, and it certainly did not disappoint. Shawn’s teaching showed me how to drive my work from my personal values, not just business metrics. I realized I had unknowingly been keeping the two separate, and his course was exactly the push I needed to make them converge a bit more.

I also had the chance to join the NYC mastermind group of Rachel Rodgers’s and Nathan Barry’s Billion Dollar Creator podcast roadshow. One of the big takeaways from this event was to figure out how to direct attention to the highest ROI possible. I was unknowingly following the typical creator playbook: make content for designers, because I’m a designer. While there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s probably not the highest ROI I could get for the attention I can attract. This was the push I needed to start something my wife and I had talked about for a while: Great Job! (More on that below.)

This push converged with something else that had already been organically happening in my work: I was designing less and writing more. My time tracking software tells me that I spent the exact number of hours this year writing as I had designing—207 hours each, to be exact. That tracks (heh) with where I’ve seen the most compounding growth this year: on my newsletter. I sent a newsletter out religiously every week for over a year now; I don’t think I did anything else professionally with this amount of discipline. Fittingly, I’ve seen my newsletter subscribers grow from an initial list of about 2,000 that I never emailed to a current list size of over 37,000 subscribers—incredible results for just one year. To put it in perspective for me, it took me 16 years on Twitter to grow to an audience of over 42,000.

I’m slowly embracing the idea that I’m not just a designer, or even primarily a designer. I guess I’m a writer too.

Great Job!

Em and I had been noodling on the idea of sharing more about our parenting tips and tricks publicly, and we finally made it happen this year. We launched Great Job! in September to help parents & caregivers design their own handbook for raising amazing kids. We started by sharing articles and small snippets of content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to see what resonated where.

The big thing that’s getting the most attention is our podcast. In last year’s review, I mentioned that podcasting was something I might get back into this year, but I didn’t have a particular angle on it. Luckily, Em did. We’re getting a lot of great feedback on our episodes and this is likely something we’ll put even more effort into in 2024. (Subscribe on Spotify and YouTube.)

And that‘s just the tip of the iceberg. We have so many plans for Great Job! in 2024 that I can’t quite talk about yet, but this might be the thing I’m most excited to work on in 2024.

Speaking

As has been my trend for the last few years, I’ve been doing fewer conference talks and workshops:

I did a few private design system talks and training for Reason One, Amazon, The Obama Foundation, Celonis, and the Navy Federal Credit Union.
I did public talks about design systems at conferences like Config and DSW Day.
I taught design system workshops at conferences like RenderATL and the DesignOps Summit and for companies like Dribbble.

That said, instead of talking at people, I’ve enjoyed talking to and with them more:

I appeared on a few webinars for Zeplin/Omlet.
I talked to the SuperHi community about job hunting.
I did AMAs with the Useful School, UI Prep, and Design Better communities.
I appeared on the Fractional, PodRocket, Rosenfeld Review, Content Strategy Insights, and d.MBA podcasts.

I also have 10 more podcast appearances scheduled for January and February of 2024.

Videos & photos

This past year, I took 20,722 photos, which is 45% less than the 37,476 photos I took in 2022. This is notable because, for the previous few years, my photo quantity had been growing by 29% each year. I think there are 3 explanations for this:

I traveled less this year than I have in previous years, especially internationally. I usually bring my camera with me on trips, which is where I shoot the majority of my photos. Fewer trips, fewer photos.
More creative work this year. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my photography has ramped up in the last few years as I’ve been creating less at work. In the last few years that I ran SuperFriendly, I was mostly involved in running teams and learning how to be a CEO, so I wasn’t very involved in the work itself. After shutting down SuperFriendly last year, I’ve been doing a lot more creating this year, from big things like projects for clients to small things like Instagram and Twitter posts.
Lower quantity but higher quality. I got back into photography more seriously about 7 years ago, and I think I’m finally starting to see my work get better. Over the last few years, I can think of 3 separate occasions when I actively believed that I shot a perfect photo.

Here are a few of my favorite shots I took in 2023:

Reporting back on some photography-related predictions from last year:

I thought I might pick up a macro lens due to the increase in food and portrait photography. Though I look at the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8 about once a month, I realized that I’m very content with my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM.
I did get the 50mm f/1.8 for my second camera (Sony Alpha a6400) to get a different focal length for shooting a second angle of video. It’s come in very handy for the Great Job! podcast.
Because my Canon EOS R has a 1.8x crop when shooting 4k, I picked up a cheap Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 STM lens to give me a wider angle option. I thought I’d use it only for shooting video, but it’s become one of my favorite lenses to shoot photos with too, especially for food photography.

I also finally posted an update to my webcam setup after a few years. I’m glad I have an updated, canonical place to link people to when they ask about my setup.

This website

More evidence that I’m officially a writer: I posted 42 articles to this site in 2023, which is 75% more than I did in 2022 (only 24 articles).

I had a goal to make this site my second brain, but I quickly realized that’s both difficult and inappropriate. I’ve grown very content with using Obsidian as my private second brain over the last year, so I feel the need to scratch that itch a bit less.

I’ve also realized that this site is a longstanding asset of mine. I’ve had it for 18 years, and it gets its fair share of regular traffic. I like to think of it as a personal playground where I can experiment with things, but the truth is that it’s a place where I write to or I don’t. It’s been a weblog for the majority of its life. I’m learning that I have other channels for that, and this site can be more for both me and others who want to learn from me.

In 2024, I’m commiting to recognizing it as an important part of my business. With that lens, it’s clear that I do a poor job here of directing people to content that could be valuable to them. So, I’ll be:

Refining my branding and positioning to be clearer
Tightening up the information architecture and content strategy
Hiring a team to take over the production of the site

Watch this space.

Family & Home

As seems to be my trend for the last year or two, the older my kids get and the closer Em and I get, the less apt I am to share about what we do publicly. I like that we have things that we privately enjoy together. So, I’ll share a few small things here, but not much.

Sidda’s 12 and Charlie’s 10. It’s an exciting challenge to find the equilibrium between treating them like babies and treating them like adults. But when we all get it right together, it’s pretty fun. They’re both in a season of being really into theater and plays. Sidda’s been taking a dive class with a friend, and Charlie’s been doing gymnastics again. We’ll see how long they want to stick with those. We’ve talked about martial arts as a new potential activity for the next season of life. Music and drawing also seem to be on the rise for both of them.

For a little over a year, a big focus for Em and me has been tightening up our family finances. It started when we were preparing for me to shut down SuperFriendly not knowing where our income would be coming from. That meant reducing as many of our fixed expenses as we could, which we did well with for a while. The big wrench this year was realizing that the variable part of our mortgage interest rate kicked in. As first-time homeowners, we didn’t know what that meant, but we sure are finding out now. We have some major hopes and plans for 2024 to create more financial flexibility for our family.

One Hail Mary attempt to change our situation was fantasizing about selling all our stuff and moving somewhere cheap and warm where we could live on a beach. I had committed in my head that, if we needed less money, I could work less and homeschool my kids. After all, if Dan Mall Teaches strangers on the internet, why couldn’t Dan Mall Teach some algebra and language arts to his kiddos? To my surprise, my kids were into the idea too, which I initially thought would be a tough sell. So, to beta test the idea, we spent spring break in a small town in Mexico in a modest Airbnb apartment to get a taste of what that kind of life would be like. My family hated it. From small things like not being able to drink the tap water and the shower having a stale smell to the bigger realizations that making friends would be tough and there wasn’t a lot that was familiar here, we quickly got the sense that this plan wasn’t for us, at least not right now. (Glad we tested it instead of diving right in.) On the bright side, the extreme reality check allowed us to walk it back and find some smaller ways to dial in what we want our life together to look like right now.

That doesn’t mean that we’re penny-pinching everywhere. For Em’s birthday in 2023, we splurged with some friends on the Disney VIP Tour (the same ones the celebrities do). We had a personal tour guide who drove us from park to park, walked us through all the secret backlot shortcuts, and even had a personalized Starbucks order waiting for us when we needed a pick-me-up. We ended up doing 10 rides across 4 theme parks all in one day, which is way more rides than anyone should do in that timeframe. We all were thoroughly queasy and exhausted by the end of the day and had dinner in EPCOT’s France pavilion watching fireworks over the water.

Regarding my extended family, I’m grateful to have had the chance to work with both my dad and my brother this year. They both willingly jumped in without hesitation to help me with stuff I was struggling with this year, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to repay the favor through what I do well. I named, branded, and built the site for my dad’s new consulting company, 3¢ Accounting. And I helped put up a new landing page for my brother’s crew at The Valoram Group. I’d like to do more for my mom as she enters a new phase of her retirement, but we haven’t quite figured out the right balance that respects each others’ needs and boundaries. I’d like to try and figure this out in 2024.

Health, wellness, and self-care

In 2024, I’ll turn 40.

I’ve been trying to get better at celebrating over the last few years. I was trying to get a table at Noma for my 40th—especially as they’ll be closing for good in 2024—but the season booked up within seconds as soon as reservations opened. I’m still looking for something equivalently special.

I’ve also never stated my age publicly until now. I built my first website in 1998, when I was 14 years old, in 8th grade. I got my first design internship job in 2004 when I was 20. I started early in this industry. For a long time, I was some version of “the whiz kid” at work. While that comes with advantages, it also has its drawbacks. When every other director at a company had a company credit card, I felt I didn’t get one because “why would we give a 25-year-old a company credit card?” I think I’ve been denied deserved raises because my boss couldn’t quite get over paying that amount of money to a 27-year-old. In the same way that I think my race always affected my opportunities, I think my age played a similar role. I can’t hide my race, but I could hide my age, so I did for a long time. Going gray early probably helped me always seem a bit older than I was.

But now, I’m turning the corner where I’m probably going to be considered too old for some things. And I’m deciding to finally not care about that.

I’ve never really had a skincare routine before. I moisturize my hands and arms often because 1) I wash my hands a lot and 2) I’m brown and get ashy all the time. But I recently got a free sample of an eye serum, which reminded me that it’s probably time to at least wash my prone-to-be-oily face at night with a cleanser and not just water. 2024 can be the start of a skincare routine for me.

Basketball is officially a regular part of my life. I played 55 times in 2023. It’s not quite every week, but some weeks, I play twice depending on which group I play with. I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in my skills over the last year. I still have off nights, but generally, most teams I play on can count on me to score a significant share of my team’s points, facilitate a good chunk of the offense, and make some smart defensive plays every game. I saw a post earlier this year where Isaiah Thomas’ son said to him, “Be aggressive; have fun.” That’s been a mantra I repeat to myself every time I go play basketball. For most of my life, I’ve been smaller and weaker than most people I played against, so I tended to play small. Over the last few years, I’ve started to accept that, while I’m slower now, I’m also stronger and can take contact better, so I have to remind myself that being aggressive is a new tool in my arsenal that I didn’t have before.

I’m still not very flexible though and I don’t have much core strength anymore, something that I’d like to improve in 2024. I signed up for this Science of Stretching program (thank you, Instagram ad) and am committed to devoting at least 15 minutes a day to improving my flexibility. I’m also going to try a 15-minute/day BetterMe workout to see if it’s something I can stick with. Hopefully, this isn’t just a January thing like the rest of the world.

I still drink a lot of soda.

Last year, I threw up for the first time in 10 years. This year, I threw up once again, this time during a fall foliage photography trip to the Adirondacks. I hate throwing up. A ~~goal~~ wish for 2024 is to not throw up.

I think I’ll do Invisalign (or some equivalent aligner) in 2024.

I finally got the tattoo I wanted to celebrate my decade of running SuperFriendly. I waited a year to get one from Mike Ski at True Hand Society, and I’m so glad I did. I only had a concept in mind but nothing specific, so I was nervous to see what Mike could think up. As soon as I saw his initial drawing, I breathed a big sigh of relief. I’ll probably add to this over the next year to eventually cover my entire forearm, and this is a great base.

On the mental health front, I continued to work with a therapist and coach at the beginning of the year. In February, she gave me an assignment to do and said I should work on it in earnest and we should meet again after I was finished and had a chance to breathe. I assumed it would take a few weeks or a month or two at most. It’s been almost a year. I’m very ready to start working with her again. Hopefully, she’s not too busy to take me on as a client again 🤞🏽

Books

In 2023, I read or attempted to read:

~~The Perfect Day Formula, by Craig Ballantyne~~ (abandoned)
~~The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy~~ (abandoned)
The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss ★★★★☆
~~One Million Followers, by Brendan Kane~~ (abandoned)
The Forever Transaction, by Robbie Kellman Baxter ★★★☆☆
Be Our Guest, by Walt Disney Company ★★★☆☆
~~Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli~~ (abandoned)
Go Back to Where You Came From, by Wajahat Ali ★★★★☆
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King ★★★★★
Superman: Up in the Sky, by Tom King ★★★☆☆
~~The World’s Worst Assistant, by Sona Movsesian~~ (abandoned)
~~True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman~~ (abandoned)
~~How to Speak Money, by John Lanchester~~ (abandoned)
Hangry: A Startup Journey, by Mike Evans ★★★★☆
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, by Sarah Frier ★★★☆☆
Continuous Discovery Habits, by Teresa Torres ★★★☆☆
The One World Schoolhouse, by Salman Khan ★★★☆☆
The Ultimate Sales Letter, by Dan S. Kennedy ★★☆☆☆
The Pocket Guide to High Ticket Selling, by Dan Henry ★★★★☆
~~Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford~~ (abandoned)
Buy Back Your Time, by Dan Martell ★★★★★
Oversubscribed, by Daniel Priestley ★★★★★
We Should All Be Millionaires, by Rachel Rodgers ★★★★★
Your World Class Assistant, by Michal Hyatt ★★★☆☆
24 Assets, by Daniel Priestley ★★★★★
This is Personal, by Brennan Dunn (currently reading)
$100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi (currently reading)

Travel

Reversing the trend from the last few years since COVID-19 began, travel this year was about half professional and half personal.

Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Los Angeles, CA
Brooklyn, NY
Puerto Morelos, Mexico
Atlanta, GA (twice)
San Francisco, CA
The Adirondacks, NY
Orlando, FL

The sole pairs

I only bought two pairs of sneakers this past year:

Air Jordan 1 Zoom CMFT 2 x Teyana Taylor
Air Jordan 1 Mid “Bred Toe”

I planned to buy the Bred Toes last year, and the Teyana Taylor’s were an impulse buy.

The only other pair I’d like is the Air Jordan 1 Retro High Utility 'Stash.' Otherwise, I’m pretty content with the collection I have, and will probably even get rid of some this year.

I’ve been playing basketball all year in the Nike KD Trey 5 X. I’ve always played in high tops so this is the first year I’ve played in mids, and I like them. I was a little worried about it after a bad ankle sprain a few years ago, but they’ve been great so far, and I like how lightweight they are. They’re getting a bit worn out now, so I’ll probably try a different pair of mids soon.

Miscellany

My beard has noticeably more gray in it than last year.
I’m honored to have an article published on the Figma blog: Dan Mall’s 10 principles for a worthy design career.
I asked for 2 things for Christmas this year: new undershirts and socks. I’m particularly happy with my new sock strategy: I threw out all of my old socks and got 12 pairs each of CSG No-Show socks and Nike Training Crew socks. No more matching woes; just grab 2 and go. The last piece is to pick up 12 pairs of good dress socks. I’m deciding between Uniqlo Colorful Socks and Bombas Marl Calf Socks.
I ate at some great new restaurants this year: Cry Baby Pasta, Fork, Zapote, Din Tai Fung, The Chicken or the Egg, Tupelo Honey, Oxalis, Peninsula, Pelicanos, Playa Jaguar, Atera, Southern Belle, Thirsty Dice, Carlucci’s Waterfront, Burma Love, yakiniQ, Sorrel, Laser Wolf, Estrella, The Pickled Pig, Noon Mark Diner.

2024

I was never really one to pick a word as my theme of the year, but seeing how well it worked for my wife, I decided to try it for 2024. The word I’m picking is: stretching + strengthening. Ok, I know that’s two words, but I feel like they go together as one idea.

Wishing you a wonderful start to 2024!

Call it Good

Dan Mall — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

When I was a Senior Designer 14 years ago, I wanted nothing more than to become an Art Director. So, I tried to soak up everything I could from every Art Director I worked with. I picked up a tip from one Art Director that I still use to this day.

I was watching him present a design concept to a client. He said, “And over here is an area that summarizes what a user will find on this page…”

There was nothing out of the ordinary about that statement. He was doing what we all do: scrolling through the web page, talking about what there.

But then he added this tidbit:

“…which is looking really good.”

I perked up and my eyes darted across the room to him and then to the client and then to everyone else. Did he just… compliment his own work? Surely, this arrogance is something the client would pounce on. What if they didn’t think it looked really good? Was there going to be a conflict?

To my surprise, they nodded, almost in realization. Like he was giving them permission to think it was good. Like he was teaching them that it was good.

He did this several times throughout the conversation, stopping to point out what things were working well. Each time, the client seemed more awakened at how fitting this design was to their needs… largely because he said so.

I learned a valuable lesson that day:

We often fail to call our own work good.

If we don’t, how can we expect others to do so?

As uncomfortable as it was to start, I began to call my own work good more often. In presentations, yes, but also just to myself sometimes in the process of doing the work. This wasn’t some brainwashing technique that allowed me to convince myself that bad work was actually good. It was a forcing function: if I was comfortable honestly calling a piece of design good in front a client, it was a signal to me that it wasn’t ready yet.

This past year has been a different kind of year for me professionally. It’s the first full year that I wasn’t an employee of a company—someone else’s or my own—since 2006. I’ve done a mix of contract work, consulting, coaching, creating courses and content, and a considerable cacophony of other campaign. Still though, within the variance, there’s a lot that I can call good.

The first chapter of the Bible’s book of Genesis tells the story of how God created the world. There’s an interesting rhythm to the chapter: God makes a thing—light, sky, land, animals, etc—and then He “saw that it was good.” After He makes everything, he “saw that it was very good!”

Whether you believe the universe was created by some old dude in the sky or think it’s a book of fairy tales and mythology, I still think there’s a lot to learn from this story. Over this past year, I can look back at some things I’ve made and call it good. As I look back on the entire year, despite some trials and hardships, I can see that it was very good. I hope you can do the same for your year too.

So what’s next? Well, according to the story, God created some things that were good, saw that the aggregate was very good, and then He rested.

I think that’s a pretty good model to follow.

I hope you had things this year that were good, and very good. I hope, as the year winds down, that you get some rest.

This will be my last newsletter for the year, as I get some rest too.

Thanks for reading, and see you in 2024.

Tell Me Everything

Dan Mall — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

He rested his elbows on the table, plopped his chin in his hands, and said with a mischievous grin, “Tell me everything.”

My wife and I were visiting London to see the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play when it debuted. It’s a 2-show series, usually playing back-to-back nights, but we chose the option for a morning and afternoon show with a several hour mid-day intermission so we could see it all in one day. After a little Yelp browsing and Google searching, we resorted to walking around the general area to find lunch.

We stumbled upon a restaurant with a beautiful outdoor patio bar with a few people lounging. We looked at the menu and it turned out to be Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon. They magically had a table for 2 open that moment. (Accio delicious lunch!)

After we were seated, our server came over, introduced himself, rested his elbows on the plopped his chin in his hands, and said with a mischievous grin, “Tell me everything.”

Then, he silently waited.

Shocked, I eventually blurted out, “Uh, I like steak.”

He nodded with a smile but said nothing.

After a few moments, Em and I started to riff on some of the food we like to eat. We mentioned what we saw on the menu outside that sounded good. We started to tell him about the show we were in town to see, that our kids were with a babysitter, that we had the day to ourselves. All throughout, he nodded in what seemed like a gesture of understanding, silently encouraging us to continue.

He only asked one more question: “What have you eaten recently that you’ve loved?” Which prompted a few more minutes of storytelling from us.

Finally, when it seemed like we were storied out, he said, “Great. How bout I bring out a few small things I think you’ll enjoy? You tell me what you want more of and less of, and we’ll go from there?”

We delightedly affirmed, and off he vanished to the kitchen.

We had an amazing meal that day.

Honestly, I can’t remember what we ate. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the conversation with server.

I use this technique now all the time. I use it to get to know new clients I consult with. I use it when I want to know how my kids’ day went. I use it when I want to get to know my seat mate on a long plane ride.

It’s such a great way to get to know someone in the way that they want to show up to you.

Too many times, I think I have to prepare a long list of specific questions when I'm doing a stakeholder interview or a usability test or customer discovery. And there’s nothing wrong with preparation. But sometimes all you need is a good opening line.

As the year winds down, I’ve been thinking about what I’ll be doing differently next year. One thing I know I’ll be keeping around is this newsletter. It’s one of the few things I’ve done consistently every week for over a year now. I’ve really enjoyed being able to share my thoughts with your, and even more so hearing back all the replies and getting to know you better. The more I know about you, the more I can write about stuff we have in common.

So, I’d love for you to reply to this or message me and let me know more about you.

Tell me everything.

The Sweet Spot for Design System Work

Dan Mall — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 20:23:00 +0000

There’s a narrow window for effective design system work. It sits squarely in the center of a spectrum that’s too easy to slide towards one end or the other.

The ends of the spectrum

On one end is where a lot of design system efforts often begin. Many design systems start when a designer and/or engineer makes a handful of components that they don’t want to keep making from scratch over and over again. Those handful of components serve them well to start, so they decide to make more. Pretty soon, they have a multitude of components at their disposal.

The problem is that they often don’t bother to 1) test these components with anyone that would need to use them or 2) see if anyone needs them with any type of urgency. So, their design systems end up being a lot of components that could be used someday by someone but actually isn’t used today by anyone. This is what I refer to as a “design system ghost town,” a fully built city with no inhabitants.

I have a name for the kinds of teams who create design system ghost towns. I call them Component Factories.

On the other side of the spectrum are teams who, in contrast, see the value of working directly with the people who would use their components. Very often, these are teams who have experienced the folly of being a Component Factory, so they try to correct for that. Unfortunately, they often overcorrect. They ask product teams what they need, receive requirements, and get to work designing and building components on behalf of the team they're partnering with.

It’s easy to justify this work too, because it feels good. When you’re a Component Factory, no one seems to want what you have and are freely offering. Now, product teams are working directly with you, you’re giving them what they need, and they’re using it. This is a design system as a service, right? You provide components, and they use them! You’ve made it! Success!

Unfortunately, this is closer to being Staff Augmentation to product teams than a design system team. It’s not much more than being an extra set of hands. And, if that was the only problem, that wouldn’t be so bad. But there are a few major issues that come with this kind of role:

As Staff Augmentation, there’s not a great way to negotiate discrepancies within the same component between multiple teams. For example, if Product Team A needs a Card component to support 2 images and Product Team B needs a Card component to support 3 buttons, an easy enough solution would be to build a Card component that supports 2 images and 3 buttons. But Product Team A might not get why their Card has 3 buttons they don’t need, and Product Team B might not get why their Card has 2 images they don't need. The easiest solution is to build 2 different versions of the Card component, 1 for each team, which kinda defeats the purpose of design system work.
The biggest issue that Staff Augmentation teams run into is that their capacity to work with product teams is lower than the number of product team needs. For example, the design system team might have the capacity to work with 5 teams at a time, but there may be 50 teams that want and/or need their help. So, at any given time, there will always be 45 teams who “lose faith” in the design system team.

What’s a better way? What’s the sweet spot between Component Factory and Staff Augmentation?

Working relentlessly and methodically at appropriate scale.

Here’s how to get that done.

Effective design system work

As early as you can, establish an expectation with all product teams that the design system team’s job is to only work on the highest coverage components at scale. That means that you will only prioritize requests that 3 or more teams have in common. (Why 3? Because three times is a pattern.) This way, one chunk of effort from the design system team has at least three points of impact. (As opposed to Staff Augmentation teams, where one chunk of effort has only one point of impact: the direct product team you’re working with.)

Don’t Component Factories solve this problem? After all, if they build a fitting enough Card component, that one chunk of effort can have dozens or even hundreds or even thousands of points of impact!

First of all, a design system doesn’t have to cover every interface your organization creates… only the most common ones.

Secondly, this is a part of systems work that I rarely hear talked about: some components have too broad of a reach to tackle wisely, especially in the early days of that design system.

Blasphemy! Isn’t the point of a design system to have the widest coverage possible? Yes, but it has to be proportional to the scale the team is ready to handle. The team’s experience, capacity, and discipline are all important factors in deciding which components are appropriate to attempt.

(This is exactly why I’m bullish on avoiding “foundational” or “atomic” components as an early step in a design system’s life. Tackling the Button component or trying to establish design tokens first is like starting a video game by playing the final boss. You’re just not ready.)

Think about the moment a design system team builds their first component… let’s say it’s a generic Card component. Until that moment, 0 teams have used anything the design system team has made, because they haven’t made anything yet. They make a great, usable Card component, one than has immediate applicability in hundreds of places. Suddenly, in an instant, they’ve gone from 0 customers to hundreds of customers, each with their own individually urgent needs.

Very few good products have scaled effectively this way, by opening the floodgates to everyone right at the outset.

Facebook started as a network for Harvard students, then expanded to other Ivy League universities, then opened up to all U.S. and Canadian colleges and universities, and then eventually to the broader public.

Tech startups like The Browser Company with their Arc browser, Superhuman, Loom, and more employed a wait list system to help throttle their scaling challenges.

So why do we expect that design system teams go directly from no customers to immediately serving an entire enterprise organization?

The only thing that opening the floodgates on day 1 accomplishes is drowning the design system team.

A strict criteria for choosing components and teams

What’s a better way? Start by finding something that works at the smallest scale possible. For design systems, that means it works in 3 places… and ideally no more, at least not right now. (The smallest scale for design system work isn’t 1 place; that would be Staff Augmentation work again.)

One of the biggest challenges with finding a component that works in 3 places but not more is that there likely aren’t very many, at least not innately. The nature of enterprise interface design is such that components are often either a one-off or they’re widespread; there’s not much middle ground.

So you create the middle ground. Consciously restrain the reach of a component through strict criteria. Instead of saying, “We’re going to make a Card component for everyone,” decide “we’re going to make a Card component for these three teams.” This is the idea of piloting a component with a few testers before you release it to everyone.

How do you pick the initial three feature teams to pilot with? Start naming components that have as much of this criteria as possible, in this order:

A team that needs this component is incredibly excited to work with us right now.
A team that needs this component has deadlines/a roadmap that can adopt a somewhat slow back-and-forth collaboration process with us.
This component is needed around 6-8 weeks from today… not before, not after.
This component would excite a high percentage (start at 50%) of other feature teams
This component would save at least 1 day of work for a high percentage (start at 50%) of other feature teams
This component has technical requirements that can be met in less than 6-8 weeks
This component could be used immediately by 3 additional teams as soon as we finish refining it with the first set of 3 teams

For most teams I’ve worked with, it’s initially difficult to even name 1 feature team that fits all of this criteria! (That’s why many design system teams resort to being Component Factories or Staff Augmentation; it’s easier.) The difficulty usually lies in timing: no feature team needs a component like this soon—they’ll probably need it in 6–12 months though—or they already needed it and it’s too late.

This is incredibly irritating, but it’s a blessing in disguise! This is kind of true constraint that allows you to not have to immediately serve an entire organization when you’re not ready to.

Push through! Every team I’ve worked with has eventually been able to generate a list of components and features teams; it just takes a few weeks of workshopping and having conversations with various product managers, designers, and engineers around the org.

I think a design system team should have a list that meets this criteria at any given time. Design system teams that don’t have this list easily find themselves sliding toward either end of the spectrum.

Here's a list of scenarios that are close but aren’t actually forms of effective design system work:

Team A needs Card, Team B needs Notification, and Team C needs Stepper. (That’s Staff Augmentation.)
Team A needs Card in Q1, Team B needs Card in Q2, and Team C needs Card in Q3. (This is a form of Staff Augmentation, even though it doesn’t look like it. This version will have you constantly modifying the component to suit individual needs, often undoing or reversing changes you made prior.)
Teams A, B, and C need Card in 2025. (A form of Component Factory work: you’re making something that might get used someday. It doesn’t sound like it, but the farther away a component need is, the higher the likelihood that the need will change before you get around to it.)
Teams A–Z need Card in 6–8 weeks. (This is a good potential for effective design system work, but it’s too many teams to serve well simultaneously unless you’re a very mature team and/or have many people available to meet this scale.)

Putting it all together

In short, what should a design system team constantly be searching for?

A manageable amount of teams for us to work with simultaneously need the same component within the same timeframe.

Anything else isn’t really work worth doing for a design system team.

It’s a simple sentence that’s contingent upon the right amounts of skill, will, and luck… way easier said that done. This is why design system work is often described as the stars aligning.

Does Web Design Matter?

Dan Mall — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This past week, I finished making a small website for a family member’s business. I had an idea I liked for a subtle header animation. As I sat down to do it, I couldn’t justify how that animation would make the site any better at its job—attracting potential clients—than the static, non-animated version would.

It got me thinking: could I justify an animation for any website’s header? Can anyone justify an animation for a website’s header? A quick glance at the latest Awwwards Site of the Day nominees shows that lots of modern sites have animations in the header. But it is worth the effort to make?

This year marks a quarter-century that I’ve been a designer, specifically a web designer. The biggest influence on me as I was deciding to become a designer was seeing well-crafted websites for and from companies like Nike, 2Advanced, CSS Zen Garden, Neostream, Vodafone, and more. (IYKYK.) This sites contained beautiful design, motion, sound, story… all of the sensory details that made watching a movie so satisfying, except that I could interact with it too. I could control the action. Like movies, I expected that making these kinds of websites required large teams, big budgets, and months or years of work to accomplish.

Over years, I worked on my craft to be able to work on projects like this. I tried to put myself in positions—and got lucky in many instances—to work on and with the kinds of brands that wanted this work.

I worked on GE’s healthymagination campaign for 16 months from October 2009 to March 2011, much of which included working on the website. I probably spent 6 months working on just the homepage between various initial explorations and multiple versions and iterations over time.

I’ve worked on my own personal website for 18 years. I launched it as a blog built on Textpattern in 2005. It’s been a portfolio for me at times but has maintained being a place where I can write about anything I want. I’ve changed URLs from danielmall.com to danmall.me to danmall.com. The back-end of the site has moved from Textpattern to Movable Type to being hand-coded and is currently built with Eleventy.

I worked on the Reading is Fundamental website for 1 year and 7 months. I worked on StarWars.com for 6 months. I worked on the TechCrunch website for 5 months.

In my most recent years, I’ve been spending much less time making websites. I don’t just mean that I’ve been managing the teams making the websites and I’m doing less of the craft work myself. That’s happening too, but generally, I’ve seen the projects themselves get smaller.

It used to take me weeks to come up with a solid concept for a site. Now, I can sometimes do it in a few days or even a few hours. Initially, I thought that was because I’m getting better at my craft. But lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s because web design doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

I’ve long been of the school of thought that design is a job. More and more, I’m wondering whether a short 3D-animated interactive film in the hero of a site is any more effective than a static image with a headline and button next to it.

I have a few hypotheses as to why that is.

The obvious and explanation is that I’m jaded. Which could be true. A 25-year career definitely puts me into “get off my lawn” territory.

But I don't think that’s fully it. I've been doing a lot of reflection lately, and one I'm thing very proud of is that I'm still working hard and trying to do a good job. I'm not phoning it in. I have done that before. I know what that feels like for me, and this isn’t that.

Another obvious explanation is that I’ve spent the last few years focused on design systems—buy my new book! 👀—specifically with teams who are setting them up in the first place. For those kinds of teams, a lot of the work lies in the gory details of the most common interface elements. The interesting part of the work is the system aspect, not necessarily its visceral nature. One-off interactive pieces feel like problems that are years away. So it stands to reason that spending years on this kind of work could have shifted my perspective on what outputs are important.

But it’s actually had the opposite effect for me. From doing loads of system work, I crave working on other things where I get to stretch my muscles of animation, digital matte painting, unique signature pieces, creative direction, art direction, and the like. They’re welcome palate cleansers for me.

So I have another explanation. It’s that web design is different now than when I started.

(And, sure, yes Dan, we use cars now too instead of horses.)

Digital design has always been ephemeral. As a neophile, that’s what drew (and still draws) me to it. But something feels different about spending 6 weeks on an animation that someone will scroll past in half a second.

Healthymagination was a 6-year, $6 billion initiative. I spent 16 months of my life on it. Now it’s a tag on the GE website with about 25 articles on it. The Reading Is Fundamental, Star Wars, and TechCrunch websites I worked on are long gone, some replaced 2 or 3 times over since.

When I first started, I thought I’d be a Michelin-starred chef in web design. Every project would be a painstakingly crafted meal of delectables for which patrons would always be happy to pay premium.

I’ve learned that I am indeed a chef, but there’s a range of meals I’d be cooking. A select handful have been tasting menus of the highest-level ingredients. I’m lucky to have been able to participate in those, and I hope a few more come my way in the next few decades of my career. A few meals have also been fast food: done, delivered, and gone before you could blink. Most meals, though, have been simple and tasty home-cooked dinners. Nothing to write a newspaper review about, but most of my guests were full and happy.

We live in a world where a Kardashian or a YouTuber can launch a product or even an industry with a tweet or an Instagram post, a role previously dominated by The Website™. As other forms of media rise in popularity, what I’ve observed is websites being relegated to one of two purposes:

The website is the business, or a major part of it. Think e-commerce behemoths like Amazon and eBay, publishers like Dotdash Meredith and Buzzfeed, or social media companies like Facebook or Twitter.
The website as a glorified business card. Some people have square business cards, some spring for the gold foil and extra-thick card-stock, but they all do the same job in answering these two questions: are you legitimate and how can I contact you?

Is there a market for Michelin-starred web designers? I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s shrinking.

So why animate that header or spend time building a papier-mâché miniature set to photograph for the footer that few will see?

The same thing that drives a Michelin-starred chef to spend 12 hours agonizing over a difficult preparation for a small cube of food that will be devoured in a 2-second bite.

The same reason that got me started in this field in the first place.

For fun, and for the art.

Improve Your Webcam Quality

Dan Mall — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 18:15:00 +0000

Like many others, I spent some time and money during the early days of COVID-19 quarantine redoing my desk setup, specifically using a DSLR to improve my webcam quality. I wrote an article about that almost 4 years ago, but I’ve since upgraded my equipment and setup to a point that it feels pretty dialed in now. Almost every time I get on a Zoom call with someone new, they ask me about my setup, so I figured it was due time to write an updated post to help others get set up in the same way.

Here’s the full view of my desk setup:

For those who just want the gear, here’s the list (affiliate links included):

Video, audio, and desk gear

Camera setup ($1,002.77)

Camera: Sony Alpha a6400 ($748)
Lens: Neewer 35mm f/1.1 ($72.79)
Stands & Mounts:
- WALI Monitor Arm Mount ($27.99)
- NICERYIG Quick Release Screw Tripod Adapter ($8.99)
- Pergear DSLR Camera Tripod Ball Head ($25.51)
Elgato Cam Link 4K ($99.99)
F1TP Power Supply and Dummy Battery ($19.50)

Lighting setup ($563.21)

Elgato Key Lights (2) ($179.99 each)
BenQ ScreenBar Halo ($161.10)
LED Corner Floor Lamp ($42.13)

Audio setup ($469.99)

Desk & Accessories ($1,597.99)

Ugmonk Gather collection ($899)
Ugmonk Analog annual kit ($299)
Belkin MagSafe 3-in-1 Charging Stand ($119.99)
IKEA Trotten sit/stand desk underframe ($280)
Custom built desk table top

Computer, monitor & peripherals ($4,896.90)

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch ($2,499)
LG 27" 5K UHD UltraFine™ IPS Monitor ($1,299.99)
Apple Magic Trackpad ($149)
Apple Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad ($129)
Wacom Intuos Pro - Large ($499.95)
CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt 4 Dock ($319.96)

Here’s a comparison of how my video looks between my Macbook Pro webcam, my LG Ultrafine webcam, and my DSLR webcam.

From the MacBook Pro webcam:

From the LG UltraFine webcam:

From the DSLR webcam:

Some details around how and why I have this particular setup.

Balancing webcam easy setup + beautiful image quality

Overall, most of people want an the out-of-the box high-quality webcam. That’s typically a specialty product like the Lumina or Opal.

I tried early versions of both of these, and neither was great for me. The Opal got very hot and both were only slightly higher quality than my MacBook’s or monitor’s built-in webcam. Still though, if you want plug-and-play, these are both decent choices.

If you’re willing to do a little more work, you can set up a DSLR as your webcam, which is what I did. The biggest downsides to this approach:

It can be hundreds of dollars more expensive.
If you don’t know much about how cameras work, the combination of complicated camera menus, lens choices, and settings for each can be very intimidating.

The biggest reasons I felt comfortable going down this route is because 1) I know enough about cameras and lenses from shooting photos regularly and 2) I was willing to do research/spend some money to figure it out.

Camera choice

The general guideline for cameras is that you want to spend as little as you can on the body and as much as you can on the lens. The quality of the image comes mostly from a good lens, not a good camera. So, I wanted to find the cheapest full-frame camera I could find that shot 4k video. At the time, that was the Sony Alpha a6400. Currently, you can get it new for $748 or used for $649. Most times, you can even find a used one on eBay for less than that, which is what I did.

Since then, I’ve heard that the Canon EOS M50 is a great choice and is even cheaper than the Sony Alpha a6400 (retails for around $530 and you can find it used for about $374). I can’t speak for the quality since I haven’t used it myself, but if I was starting over again with my setup, I’d probably investigate this option, especially because my regular shooting gear is all Canon.

You’ll need a few things to go with this camera to make the setup work, and work well.

First, you’ll need a way to get the picture signal out of your camera and into your computer. Typically, that’s an HDMI signal, and not all computers accept HDMI. So, for the Sony alpha a6400, you’ll need a micro HDMI to HDMI cable plugged into something like the Elgato Cam Link 4K, which allows all of that to get to your computer via good old USB.

Next, I suggest getting a dummy battery. This tricks your camera into thinking there’s always a battery in it. Otherwise, you’ll be going through camera batteries every 30 minutes, and they also get super hot.

Regarding camera and desk mounting, I do everything that Caleb Pike suggests in his desk studio setup video:

Lens choice

Lens choice is the first important ingredient in getting great webcam image quality. For those that don’t know much about the technical details of cameras, getting that soft, buttery, out-of-focus background is what makes your setup look pro. To get that, you need a lens with a very wide aperture (also known as an “f-stop”). The lower the number, the better (and usually more expensive). For example, you can get a great f/1.2 lens (probably the widest aperture you’ll find), and you'll probably pay $2k or $3k for it. Don’t do that (unless you’re planning to shoot photos or video with it outside of it being your webcam). If you only want it to be your webcam, that kind of lens is overkill. Luckily, Amazon has their own brand of lenses called Neewer. They’re not good enough to shoot photos or videos with, but they’re perfect for a webcam setup. Buy this lens: Neewer 35mm f/1.1 for $72. This is what I’m using (an older version).

There are a few gotchas with this lens, but nothing unconquerable. It’s a manual focus lens only; not autofocus available. In my opinion, that’s a feature; I’ve tried other lenses and set the camera to autofocus. It looks great 80% of the time when it’s focused on me, but the other 20% of the time, it’ll try to focus on something in the background, especially if I’m moving. So, I prefer keeping the camera in manual focus mode, which is the only mode this particular lens allows for.

Here’s how I make sure I get the best image, including keeping me in focus.

Setting the aperture

First, I set the camera mode dial to “A,” which stands for “Aperture priority.” That means I set the aperture and the camera figures out all the other settings. The nice thing about this Neewer lens is that the apertures (or f-stops) are all on the lens. I turn the dial on the lens that’s closest to the camera to the widest aperture, which is f/1.1. That’ll get me the most out-of-focus background. (If you turn the dial the other way to f/22, you’ll see that the entire scene is in focus, which is the opposite of what we want).

Setting the focus using focus peaking

The next piece is making sure I’m properly in focus. To do that, I use the focus peaking option to help, a feature that shows anything in focus as bright red on the live view screen. Turn the focus ring on the lens until your eyes in particular are highlighted red to show that they’re in focus.

Here’s a YouTube video that shows how to enable focus peaking in the Sony Alpha a6400 menu.

Lighting, room location & position

While camera and lens choices are important, they won’t mean much if you’re not lit well and/or in a good spot in your room.

The first rookie move most people make—myself included—is that they sit with a window behind them. This is the worst spot to be in! All the light is behind you and you’ll always be backlit, making you a silhouette in shadow. Instead, sit facing a window if you can so that all the natural light points at the most important part: your face!

If you can’t do that (and even if you can), you’ll also want to invest in some artificial lighting to make sure you’re always well lit when natural light is unavailable, like at night or on cloudy/stormy days.

I love the Elgato Key Lights. They’re lightweight, easy to set up, and I can control both the temperature and brightness through a menu bar app on my computer as well as an app on my phone. I’ve heard others really like the Lumecube Desk Lights, but I haven’t tried them myself.

The next tip is a hidden gem I picked up while watching a video of Peter McKinnon’s studio setup a few years ago. His studio is gorgeous, and he dropped this little nugget in the video:

Use the depth of the room diagonally… don’t use the shortest length of the room but the longest length of the room.

Genius! Set up so that the longest view of the room is directly behind you when the camera is pointing at you. That has two benefits:

It gives the viewer more interesting things to look at in the distance, even when it’s out of focus. There’s more visual interest there, and it keeps your viewer more focused on your screen.
To get that soft depth of field, things behind you need to be varying distances away from you. In my frame, I have a sofa 6 feet behind me, a Christmas tree 8 feet away, stairs 15 feet away, and my kitchen way back in the distance. My head and torso is usually covering some of that, but when I move around, the viewer gets a glimpse of that distance, which remains intriguing. Here’s the view when I’m wearing a hat so you can see a little more of what’s back there:

For more office and studio setup tips specifically for camera framing, I love the stuff that Kevin Shen shares.

I hope that helps you if you want to improve your webcam quality!

A Case Study: Building an Accounting Brand & Website

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 10:00:00 +0000

My dad (Tanveer Mall) spent 40 years as an in-house CFO. After he helped his company get acquired last year, he decided to start his own accounting consultancy. He asked me to help him put up a new website, and of course I said yes. Here’s the story of that process.

I had grand ambitions for this project. I knew I could probably put up a website in a day, but that seemed boring. Instead, maybe I could work with a junior or mid-level designer who’s never had the chance to work with a creative director before. I wanted to record or livestream it like a reality show. I wanted a sponsor to help subsidize it.

As with most things I work on, I grossly underestimated the time it’d take me to do. I thought it’d take a week. It took 3 months (part-time) from start to finish.

I got a lot of interest from junior and mid-level designers who wanted to work with me on this. (Many senior designers too.)

One of the applicants—Nadine Sarraj—was a great fit, so we sorted out details and got started!

Tan already had a name picked out for his new accounting consultancy: Numbers Kruncher.

I didn’t like it, and I really didn’t like it for him.

It’s a bit of a clumsy phrase that can be easily misspelled or misspoken. I’ve always heard the phrase as “number crunchers,” but he had the opposite word pluralized. And replacing the “c” with a “k” was just another variable to add to the confusion.

Also, it’s a very playful name, and Tan isn’t playful. He’s a lot of things: wise, creative, mindful, experienced… playful isn’t at the top of that list. I also fit that its connotation was a bit derogatory, in the same vein as “bean counter.” I think that’s part of what Tan liked about the name: as a humble person, I think he appreciated that it implies he’s “just here to help,” to do the lowly tasks of counting the beans and crunching the numbers. Still though, as his son who has seen for years how valuable his approach to accounting and money in general has been genuinely transformative to his colleagues, friends, and family members, I thought the name severely undersold what Tan brings to the table.

Said differently, the name didn’t match my perception of Tan’s brand. So, even though all he wanted was a website, I decided we needed to start with branding. Bonus: branding work wasn’t something Nadine had done much of, so that was something new for her to learn. We met every day for about an hour, and I talked her through why branding was important and gave her assignments to practice what she was learning. We started with 2 quotes that I include in the beginning of almost every conversation I have with a client:

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.

Marty Neumeier

A brand is the promise of an experience.

Ed Tettemer

That’s how I contextualize the work, and it’s how I recommend clients give feedback too. Here’s a slide I use in every presentation that gives clients guidance about what feedback I’m looking for:

We started with the obvious, expected thing: a logo for “Numbers Kruncher.”

I was really happy with this concept, as I thought it did justice to the idea of this name. I try to not show a client anything I wouldn’t be content with them choosing. Still though, I didn’t think it fit Tan, so I poured on some extra sauce to dissuade him from this idea.

As an evolution away from that name to something more palatable, I tried to make the case for at least losing the “K.” I included a slide with this quote:

Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say “Alka Seltzer” you get a laugh. Words with “k” in them are funny. Kevin Stengel: that’s a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny. Cupcake is funny. Tomato is not funny. Cookie is funny. Kentucky is funny. Maryland is not funny. Then, there’s chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.

Willie Clark, retired Vaudeville comedian

I showed the number of search results in Google for different variations of the spelling.

Then I showed a much simpler mark, made from the same shape that evoked a retro calculator vibe.

Now that the door to considering other name variations was cracked open, I dialed it up by throwing a completely new name into the mix.

One special thing about Tan is that he gives great advice. Even though he’s the youngest of 7 siblings, all of them, including their kids and grandkids, often go to Tan when they need advice. There’s a common idiom for sharing small bits of wisdom: giving someone your two cents. Given the monetary orientation, I proposed changing the name to “2¢ Accounting.”

As a way to carry the concept forward, I mocked up a series of business cards that would each have a different piece of financial advice as different flavors of Tan’s 2¢.

With 3 concepts to choose from, Tan took a day to sleep on, think about, and review the options. We had the call the next day to hear his thoughts.

He preferred 2¢ Accounting! Huzzah! I told him that the next steps were to start tightening this up and move into creating a website that extended what we started for this brand.

What I didn’t say was that I wasn’t content here yet. As a contrast to the Numbers Kruncher version where I didn’t think the concept worked but I thought the execution did, I really though the 2¢ Accounting concept was spot on but thought there was still something to be desired in the execution. I’m not crazy about giving a client a logo that just about seems typed out in a nice font, as I like to make it a bit more defensible that that. If it’s hard for a non-designer to replicate, that’s at least a good start.

There were also a few logistical hurdles to conquer as well. Regarding registering domain names and and email addresses, there were options available, but nothing I could put my full recommendation behind. My preference would have been 2CentsAccounting.com, but it wasn’t available at the time. The more hyphens and non-.com top level domains and mix of numbers and characters there are, the more difficult I think it’ll be to remember and/or get right.

As I was looking for other domain ideas, I thought to myself, “What’s better than 2CentsAcccounting.com?” I laughed out loud as a funny answer popped into my head. Three Cents Accounting! I looked up the domain for fun.

Available.

Hmm.

I just convinced Tan to consider a new name. Was it a good idea to do that again?

Absolutely! One lesson that has served me well for years is to never hold back a good idea. I always try to pitch it.

I started sketching around this idea and quickly realized that I could use the “nc” shapes to create a “3” and a “¢”. We got on a quick call with Tan to review this. I pitched it exactly how it came to me. “What’s better than getting your two cents? Getting your three cents!” He agreed. Onward!

Nadine was active in all of the branding conversations, but the web part was much more her comfort zone. While I led the branding efforts, Nadine was working on setting up the site structure and information architecture. Once we landed on a decent hierarchy, she continued the sketching work she was doing in Figma over into Webflow.

From the beginning of the project, one thing I felt strongly about was that there should be a big photo of Tan on the site, probably at the very top of the page. One thing that’s unmistakable and distinct about him that everyone realizes when they meet him is just how dang nice he is. He’s warm, disarming, and kind… everything you want in trusting someone to take care of your business’ finances. I thought a good photo of him would communicate that in an instant. While we were still working on the branding and the site, I commissioned my friend Josh Luciano to take new portraits of Tan that we could use for the site. Josh never disappoints! He’s my go-to for anything photo-related.

I finalized the logo, assets, and color palette simultaneously with the art direction for the site so that I could get Tan the thing he needed most immediately: business cards and letterhead. As I was working on the business card series, it occured to me that the business card tips weren’t as personal as everything else. One advantage of doing branding for someone you know really well is that you have a wealth of experience to draw from. Growing up, Tan occasionally had these quaint sayings that he would drop into a conversation. Most of them were old Pakistani proverbs that just didn’t translate exactly to English, so they were hilarious to me and my brother. I called my brother to make a short list together of some of the sayings, and I mocked them up as a series of business cards that would each have a different flavor of Tan’s 3¢. These include gems like:

If you want to cross the river, you must befriend the alligator.

and

A rusted coin still has value.

I love them so much! They appear on his business cards, letterhead, and randomly generate a new one every time you visit the website.

Overall, I had a ton of fun working on this little project, and I’m honored to help my dad launch his new business. Of course, I’m one of his first clients. If you’re looking for seasoned CFO to work with you or know someone who does, please point them to 3¢ Accounting!

Commit to Commit

Dan Mall — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 11:04:00 +0000

“Can you have this done by the end of the day?”

A scary question for some, especially if it comes from a manager, boss, or client.

What they’re looking for is a commitment… which is usually the reason that it’s scary.

When someone asks you to commit to something, there are three useful responses.

The first two are obvious: “yes” or ”no.”

“Yes” is easy. If you do believe you can have it done by the end of the day, “yes” is easy because it’s honest and it’s probably what the asker wants to hear.

“No” is a bit tougher. If you don’t believe you can have it done by the end of the day, “no” is honest but it’s probably not what the asker wants to hear. Still though, the asker is looking to see if there’s a commitment that can be made, and your answer makes it clear that there isn’t… at least not right now.

But what if you’re not sure? Is there a third possible answer?

People often resort to “maybe” or “I don’t know,” but neither of those answers are very helpful to the asker, as they leave the asker in the same place as they were before they asked: unsure.

What’s a better response? Commit to commit. It sounds like this: “I’m not sure right now, but I can tell you in an hour.”

Committing to commit gives you the ability to hold your own honest ambiguity while still giving the asker the commitment they’re looking.

Next time someone asks you for a commitment where you can’t yet answer yes or no, try committing to commit. It’s a great way to create accountability.

Creating a Success Metrics Tracking Practice

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 11:04:00 +0000

As the common saying goes from business management consultant Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” So, many teams put high priority on setting up ways that they can measure the impact of their work in order to manage it well.

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Almost every team I’ve worked starts this process by seeing if they can dynamically generate a dashboard from any data they have access to. There are a few hurdles with this approach:

Most teams don’t have any data about how they work, which becomes a non-starter.
Of the few teams that are lucky to have some data—much less a whole telemetry or data science team—there aren’t many tools that can collect that data into a dashboard. Teams resort to trying to build this on their own, which is a non-trivial task.

For years, my recommendation to these kinds of teams has been to try and use a Google doc, but that’s always been a half-hearted recommendation, as adding some new tasks isn’t really an thrilling proposition for an already-overworked team.

Lately, though, I’ve been much more excited about seeing modern suites of tools that make viewing data much easier. One in particular that I’m recommending to design system teams is Omlet. To get useful visualizations about your design system is as easy as as npx omlet init. What used to take months to build a custom dashboard now takes seconds.

But that’s enough. You have to know what to do with the data once you have it. For that, I recommend setting up a metrics tracking practice.

That sounds incredibly official and like a big process, so let’s make it a bit simpler.

Let’s say you wanted to lose some weight. One might suggest that you set up a new exercise practice. What does that mean in the simplest terms? It means picking a day or two where you go to the gym, each week, regularly. That’s what a practice is: something you can do over and over again to the point where it becomes a habit that you don’t think about. Eventually, it takes more willpower and effort to stop that habit than continue it.

Here are some tips I recommend for a success metrics tracking practice, excerpted from my new book Design That Scales (now available for pre-order):

It’s not enough to simply set good metrics. After you’ve identified them, you have to make them matter by building a practice around them.

Add three events to your calendar:

Every Friday: Set aside an hour to look at the data for all of your key results to record what’s changed.

Every Monday: Set aside an hour to write an update to your fellow design team members to make progress—or the lack of it—visible. Make this message applicable at the ground level that everyone’s working on. Spend time in this message focusing more on key results rather than objectives, especially on what each team member can do or try to influence the key results in the direction you want to see them go.

On the last Friday of each month: Draft a message to all the people you initially interviewed and report what you’ve learned in the previous four weeks of tracking. Keep this message high-level by focusing more on the objectives than the key results—the opposite weighting of the message you send to the team each week.

The more intimately familiar you are with your data, how it’s being collected, and how much it can be influenced, the better story you’ll be able to tell around how your design system is contributing to the company’s overall goals.

What practices have you set up around your success metrics that keep you focused? Reply and let me know.

Designing Everything

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:08:00 +0000

The second worst trick designers ever pulled was convincing the world that design is primarily about colors and fonts.

The worst trick designers ever pulled was believing that ourselves.

Designers have one of the biggest unfair advantages for success in the world: we’re skilled, trained, and practiced and prioritizing and making decisions.

Think about the act of creating a color palette. In the RGB spectrum, there are 16,777,216 different colors available. Most brand color palettes have about 3–5 colors in them. Who is responsible for choosing 5 effective colors out of 16 million? Designers. Regularly. This is a routine part of the job, a standard responsibility and expectation of even the most junior designers. Talk about pro-level prioritizing and decision-making skills.

Yet, we freeze up when we have to apply those skills to anything outside something we can make on a design tool on our computers. Create a 3-color t-shirt? I’ll do it in my sleep. Normalize our family budget? Danger, Will Robinson!

Most problems are design problems, which is just a fancy way to say that design can provide a solution to them. How? First, we have to abstract the definition of “design” from the typical meaning of “to produce a drawing or artifact.” It does mean that, but it has other definitions too. My favorite is Jared Spool’s version: design is “the rendering of intent.” That intent could be a website that has a particular job as much as it could be a system I have for washing the dishes.

Designers are often asked about their process. Why? Because there’s often more value in how a designer does something that what they make. But we regular forget or ignore that.

My oversimplified design process goes something like this:

Observe something and think about it for as long as I can and from as many different angles as I can see until I have some ideas, theories, and hypotheses about how it could be better.
Work on changes to that thing in a way that I and others can see, touch, hear, smell, and/or taste.
Use that thing and/or watch others use it to see if the changes made it better or worse.
Repeat for as long as I can until something else is more worthy of my attention.

This process has proved helpful to me when I was working on mobile apps to help people get healthier as well as helping a friend get better grades on their exams.

Earlier this year, my wife Em hit me with this zinger: “Why don’t you run our family as well as you run your teams at work?”

Ouch.

It stings because she was right.

When I run a team, I go to great lengths to establish and sustain a culture of safety, sharing, bravery, and creativity. I pioneer rituals. I mold timelines and expectations. I do everything in my power to help everyone involved experience better opportunities that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Why wasn’t I this intentional with my kids, with my marriage, and with our home?

Challenge accepted.

Over the past few months, Em and I have been trying to design the way we want our family to live and grow. We know we can’t control that, and we know that we have great influence over it. (That’s the life of a designer.) That has taken a few different forms, from instituting a system for how we do family meetings to involving our kids in more conversations about money and earning to being more purposeful about being silly and playing with them, and a lot more. It’s the start of our family’s operating system, and we’re already reaping some of the rewards of planting those seeds.

Sharing these things with a few friends and family have encouraged us to share it more widely, so we turned it into a new venture that we launched earlier this week called Great Job! We realized that being intentional about raising kids is a great job—it’s great and it is a job—and most caregivers need more reminders that they’re doing a great job. We’re starting by sharing what’s worked for our family through weekly articles on the site and daily tips on Twitter and Facebook. We’re also working on some other things like downloadables, a podcast, and more. (If you have suggestions and ideas for what could help you or others in your life who want to be more intentional about raising amazing kids, reply to this email and let me know!)

Overall, designing everything means you’re doing as much as you can on purpose.

What are some things you’ve designed in your life? Reply and let me know. I want to hear your stories!

2023 Adirondacks Fall Foliage Photography Trip

Dan Mall — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 23:23:00 +0000

For the last 3 years, I’ve made an annual tradition of taking advantage of living on the east coast of the U.S. to take photo of the changing foliage during this time of year. This year, I visited the legendary Adirondack Mountains. I managed to rope in a few friends to join me: Chris Rivera, Matt Sherlock, and Jesse Gardner.

Here’s our tale.

Day 0: Friday, October 6

We’d been watching the fall foliage prediction map for weeks, and it seemed our trip was perfectly timed for peak color.

Late afternoon, Chris’ wife dropped him off at my house and we went to pick up Matt. The three of us had shot photos together before, but it had been a while since we’d seen each other, so we spent most of the initial time of the car ride catching up on what was new in our lives. Jesse lived a lot closer, so he headed to our Lake Placid Airbnb to settle in.

After a Jersey Mike’s dinner (not a sponsor) and 2 stops to charge my Tesla, we finally arrived at the Airbnb a little after midnight to crash. We chose our bedrooms and agreed to do a sunrise shoot in the morning. I unpacked my clothes and gear, finally getting to sleep around 2:00am.

Day 1: Saturday, October 7

I woke up at our agreed time of 5:30am to catch sunrise. The forecast called for rain all day, so we were hoping that would mean a foggy scene at Mirror Lake. Unfortunately, it was already pouring pretty hard by the time we got there. Defeated, we retreated to the Downtown Diner for breakfast to fuel up and regroup.

Pancakes, waffles, eggs, and coffee gave us the courage to decide that we were going to shoot in the rain. I scoured my phone for inspiration for fall photos that looked good in the rain, most of which were forest-y shots. Our sunset plan that night was walk around the shore of Heart Lake then hike to the top of Mount Jo, but we decided to go earlier and scout out around since sunset didn’t seem promising because of a full day of rain. On the way there, we stopped at a few pull-offs to shoot some incredible scenery, including the Olympic Jumping Complex.

We mosied over to Heart Lake to shoot the shoreline in the rain. I got the foggy lake shots I wanted, but we were completely drenched.

We started to hike to the top of Mount Jo, but before even starting the ascent, we ran into some hikers coming down who warned that it was too slippery to hike and too foggy at the top to even see anything.

Deterred and sopping wet, we decided to call it a day for shooting and instead spend the rest of the day editing. We went back to our Airbnb to change into dry clothes.

We exchanged a few editing techniques with each other and worked up an appetite. We were in the mood for some comfort food, so we went to The Pickled Pig and I had the Crack Burger: two fully-cooked, juicy 4oz “smashed burgers” ground from local Donahue Farms chuck, short-rib and brisket, finished with black garlic mayonnaise, fries, shredded green leaf lettuce, caramelized red onion confit, melted American cheese and finished with piggy sauce. Oink, and yum! This was the heaviest meal I had eaten in a long time, and I was here for it.

We edited some more, choosing and sharing our favorite shots of the day. We talked about religion, faith, and identity. We made a quick plan for the next day. Instead of sunset at the summit of Mount Jo that night, maybe we could do sunrise the next morning. It was settled.

Feeling full and tired, we put the new season of Loki on the TV. The show was great but I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

I went to bed at 7pm.

Day 2: Sunday, October 8

We were out the out the door at and the base of Mount Jo to hike to the summit for sunrise at 6am. I brought all my camera gear—4 lenses and a tripod—and my drone bag. The temperature had dropped into the 40s overnight, and I was bundled up with a base layer, t-shirt, zip-up hoodie, and insulated jacket.

Armed with our headlamps in the pitch black, we started our trek. The Adirondacks has the highest concentration of black bears in the state, so we yelled “Yo bear!” every few minutes to be loud enough to make bears not bother with us.

Mount Jo has two trails to the summit: a long one and a short one. The short trail is only 0.8 miles, but the elevation gain is about 700 feet. I generally run about 4–5 miles each when playing basketball, so I thought this hike would be a piece of cake.

Boy, was I wrong.

Between darkness and steep boulder climbs, I was struggling pretty quickly. My 3 companions seemed to be doing just fine, but I needed to stop every few dozen feet to shed a layer. My heart rate was up to around 170bpm. I generally run warm, and I quickly realized how overbundled I was. By the time we got to the summit, I breathing pretty hard and dripping sweat into my face pretty profusely. The summit was cold and windy, which made me want to put all my layers back on again. I was very uncomfortable.

The view from the top was gorgeous. I could see a little piece of sun peeking out from behind the mountains. I took out my camera and tripod to set up and shoot. I picked my spot and spun the dial on my camera to adjust my shutter speed.

No response.

Hmm, no biggie. I could use the touchscreen menu.

Touchscreen wasn’t working. Menu button wasn’t working either. My camera must have gotten too wet shooting in the rain the day before. Most of the buttons were non-responsive.

All good; I'll fly my drone.

I reached into my pocket to grab my phone, as it’s the remote control for my DJI Air 2S drone.

My phone wasn’t in my pocket.

I checked all the other pockets and in my bag. Not there. Did I drop it along the way? It was very possible that lunging over the boulders on the way to the summit may have pushed my phone out of my pocket in the dark. Or was it still in the car and I never grabbed it? Man, I hope I left it in the car. My phone is also my Tesla key; without it, we weren’t gonna be able to go anywhere. I could use my key card that I kept in my wallet, but my wallet was in the car.

The sun was coming up now and I had nothing to shoot with. I grabbed my GoPro out of my bag, and took a few quick videos of nothing in particular. I snapped some half-hearted photos with my camera, making due with being stuck in a 2-second timer with no autofocus.

I took a sip of water and ate a granola bar. It made me feel a little bit better, though I was still bitter than I wasn’t shooting as much as everyone else. Suddenly, a storm started to roll in, so everyone decided to pack up and head back down the mountain.

The descent was much easier than the ascent. Plus the sun was up now, and the forest looked beautiful.

We decided to walk the shoreline of Heart Lake again to see if we got any different shots than we got in the rain the previous day. I took a few of the same shots I took the day before, which gave me a lot more vivid color.

Walking the shoreline again, the light rain was starting to lighten up even more. I noticed a rainbow forming across the other side of the lake and called to the others to check it out.

Suddenly, it became very vivid, and we could see it go all the way across.

This was one of the most special scenes I had ever witnessed. Giddy from excitement, I remarked that if this was all I got to shoot from this trip, I’d be good. Of course, I wanted to shoot more, but I could be content with this.

After the rainbow disappeared, we decided to pack up and head to our next location. I normally eat an early breakfast, but I hadn’t eaten much this morning except for a granola bar, and I was starting to feel a bit of a headache. I thought it might be the lack of caffeine, so I got a bottle of Pepsi from the gift shop.

I got to my car with my fingers crossed that my phone was in it.

Success! I had left my phone in the charging tray. What a relief!

Our crew agreed that breakfast should be our next stop before our next shooting location, so we tracked down a local breakfast spot. My headache was much worse now and I was starting to feel nauseous, so I started munching on trail mix. Jesse and Matt were driving separately from Chris and me; they found a parking spot first and headed into the restaurant. They called me while I was parking: 1-hour wait for breakfast. Ugh. I was really nauseous now. I decided I wanted to go back to the Airbnb to lie down. Chris decided to join Jesse and Matt while I went back. I tried to eat enough to take some Advil. I popped 2 pills, and less than a minute later, I ran to the bathroom to throw up. Hello again, Crack Burger from yesterday!

I texted the guys to carry on without me and I’d catch up with them later, then I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later with the same headache, but at least the nausea was gone. I stumbled downstairs to find enough to eat to take more Advil, but all I could manage to eat was more trail mix. I opened my computer to edit more photos to distract myself.

The guys came back from shooting an amazing High Falls Gorge about 15 minutes later. Jesse offered to make me some eggs, which I gladly accepted. I ate a few bites and started feeling nauseous again. I took some Advil and went back to bed. Before I dozed off, I came to terms with the idea that I might not feel good enough to shoot on this trip again, and the shots I have are where I’ll stop.

I woke up after an hour, feeling better. I showered, which made me feel even better. I realized I was probably dehydrated after sweating so much in the morning, and I didn’t even think to drink much water, so I chugged some right there. More feeling better. I wandered downstairs to find the guys editing, so I joined them.

We decided to go out for a low-key dinner at a local pizza place where I scarfed down some fettucine alfredo and a salad. Chris skipped dinner to shoot some nightime architecture of the Olympic Conference Center while Jesse, Matt, and I debated the merits of mentorship groups and codes of conduct.

After dinner, we made a game plan for our last day of the trip.

Day 3: Monday, October 9

We decided we’d check out of the Airbnb before heading out for a sunrise shoot and that we’d all go home directly after shooting the locations of the day.

Our sunrise spot was Cascade Lake, and, unlike the past few days, the sky was dry and clear. Chris and I flew our drones around the lake and the nearby rock face sporting a waterfall. It was a great start!

Also, my camera seemed like it was back to normal. All buttons and dials were working properly again. I guess it just needed time to dry out!

Learning my lesson from the previous day, I insisted on an early breakfast, which everyone was in favor of. We stopped at the Noon Mark Diner to break our fast.

The next stop was the powerful Roaring Brook Falls.

Our final destination for the day and for the trip was the gorgeous Chapel Pond.

This is where Chris, Matt, and I parted ways with Jesse. We had one last location we wanted to stop at, but the map said we’d get home later than we all would have liked, so we opted to skip it and go straight home. The car ride back was full of conversations about business ideas, family dynamics, mental health, and more.

I hope you enjoyed the tour and the tale of 2023 fall foliage in the Adirondacks. If you’d like to go on a trip like this, join me next year! I have my eye on the Catskills, Colorado, or maybe somewhere in Canada. Lemme know your preferences, and let’s starting planning it!

Answers to Common Design Questions

Dan Mall — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

I get a good deal of messages from people asking me questions about design. I try to answer as many as I can, but I’m unable to get to all of them. So, here’s a roundup of my answers to some of the most common questions I receive.

What typeface should I use?

Neue Haas, GT America, or Pangram Sans. Gothics, grotesks, and geometric sans are so are in right now.

Should I use a grid?

Yep. 12 columns.

How much should I charge for my work?

Start at $25/hour. Once you feel like your work is worth more than you’re making, double it. Keep doubling until you get to a rate that clients won’t pay, then value price.

What’s wrong with my portfolio?

It doesn’t say what you want from the viewer. Ditch the meaningless “I create bold experiences for a new world” copy at the top and replace it with something more direct like “I’m looking for a senior designer job at a publishing company” or “I’m looking for new clients who make sustainable vehicles” or something equally specific. If you want something, you gotta ask for it.

Do I need a design system?

If you work at an enterprise: yes. You’re probably reinventing the wheel more than you should.

If you work at a startup: no. Your time is probably best used creating more value for your customers and your investors.

I work at an enterprise and am reinventing the wheel more than I should. I need a design system. Where should I start?

Audit all of your company’s digital products.
Pick a component that appears in 60% of those products.
Create one abstracted version that uses some element (typography, color, radius, hierarchy, etc.) from every version you found.
Put that component in a central repository/library.
Refactor every library/codebase that uses that component to include your new version and issue pull requests.
Beg, borrow, and steal to get teams to accept your pull requests.
Rinse and repeat.

That’s the most successful way I’ve seen to start a design system.

How do I get promoted at my job?

Work on something that directly makes your boss or your company more money. Then tell them often that you did/are doing that and that you could do more of that if you get a better title, more money, and a company credit card.

How can I tell if my startup/product idea is any good?

Put up a landing page this weekend, ask all of your friends to tell their friends about it, and see how many email signups you get.

What colors should go in my color palette?

Black, white, and one strong accent color.

Can the answers to these questions really be so simple?

I mean, most questions can be answered with, “It depends,” but I hate giving that answer. I’d rather give you a definitive starting point even if it’s wrong, because it’s easier to revise than create.

How Much of a Rascal Are You?

Dan Mall — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 11:00:00 +0000

A specific theme has been surfacing lately across many of my students and mentees. All of them have great ideas to improve their work situations that help their coworkers and colleagues. These ideas usually get shot down by a boss, manager, or client. My students ask me what they can do about this.

To which I reply, “How much of a rascal are you?”

For many, it’s important to know that they’re doing a good job at work. Doing a good job often means following a previously established standard. When you’re trying to change something, you’re actively subverting the current standard. Even further, you’re actively subverting the current standard in an attempt to abolish and replace it.

That means that, for a time, you won’t be doing a good job. In fact, you’ll be doing a bad job, on purpose, at least according to the current standard until a new standard gets implemented.

No manager in their right mind would give you permission to subvert the status quo, to intentionally do “a bad job.” It’s too risky to their jobs, unless of course they are rascals too.

How much tolerance do you have for knowing you’ll be doing “a bad job” when though you know you’re doing a good job? This is why many changemakers are people who are intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated.

So, how do you change something if you don’t have the approval to do it? Do it anyway, but don’t tell anyone you’re doing it. Only share the results when your work is done.

This goes against the common wisdom of being a good direct report and colleague. You’re supposed to say what you’re going to do before you do it, do it, then say what you did. But that’s not what rascals do.

The key is not doing all of the work before you share it. That’s pragmatic; it’s not feasible to do months of work under the radar without your boss noticing. So only do the first 10% of it, enough to see some results. Then share it with your boss and ask for the resources, budget, time, space, whatever to continue earning results like this in a larger way.

Examples:

Want approval to create a design system? Make the first component or two under the radar, get people to use them, then show your boss how much time these first components saved while you were working on the sly. Then ask for funding or resources to continue making more components in order to realize even more time savings.
Want approval to try a different process in a project or sprint? Try it for a week without asking, then tell show your boss how much more productive the team was this way. Then ask for approval to try it on the next 3 projects or sprints.
Want to get your entire team using a new piece of animation software? Fork over the first $19/month out of your own pocket and make something cool with it that a client loves. Then ask your boss to approve $57/month to get you and 2 more of your colleagues on it next month.

To be a good rascal, don’t wait for permission to start. Get permission to keep going.

How to Calculate Opportunity Profit

Dan Mall — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 09:52:00 +0000

Opportunities are relative.

“Wanna go to a major league baseball game tomorrow?”

You probably evaluate that offer against the factors in your life. If you hate baseball, you’ll probably refuse. If you love baseball, you’ll probably accept. If you love baseball but you’ve already scheduled a date with your partner, you might regretfully refuse. If you hate baseball but you haven’t hung out your friend in a while and want to, you might reluctantly accept.

The dictionary defines an opportunity as “a chance for success.” Shouldn’t you take every chance for success that comes your way? Isn’t an honor just to be invited? Many people never get invited at all, so are you being a pompous ingrate by declining?

Nope. Not all chances are created equal. Opportunities are relative to your goals.

If your goals are S.M.A.R.T.—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—then you can quantify opportunities.

Financial targets are common examples of S.M.A.R.T. goals, so let’s start there. If your goal is to make $10k this month, then a $5k freelance gig gets you halfway there.

But it’s not that simple. It costs you something to do that $5k freelance gig: for starters, your time, not to mention any expenses you might have to incur.

I like evaluating my options by assessing what I call the opportunity profit. Here’s how it works:

The “T” part of S.M.A.R.T. goals is “time-bound,” my favorite criterion of the bunch. Making $10k in 1 month is a very different goal than making $10k in 6 months. So the timebox plays a big role in the worthiness and profitability of the opportunity.

If your goal is to make $10k this month, then a $5k freelance gig gets you halfway there. So, it should take you half your month to do at most. If it takes you longer, you’re at risk of missing your goal.

Here’s a visualization:

The percentage this moves you toward your goal is the percentage of effort you should be spending. Otherwise, the opportunity profit is too low (because the opportunity cost was too high).

Here’s the formula. Against a specific goal within a given timeframe:

Opportunity Profit = \frac{Movement Towards Goal}{Total Goal} - \frac{Effort Needed}{Total Capacity}

For the purposes of example, let’s shorten that to:

O = M_{G} - E_{G}

If O is negative, I decline.

But isn’t making $5k guaranteed a better alternate than making $0? After all, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. This surfaces some important realizations:

If you’re not worried about your ability to make the remaining $5k you need in one week instead of the normal two weeks, then why isn’t your monthly goal $20k/month ($5k/week)? There’s nothing wrong with setting your goal to be the bare minimum you need and can easily make, but consider whether you’re selling yourself short.

If you’d rather take the $5k for 3 weeks of work because you don’t think there’s a better opportunity for you, perhaps your $10k/month goal is too high. Having an “anything is better than nothing” mindset is great cue that you have a wish more than you have a goal.

“Dan, wanna speak at our acclaimed conference? We’d love a 60-minute talk and want you to do a 30-minute prep call and a 30-minute tech check beforehand. We can pay $500.”

What an honor to speak at this conference! I should do it, right?

Let’s use our trusty formula. If my goal is to make $10k in a month:

Increment amount towards goal: $500
Total Goal: $10,000
Effort Needed: 1-hour talk + 1-hour calls + 40 hours to write a new talk = 42 hours
Total Capacity: 160 work hours in a month (40 hours/week)

O = \frac{500}{10,000} - \frac{42}{160}

O = 0.005 - 0.2625

O = -0.2575

The opportunity profit is negative, so doing this talk probably isn’t worth it for me because it doesn’t move me toward my goal enough for the effort involved.

What if I wasn’t writing the talk from scratch and instead delivering a talk I already have written? The “effort needed” goes from 42 hours down to 2 hours. Certainly, I could swing it now, right?

O = \frac{500}{10,000} - \frac{2}{160}

O = 0.005 - 0.0125

O = -0.0075

I should still decline.

What if I asked to skip the prep calls?

O = \frac{500}{10,000} - \frac{1}{160}

O = 0.005 - 0.00625

O = -0.00125

Gah, so close! But still not worth it.

What if I asked for $1,000 instead of $500?

O = \frac{1,000}{10,000} - \frac{1}{160}

O = 0.1 - 0.00625

O = 0.09375

Success! Opportunity profit is positive, so now it’s worth doing because it’s moving me closer to my goal without costing me too much. Hopefully you see how tweaking some of these levers changes the result. The ideal life is optimizing for the highest opportunity profit activities available to you.

This approach can work with any quantifiable goal, not just finances. Let’s say you were trying to lose 5 pounds this month. That’s about 1 pound per week. One way to do that is burn more calories than you consume. You might make choices every day for low calorie foods that still keep you full so you’re burning calories every day.

Then a friend invites you out one night to a decadent restaurant in town you’ve wanted to go to all year. You know the menu, so you know there are very few foods that will keep you under your desired caloric intake. But, reservations are hard to come by, and this might be your only shot.

Many people would justify going to the restaurant by citing the opportunity cost of missing out. But opportunities are relative to goals. If your goal was to eat at the 10 best restaurants in town, then going to this restaurant gets you 10% closer to your goal. The opportunity profit is positive here.

But that’s not your goal. Your current goal is to lost 5 pounds this month. It’s the last day of the month.

Back to the formula:

Increment amount towards goal: You’re forecasting +500 calories from dinner
Total Goal: -500 calories each day
Effort Needed: 30 days
Total Capacity: 30 days

O = \frac{500}{-500} - \frac{30}{30}

O = -1 - 1

O = -2

The opportunity profit for going to this restaurant and eating the food you’ve desired for so long is negative, because it moves you farther away from your goal.

By no means am I recommending not going to the restaurant though. Live your life! But don’t falsely justify it as an opportunity. An opportunity isn’t just something you want to do. For that, you can justify anything, which won’t help you decide which things to pursue or not.

I use a different word. If it doesn’t move you toward your goal—opportunity profit is negative—but you still want to do it, it’s not an opportunity. It’s a splurge.

It’s ok to splurge sometimes. It’s important to recognize it as such.

Evaluating opportunities requires a goal and a commitment to get there in a certain amount of time. Those are the prerequisites for having a rubric to say yes or no to the things that cross your path.

Most people won’t understand this. They’ll be confused or upset that you’re rejecting the “gracious opportunity” they’re extending to you. Most times, it’s because they don’t know what it’s like to be focused on a goal. Sometimes it’s because they don’t know what your goals are; of course they don’t… how could they know that? But that doesn’t mean that you need to stop your progress to accommodate them.

I get a lot of messages from people to review their portfolios or appear on their podcast or talk to them about their product. I appreciate everyone that reaches out, but many of those things have a negative opportunity profit against the goals I have right now. It’s taken a while, but I’ve had to practice how to balance being grateful for everything that comes my way while not thinking of everything as “an honor so I should do it.”

I’m fond of this quote from Jeff Bezos:

Inventing and pioneering involve a willingness to be misunderstood for long periods of time.

People may not understand why you’re saying no to them, but you don’t have to explain it. That’s partially what’s difficult about saying no: even the effort required to explain can have a negative opportunity profit. So don’t. Push through. Say thank you and move on. Keep focused on your goal and keep doing the things that move you toward it. Once you make that $10k or $10M or are living in your dream house or restored that relationship with your sibling or finally took that trip or reach whatever goal you were pursuing, you’ll be grateful that you invested in yourself enough to stay away from the things with negative opportunity profit for you.

Eventually, you may find yourself in a place where every path in front of you has a positive opportunity profit, and a high one at that. What do you do in that situation? Rank them, do the handful that have the highest opportunity profit for you, and practice gratefulness for the blessed life you’re able to live.

Career Paths, Ladders, and Leveling in Design Systems

Dan Mall — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 07:54:00 +0000

I’ve been involved in design systems long enough to see it evolve from an auxiliary asset (“we made a quick design system to help us be more organized”) to a full-fledged part of an organization (“I work on a design system team full-time”). As design systems and dedicated design system teams become more prevalent and official, we need more support structures to help people evaluate and grow. One of the most popular tools for that is a career ladder that articulates leveling, areas that have little if any standardization for design system teams. Let’s change that!

I like how Doordash’s Head of Design Helena Seo describes a team member’s career needs in her article, “Designing” a Career Ladder for Product Design:

I want to understand where I stand currently. I want to know what I need to do to get to the next level.

Those expectations are usually opaque for a design system professional. Fortunately, there are lots of good models and examples to pull from in adjacent spaces. Design system roles often sit squarely between design, engineering, and product roles. While it’s not exactly right to use them verbatim, they can provide great starting points for remixing.

We need to define the criteria that all roles must adhere to, regardless of seniority. The criteria in the Design Team Levels Framework that Peter Merholz originally created for Snagajob is a great starting point:

Theme
Achievements
Delivery
- Core Skills
- Process/Practice/Planning
- Problem Solving
- Scope
Direction
Communication
- Presentation
- Cross-functional Meetings
Leadership
Orientations
Relationship with Team
Recruiting/Hiring

I added a few things to Peter’s format.

First: levels. I love how Julie Zhuo describes it in her article, How to Work with Designers:

The more senior the [person], the more abstract the problem they should be solving.

Second: I added 2 columns that say “Looks like” and “Sounds like,” something I learned from Emily Meekins and Wil Reynolds at Seer Interactive. I stole this when creating a handbook for SuperFriends and it really helped to make abstract responsibilities much more tangible. For example, a responsibility in “Cross-functional Meetings” for a Senior (Level 3) person might be “Active planner of the meeting.” That could look like “creates meeting agenda with defined desired outcomes and distributes an agenda to all participants 24-hours before the meeting.” That could sound like, “I took the liberty of drafting an agenda for Thursday’s meeting. You can find it attached to this email.”

All of those things have resulted in this Google Sheet starting template. The details aren’t filled in yet, but I’m pretty happy with the structure.

How does this get filled in? I’m glad you asked! I’m facilitating the next Study Hall in the Design System University community around this topic specifically on Wednesday, September 13 at 12pm Eastern. We’ll be workshopping what jobs people do, don’t, should, and shouldn’t have in design systems. Join in and help me shape what design system responsibilities look in our industry! (This event is exclusive to Design System University members, so enroll to attend.)

I’m also going to be sharing some of my own lessons around design system roles and responsibilities at DSW Day on September 20, a free event for the design system community organized by Maria Eguiluz. RSVP to attend.

I consulted many books and resources that helped me develop my own thoughts and opinions on this topic. In no particular order:

Content Career Pathing from Tracey Wallace
Resilient Management by Lara Hogan
Org Design for Design Orgs, by Peter Merholz & Kristin Skinner
The Making of a Manager, by Julie Zhuo
How our team level set on career leveling, by Sara Culver at Figma
Levelling up the Design Org, by Matthew Godfrey
A guide to becoming a senior product designer, by Aaron James

Books I haven’t read but are on their way to my house as we speak so I can read them:

The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier
The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

A Design System Coach’s Portfolio

Dan Mall — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 10:00:00 +0000

I’ve been talking a lot lately about my new products where I teach design systems, so a lot of people have been asking to see design systems that I’ve made.

That’s a fair and reasonable request! After all, if you’re going to be taught by someone, you want proof that they know their stuff, right?

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The standard way that the tech industry typically evaluates whether someone knows their stuff is through the all-powerful Portfolio. There are many definitions of portfolio, but generally, it means “a collection of stuff.” For tech portfolios, that collection of stuff is often images of sites, apps, and other web thangs. Those images usually lack context, which is why we resort to interviews and can’t always hire only from viewing a portfolio. Each image represents a conglomerate of work; which part of that did you do? Did you art direct it? Write the front-end code? Did you design under a supervisor? Did you write the copy? The interview surfaces answers that a portfolio should have provided.

When people ask to see my design system work, I think they’re expecting to see a portfolio of some images of Figma UI kits or Storybook installs. That’s a reasonable expectation, but those aren’t the kinds of design systems I work on, even though they partially are. I work with teams of people who are already good at making Figma UI kits and Storybook installs. Their portfolios are full of great examples of UI kits and code libraries. If you’re reading this post for examples of those, here are some great case studies created by some of my students in my Dribbble design system course:

But that’s what the portfolios of my students and teams look like. For me to show images of those things are both a misrepresentation of my own work and a misappropriation from the people who directly did that work. I’d be largely showing their work, even though I played a part in it. Said differently, I am not a design system designer or a design system engineer, so my portfolio shouldn’t look like the portfolio of a design system designer or a design system engineer.

So what am I? (Cue existential dread.)

Never having been good at branding myself—who is?—I’ll instead turn to what other people have described about me after working with me. Two of my favorite encapsulations (partially because they stroke my ego):

Like Ted Lasso!

A way cooler Phil Jackson.

What do those say about me? I’m a coach!

But blech.

The denotation of that word is absolutely spot-on for the work I do with teams. But the connotation… ugh. It seems everyone is a coach nowadays, and all it takes is to have an opinion, like saying something smart to someone is coaching. That’s closer to mentorship, and there’s a difference. Per Sir John Whitmore’s book, Coaching for Performance:

Mentoring is very different to coaching, because coaching is not dependent on a more experienced person passing down their knowledge… Instead, coaching requires expertise in coaching, not in the subject at hand. That is one of its great strengths.

As bad as we are at evaluating portfolios in tech, we’re even worse and evaluating coaches. Fortunately, there are some useful models and methodologies we can look to. First up: sports!

In sports, the evaluation of coaches is clear: do they win? More specifically, do they capture the coveted trophy awarded to only one team per season? If not, they’re usually fired after a few years. The most memorable coaches are the winningest ones: Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Pat Summitt, Bill Belichick, Mike Krzyzewski.

Where it gets tricky is that a coach’s success is inextricably tied to their team. A coach on their own cannot win, because they’re not playing. So coaching always begs the question: did they win because of the players or because of the coach? Did the Chicago Bulls win so much because of Michael Jordan or because of Phil Jackson? Related, did Michael Jordan win because he had Phil Jackson as a coach, or did Phil Jackson win because he had Michael Jordan as a player?

The Kirkpatrick Model provides more detail in how to evaluate coaches. It outlines 4 levels to measure:

Reaction. The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging, and relevant to their jobs
Learning. The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence, and commitment based on their participation in the training.
Behavior. The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.
Results. The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support and accountability package.

Reaction (#1) and Results (#4) are the easiest to observe and articulate, even if they’re difficult to achieve. The results I’ve seen from working with design system teams often look like this:

After moving products onto a design system, The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas experienced a 27% increase in e-commerce conversion.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church created a design system to let them go from building 120 chapter sites per year to 2400, a 20x increase.
ExxonMobil used their new design system Unity to immediately build 50+ web apps in 10 months.

But again, those are their results, not mine, even though I was involved.

The real coaching work is in learning (#2) and behavior change (#3). That’s hard to observe. Also, I can’t say it; the team has to be the ones to say it. I can say I taught, but only they can say whether they learned. I can say I helped create the environment, conditions, and culture for change, but only they can say whether or not change happened.

Was Phil Jackson a good coach for Michael Jordan? We can’t tell as outsiders. We can’t even trust Phil Jackson’s words on it, because of all the implicit bias that might exist there.

The most reliable source on whether Phil Jackson was a good coach for Michael Jordan is Michael Jordan. So, does he believe Phil Jackson was a good coach for him? Yes.

What I do is I challenge myself in big games. I try to find a quiet center within me because there’s so much hype out there, and I don’t want to fall into it. I don’t want to rush. I’ll start off rebounding or getting everybody else involved until I get an easy shot, a layup, or a free throw or something, then boom, I’m off and running. I will have controlled my emotions and not gotten over-hyped or lost my focus. These are things Phil has taught me.

The results of 6 Chicago Bulls’ championships are Michael Jordan’s results, and the results of the other players on that team. And yes, it’s a feather in Phil Jackson’s cap as well, but his real results are the learning and behavior change that Michael Jordan credits.

Back to my portfolio, as a design systems coach, what have people credited to me as it relates to learning and behavior change?

After I helped a data analytics startup ship multiple products in record time, the head of design said, “Your design system approach fundamentally changed how we build product here.”
After I helped a Fortune 10 corporation create their first enterprise-wide design system, the design strategy manager said, “What can we learn and help teach others about? That mindset is what you brought to our company.”
After I helped a non-profit create a design system base to build on, the communications director said, “You provided a great foundation where we were able to take the pieces and easily add new ones.”
After I worked with a digital publisher to help turn around their declining business through workflow improvements, the director of Agile program management said, “That was simultaneously the most and least Agile thing we’ve ever done here.” The CEO said my involvement was “crucial” to their success.

Feedback from students across my courses:

I find it fascinating how you are able to take seemingly complex concepts and give them over in such a clear and simplistic way. I was completely overwhelmed with the thought of building an official single design system in my company and I already feel like it is absolutely doable and even possible to work on together with delivering the regular day to day work. Thank you for the most pleasant and enjoyable design systems course!!

You ask arresting questions and making unsettling arguments. You have caught me off guard with hard questions I could not answer in the moment because they were getting at my values and boundaries.

You’ve put Design Systems on the map in a way that anyone could understand.

As a new leader, you helped me find and create clarity for our team—not by giving me all the answers, but by helping me grow and find the confidence to chart our path forward together. These lessons will stay with me for the rest of my career.

That’s my design system coaching portfolio.

Am I good at it? You can be the judge of that.

Breaking Down Design System Effort by Week

Dan Mall — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 17:16:00 +0000

Imagine that you have 12 weeks (roughly 90 days or 3 months) from the start of next month to create a design system from scratch. You’re given a team of a designer, a lead engineer, a writer, and a DesignOps person (all senior level individual contributors), and you’re forecasting what each of their involvements might look throughout.

How would you do it?

(For some of you that I’ve even heard from directly, this isn’t a hypothetical; it’s the exact situation you’re in.)

I’ve worked with teams in this situation many times before, and here’s the average of where we landed. This isn’t broken down by time. It’s more about relative effort week to week. Here are some questions these kinds of views can answer:

How does group effort change week to week?
How does individual effort change week to week?
How does each person’s effort compare to everyone else’s each week?
Who drives the team each week?

Here’s a look at how the overall team effort waxes and wanes over a 12-week period, using an oversimplified unit of “quantity of tasks” as a reference point.

	Team Effort
Week 1	48%
Week 2	100%
Week 3	67%
Week 4	70%
Week 5	59%
Week 6	44%
Week 7	41%
Week 8	48%
Week 9	67%
Week 10	48%
Week 11	63%
Week 12	52%

Here’s how that would break down across the 4 separate roles.

	Engineer	Designer	Writer	DesignOps
Week 1	31%	31%	15%	23%
Week 2	30%	26%	15%	30%
Week 3	39%	28%	11%	22%
Week 4	37%	26%	16%	21%
Week 5	25%	25%	19%	31%
Week 6	17%	8%	17%	58%
Week 7	45%	18%	18%	18%
Week 8	31%	15%	23%	31%
Week 9	17%	28%	17%	39%
Week 10	23%	23%	23%	31%
Week 11	24%	24%	24%	29%
Week 12	29%	21%	21%	29%

Here’s a breakdown of work to be done each week.

Week 1

Days 1–7

Assemble the North Star (1-4)
Assemble Design and Code Assets for Audit (1-4)
Create an Influence Map (2-4)
Collect Feature Teams’ Roadmaps (5–9)
Identify Existing Paradigms in Design and Code (5-14)

Week 2

Days 8–14

Collect Feature Teams’ Roadmaps (5–9)
Identify Existing Paradigms in Design and Code (5-14)
Identity Emerging and Interesting Paradigms in Design and Code (10–14)
Interview Potential Design System Customers (7–19)
Identify Potential Pilot Teams (9)
Schedule Pilot Product Walkthroughs (9)
Identify Key Stakeholders and Schedule Interviews (9)
Visualize Your Technical Ecosystem (10–13)
Interview End Users (10–22)
Interview Stakeholders (10–29)
Conduct Pilot Team Walkthroughs (10–29)
Create New Design System Repository and Package (14–15)

Week 3

Days 15–21

Identify Existing Paradigms in Design and Code (5-14)
Identity Emerging and Interesting Paradigms in Design and Code (10–14)
Interview Potential Design System Customers (7–19)
Interview End Users (10–22)
Interview Stakeholders (10–29)
Conduct Pilot Team Walkthroughs (10–29)
Create New Design System Repository and Package (14–15)
Set Up Public Workshop Environment with Branch Deploys (16-17)
Teach HTML & CSS to Designers (20)
Teach Figma to Engineers (21)

Week 4

Days 22–28

Interview End Users (10–22)
Interview Stakeholders (10–29)
Conduct Pilot Team Walkthroughs (10–29)
Teach Git to Designers (22)
Teach Storybook to Designers (23)
Practice Hot Potato (25–26)
Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Practice with an Existing Design System (27–28)

Week 5

Days 29–35

Interview Stakeholders (10–29)
Conduct Pilot Team Walkthroughs (10–29)
Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Conduct a Practice Pilot (29–30)
Create a Glossary of Shared Vocabulary (31)
Identify 3 Initial Components to Pilot (32)

Week 6

Days 36–42

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Synthesize Themes & Insights from Stakeholder Interviews (36)
Send First Stakeholder Update (36)
Create Design System Coverage Map (36)
Set Up Slack Channel for Design System Conversation (36)
Create Reference Website V1 (36–37)
Create Component Implementation Roadmap (39)
Propose Collaboration Plan to Pilot Teams (39)
Abstract Component Through Hot Potato (39–43)

Week 7

Days 43–49

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Abstract Component Through Hot Potato (39–43)
Share In-Progress Component Abstraction Work with Pilot Teams (44)
Iterate on Component Through Hot Potato (45–47)
Chronicle the Process (48–50)
Issue Pull Request to Contribute Newly Abstracted Component (48-50)

Week 8

Days 50–56

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Chronicle the Process (48–50)
Issue Pull Request to Contribute Newly Abstracted Component (48-50)
Usability Test Component with Pilot Teams (52–54)
Final Iteration on Component (55)
Send Stakeholder Update (57, weekly)
Extract 3 Overarching Principles (57)
Create a List of Potential Design System Names (57)

Week 9

Days 57–63

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Send Stakeholder Update (57, weekly)
Create Design System Logo v1 (58)
Add “Design System Office Hours” to Calendar (58)
Make Design System Swag (59)
Send Slack Post about Component #1 (59)
Host “Systems Week“ (60–65, then monthly)
Send Design System Name and Logo Finalists to Brand & Legal Team (60–69)
Repeat Activities 34–40 for Component #2 (60–77)

Week 10

Days 64–70

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Send Stakeholder Update (57, weekly)
Host “Systems Week“ (60–65, then monthly)
Repeat Activities 34–40 for Component #2 (60–77)

Week 11

Days 71–77

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Send Stakeholder Update (57, weekly)
Host “Systems Week“ (60–65, then monthly)
Repeat Activities 34–40 for Component #2 (60–77)
Repeat Process for Component #3 (72–89)

Week 12

Days 78–84

Join Pilot Teams’ Sprint Planning Sessions (26–∞)
Send Stakeholder Update (57, weekly)
Host “Systems Week“ (60–65, then monthly)
Repeat Process for Component #3 (72–89)
Congrats! Release Design System v.1.0.0

If we average the amount of work each role would have to do across an entire 3-month window, here’s how it would break down.

Role	Effort
Engineer	57%
Designer	47%
Writer	35%
DesignOps	59%

A few interesting observations that might be a bit askew from typical expectations:

The more natural pairing for design system product work is Engineer + DesignOps, surprisingly not Engineer + Designer or Designer + DesignOps.
Even though Engineer + DesignOps is the most natural pair, each role’s work acts as a counterpoint to the other. For most weeks, when the Engineer’s work is highest, the DesignOps person’s work is lowest, and vice versa. That makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that design system work is equal parts tactical and operational but not always at the same time.
Despite being called a design system, the Designer’s work is typically to support the Engineer and drive marketing/branding efforts when it’s time to socialize and/or broaden the design system reach.

This is the kind of deep work and analysis we’ll be exploring more of in my newest program at Design System University called Design System in 90 Days. It’s a live cohort where I’ll teach you and your team every week for 12-weeks how to get a design system up and running—and adopted!—by the end of the year. Registration opens Monday, August 21 at 10am Eastern.

Were you surprised by any of the observations here? How closely does this match—or not—your design system experience? Reply and let me know.

The Rest is History

Dan Mall — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:29:00 +0000

A few years ago, one of my SuperFriendly teams found themselves in a tough spot with a client. The brief was extra tough, so the team was spending a lot of late nights working without a lot to show for it. The client was starting to notice and getting understandably frustrated.

I met with the team leads to strategize. After weighing and discussing many different options, I suggested what I thought was the best course of action: apologize to the client for the lack of recent progress and inform them that we were giving the team a week-long break to recuperate and recharge so that we can come back with fresh ideas.

The team leads refused.

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The worry was that giving the team a break would be the last straw that would make the client fire us.

So, we pushed through. We weren't able to resolve it over the next few weeks, and the client fired us anyway. We refunded 6-figures to them because they paid a good chunk of the project up front.

I’ll never know, but I do wonder from time to time what would have happened if the team had taken a break. I want our industry to normalize rest. We chase efficiency in every aspect of our work, but what do we do with the savings? We work more.

When I teach teams about design systems, the topic of measuring success always comes up. I’m quick to propose “most vacation days taken without a loss in quantity or quality of work“ as an important metric, and it always gets a chuckle. When I retort that I’m being serious, eyes shuffle awkwardly towards the floor. No team has ever taken me up on this.

Dezzie Garcia has recently been experimenting with ensuring multiple PTO days as part of planning and roadmapping rituals. Cameron Moll has long written about a minimum vacation policy as a better alternative to unlimited vacation, something I’ve implemented for myself off and on for years. I admire the innovation, and I’m honored to call both Dezzie and Cameron friends. But it saddens me that these kinds of actions are considered novel or unique.

What will it take to normalize rest as an important part of work? How have you normalized rest on your team? Reply and let me know.

Extravagance as Savviness

Dan Mall — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:02:00 +0000

During my first year of running SuperFriendly, I was doing mostly “lone freelancer” work—straightforward design projects where I received a brief and I’d knock out comps at my desk. Slowly but surely, though, I was getting inquiries for larger projects that needed slightly larger teams to work on them, something I was more excited for and experienced at.

One day, I got an inquiry from a CEO who wanted a team to jam on some new ideas for his company. (Bonus: it was a company whose products I used regularly, so I was extra keen to help them with this work.) He offered to fly my team and me to his city for a few days to see how well we worked together, and we could all decide if it was something we wanted to continue. This seemed like a reasonable proposal, but the way he asked was pretty unique:

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Would you be up for a first class flight to [city] for a meeting on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week? We would put you up at the [swanky local hotel]. We could meet for lunch or in the early afternoon on either day if that can work for you.

I had traveled for clients before, but it usually involved booking the cheapest flights and lodging possible because of the combination of wanting to shell out the least dough and because reimbursement policies usually had a pretty low cap approved expenses. This was different! Flying first class? I don’t think I had ever flown first class before. And staying at one of the best hotels in the city? The opulence!

It didn’t stop there. Once we arrived, we realized that the CEO had booked the Penthouse suite for us. There was even a grand piano in the living room!

I was feeling two things simultaneously:

We had arrived! This was peak agency life, where clients would spare no expense to work with us. We were in demand! This was the good life.
How dare he! Was he just throwing is money around to show us how well the company was doing? Was this some sort of intimidation tactic to somehow give him the upper hand, to make us prove we were good enough to hang? Fine, we’ll bring our A-game and make him wish he bought the whole dang airline for us.

When it came time for our meeting—which was arranged in the living room of our suite—the CEO showed up a few minutes early, modestly dressed. This was not the guy I envisioned who had dropped all this cash. He was smart, a bit understated, and made great conversation that wasn’t about, I don’t know, buying yachts or whatever rich people talk about. Not what I expected, but we went on with the meeting and working session, which went great! Later in the day, we thanked him for the great working session and the more-than-generous accommodations.

Brazenly, I asked if he did this for all his partners.

“Oh, absolutely,” he replied. “It’s the most economical way to do this.”

That was not the response I expected, and “economical” was not the word I would have used to describe our experience. I probed more, and he explained. Apparently, booking the Penthouse suite was actually cheaper than booking multiple separate rooms and a conference room for the day. Plus, conference rooms are public spaces and often have cameras and such in the hallways and nearby. Doing the meeting in the Penthouse living room gave us some additional privacy to talk about some confidential company plans without worrying about anyone else overhearing.

Huh. Color me surprised.

“What about the first class flight?” I asked.

He admitted to it being a bit extravagant, but it also saved a little bit of money and time for us to have had a good meal before we showed up as opposed to having to go out to a fancy restaurant. Also, he found that he got better work from people when they had a comfortable flight, as opposed to when they’ve had an uncomfortable and labored travel experience and then had to be on their A-game for hours in a working session.

Instantly, what I initially saw as extravagance now looked much more accurately like savviness.

This was a formative experience for me as an agency owner. From then on, for any travel I’d book for my teams, I’d look to make it the most comfortable and easy-going as I could afford. This included every seat and room upgrade available and often meant taking the team to a tasting menu or Michelin-starred dinner the night before a full day or few of intense workshopping. I wasn’t necessarily trying to save money, but the return on investment in creating comfort for the team was almost always palpable in terms of innovation and morale.

Last year when I shut down SuperFriendly, my wife and I started to prepare for a season where money might be tight as I was making a career transition, so we started looking for all the places where we could cut our expenses back. At the time, we were both driving our dream cars—and we were paying for it, literally.

A few years back, we had invested in solar panels for our house to decrease our reliance on the grid, and one of the perks was that our installer threw in a free electric vehicle charger in our garage for if we ever got an electric car, something we figured might be in our near future. So, we sold our dream cars and bought two used Teslas from a local car dealership, cutting our car payments to a fraction of what we had been paying. Conveniently, the timing of this choice also coincided with the highest gas price surge in a long while—something that hasn’t really come down too much since—so moving to two electric vehicles meant a bonus of also saving hundreds of dollars a month by not having to buy gas.

Of course, when anybody asks or visits our house and sees two Teslas in our garage, they assume we splurged. Yet another case of supposed extravagance that’s actually savviness.

How have you been savvy in a way that might look extravagant to others? Drop me a line and let me know.

In Search of a Better Design System Metric than Adoption

Dan Mall — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 15:31:00 +0000

For a long time, the holy grail of design system success has been adoption—how many components from a design system are used, and how often. The majority of results on the first page of Google results for “design system metrics” cite adoption as an “essential” or “most valuable” metric.

I’ve never really been a fan.

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Adoption is a lagging indicator, which can only be measured after an event happens. Lagging indicators are relatively easy to measure—which is what makes adoption so attractive as a metric—but difficult to change… which is exactly why I’m not a fan. Design systems are most useful at the points of change, so why put so much stock in a metric that can only be measured after these crucial points?

More importantly, using adoption as the most important metric implies that the goal of a design system is to get used.

It’s not.

The goal of a design system is to help its parent organization achieve its goals more efficiently and consistently with the least possible burden.

Adoption is a part of that, but it’s equipment used for the journey, not the destination.

Nike’s co-founder Bill Bowerman wanted to help his track athletes run faster. That’s why he worked on better sneakers for them. From Shoe Dog, the memoir of Nike chairman emeritus Phil Knight:

There was one piece of gear [Bowerman] deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod… He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, lighter. Especially lighter… Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed. And speed equaled winning… Thus, lightness was his constant goal.

Bowerman—hence, Nike—didn’t make sneakers so that they could be purchased. Design systems shouldn’t make components so that they can be adopted.

Sneakers need to be purchased in order to win races. Design system components need to be adopted in order to achieve the goals of its parent organization. But sneakers and components are just the equipment. Their adoption is a lagging indicator of the goal, not the goal itself.

Buying sneakers won’t make you faster. And design system adoption doesn’t indicate success. I’ve met with plenty of teams that have 90%–100% adoption of their design systems but still experience the same inefficiencies and inconsistencies in product and process that they had prior to adopting the design system.

What’s a better indicator? Specifically a leading indicator, something that can more accurately predict future conditions of success?

First, some context.

At many enterprise organizations, cross-disciplinary teams are formed around separate features (feature teams). The people who are dedicated to working on a design system are a separate team (the design system team.)

In my consulting work with various teams over many years, there’s one specific leading indicator that has emerged more than others. It’s the answer to this question:

How early does a feature team invite, involve, and/or include the design system team in their work?

If I could only track one metric regarding design systems, it would be this one. My anecdotal data shows that the earlier a feature team involves the design system team, the more successful the design system is.

Design systems teams that get invited to feature kickoffs or sprint planning exercises have the ability to be the most helpful than when they’re invited during a later implementation phase.

Why? My hypothesis and observation so far is that design systems teams that get invited to kickoffs are conceptually there to help come up with a solution, whereas design system teams that get invited later on are there to supply components. This distinction is important because it signals the strategic importance of the design system to any particular initiative at the company.

The next level to this is to evaluate a design system team’s presence in the conversations when a feature or product is being conceived, before it’s even officially kicked off when a team. This is a strong indicator that an organization sees a design system as part of their competitive advantage as opposed to a production tool with limited strategic benefit.

Another reason this is important is that these different positions often surface very different questions and conversations. It’s much more indicative of the kind of design system a company has:

In implementation kickoff, the design system team is asked, “Do you have components that match what we have in this design?” Because of the timing of this question—later than it could be—the feature team has already missed out on half the benefits of a design system tool.
In feature kickoffs and sprint planning, the design system team is asked, “What components are available in the system that we could use to make our process faster?” This question takes full advantage of the efficiency of a design system tool.
In concept and strategy meetings, the design system team is asked, “What features and products can we create more easily for our customers because we have this design system?” This question leans into a design system as much more than a tool and instead more of a process and a practice.

So, next time your design system team asks how adoption can be increased, suggest instead working on having feature teams invite you into their processes earlier. The closer you tie your design system to feature value, product value, and ultimately organizational value, the more success you’ll see.

Don’t Get Paid What You’re Worth

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 09:01:00 +0000

I’m not a fan of the phrase, “Get paid what you’re worth.”

I love the sentiment. And, to be specific, that sentiment is, “Don’t settle. Don’t accept less than you should. Get that bag.” I agree!

But the phrase itself is problematic.

The first natural question is: how much are you worth?

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How much are you worth?

Let’s start with worldview.

I’m a Christian. I believe God made the Earth and all the people in it, and I believe He loves everyone so much that He would send His only Son to die so that all the people who want to live with Him in heaven for the rest of eternity can do so. If you share this worldview, you probably believe in the Bible, and the Bible has some answers to the question, “how much are you worth?”

Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? —Matthew 6:26, Common English Bible

A capable, intelligent, and virtuous woman… She is far more precious than jewels and her value is far above rubies or pearls. —Proverbs 31:10, Amplified Bible, Classic Edition

For reference, the Sunrise Ruby from Myanmar went for $30.3 million at the Sotheby’s Magnificent Jewels auction in Geneva. Marie Antoinette’s Natural Pearl and Diamond Pendant sold at auction for $36.8 million. Yes, you’re easily worth more than those. But something tells me that if you asked for those numbers at your next performance review, you’d get laughed out of the room.

The average tech worker makes somewhere between $71,000 and $212,000 each year. Even if you have a different worldview than I do, I bet you believe that that range doesn’t come close to capturing what a human is worth.

Does that mean everyone is settling for less than they’re worth? No!

An annual salary isn’t a representation of what someone is worth. An annual salary is a representation of what the opportunity is worth.

Price the moment

I wrote a small book called Pricing Design which teaches a school of thought called value pricing. A common mantra among people who talk about value pricing is, “Price the customer, not the service.” Most people can get down with this idea. You might expect that you could get paid more working at Google or Amazon than you could at a local graphic design shop. Is that because you’re worth more to/at Google or Amazon than you’re worth to the local graphic design shop? No! It’s because the opportunity is greater at a big tech company, for lots of reason. This is pricing the customer.

I have my own spin on that idea too. Instead of pricing a service or a role or even the customer, price the moment. A year ago, a senior designer may have been able to easily command a $200k salary from many employers. Today, after loads of companies laid off tens of thousands of workers, you’d be lucky to even get a email reply for a job application. And no, it’s not because your work is bad. It’s because the moment changed. The supply and demand ratio shifted massively. So the price for your work needs to shift too. Otherwise, you’re not living in the reality of the moment. You’re living in a fantasy world.

The best way to price the moment is to know confidently how much value you create. (And yes, that’s easier said than done.)

How much value do you create?

Let’s explore an example. How much value does a designer at Netflix create?

A tough question to answer, for lots of reasons!

A place to start is to determine how Netflix even defines value, and Socratic method our way there.

As a public company, I imagine shareholder value is an important metric.

What drives shareholder value? I would guess that the more subscribers Netflix has, the more the stock price rises.

What makes subscribers join and stay? Maybe constantly finding movies and shows they’d enjoy watching.

How does Netflix do that? With techniques like artwork personalization.

What if you were one of the people who came up with the idea for artwork personalization? What if you were one of the people who designed a good portion of those thumbnails? You’d have a good starting point for the fact that you’re directly contributing to increasing value at the company, as reflected in stock price or company revenue.

In 2017, Netflix’s revenues were around $10B; in 2023, revenues were around $30B. That’s a $20B increase. What percentage of that increase was artwork personalization responsible for? If artwork personalization was 1 of 1,000 other experiments Netflix was running, then artwork personalization contributed about $20M to these revenues ($20B ÷ 1,000 experiments).

If you were 1 of 20 people that worked on artwork personalization, perhaps you personally contributed about $1M of value to Netflix ($20M ÷ 20 people).

That’s over 6 years, so each year, perhaps you personally contributed about $166,666.67 of value to Netflix ($1M ÷ 6 years).

If everyone asked to receive every dollar of value they created, Netflix would have no profit (which is exactly why some people prefer to run their own companies instead of working for someone else’s). Instead, it’s more reasonable to ask for a portion of the value you create as a reward for your work. What portion? I like starting with 10%. 10% is a small enough number that people don’t feel like you’re being greedy, but often lucrative enough to you if you’re creating significant measurable value.

In this example, you’d ask for a $16,666.67 annual bonus for the value you created.

It’s the difference between thinking “I just make thumbnails here” vs. “I’m doing work that contributes to the overall value of this company, and, therefore, I want to share in the reward.”

Sound familiar? This this is exact argument at the root of the current Hollywood strike. Notice that when it’s positioned as, “AI is taking my job so I want to be paid more,” it sounds more like whining so people are less sympathetic. That’s a socialist position within a late-stage capitalist context, which is why it rarely works even though it’s sensible. But when it’s positioned as, “I’m creating value here, so without me, everyone’s piece of the pie gets smaller,” it feels much more reasonable. It uses a capitalist argument to combat capitalism.

These are the kinds of stories you want to bring into your performance review at the end of the year. Even better, these are the kinds of stories your manager should be hearing about you and your work every week.

Most people get value pricing wrong because they think it’s about taking the most money you can. They think it’s about ignorantly blurting out the highest number you can with a straight face and blindly hoping the person on the other side of the table agrees. Think it’s zero-sum, that either you win while they lose or they win while you lose.

All of that is the wrong perspective. Whether it’s a service you offer or the salary you’re negotiating or a table you’re selling on Facebook marketplace, value pricing is all about math. There’s a formula:

What I earn = Value created × 10%

The “value created” part is tough to compute, but hopefully the example above gives you some inspiration about other ways you calculate that number.

The nice thing about this approach is that you can show your math openly. If your manager or clients asks how you arrived that this price, show them the formula. Tell them how much value you’ve already created and how much more you’re going to create with and for them. The key is that this is a hypothesis. You don't have to be right about this hypothesis. You just have to have one, something that many designers (and engineers, and tech workers in general) don’t have, because they’re falling back on the arbitrary “getting paid what they’re worth.” That’s usually shorthand for, “This is how much money I want to make,” which isn’t a really compelling argument for anyone who’s actually paying you.

If you’re wrong about the value you create, what’s great is that they’ll tell you! People love proving other people wrong, so play that up! Let them correct you on how much value you create; most times, they actually end up proving that you create even more value than you thought you did.

Pitch your value

So, don’t try to get paid what you’re worth. Instead, know how much value you create, and keep a mutually acceptable proportion of it (start at 10%) that takes care of your wants and needs. It’s not as slick of a catchphrase, but it’ll get you paid.

If you’ve attempted to use this formula and want some feedback, reply and share it with me and I’ll give you my thoughts on it.

Salary and Income Transparency: Now With More Context!

Dan Mall — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 17:41:00 +0000

This last week especially, my social media feeds have been full of people talking about how their work in design and tech relate to the amount of money they make and earn. I’m a big proponent of talking openly about money, as I think it helps to surface possibilities to people that they may have not imagined for themselves otherwise. My biggest gripe about how people talk about money is that they often leave out one of the most important parts: context.

This week, I made my contribution to that conversation by finally publishing something I’ve been meaning to for a while now: my salary and income details over the last 19 years of my career.

More importantly, I added some context to each job so it was more than just a table of numbers. Still though, there’s a lot more context to share that was missing. I’d like to share some more of that context here.

One of the pieces that seemed to resonate most were these lines:

Making $10k while staying up late is so different than making $10k while you sleep. Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the whole story. There’s a such thing as good money and bad money, even if the amount is the same.

I’d like to tell a few more stories about some of the numbers here.

Income to Hours Worked

I think one of the assumptions that comes with sharing annual salary/income numbers is that you’ve worked as hard or much as humanly possible for the most amount of money you can make. Let me be clear: I rarely was. That’s not to say I wasn’t trying to do a good job—I was—but I was also trying to optimize for having a good, challenging job that I enjoyed with enough time to enjoy other people and activities in my life. I wasn’t trying to get rich. (More on that in a minute.)

Here’s a relative-scale graph that shows how much money I made vs. how much I worked each year.

This pulls in decades of data from the accounting software and time-tracking software I’ve used. I’ve never actually looked at this data this way until writing this post. A few things worth pointing out:

For the most part, the first half of my career seems to show that the more I worked, the more money I made. The most significant deviance to that came in 2018 when I worked almost as much as I ever had but made significantly less than I had in a long time. In retrospect and according to this chart, that seems to have started a mindshift that working more isn't related to earning more, and you can see that I immediately started to work less over the following years.

Related, 1-2 years later, I experienced a bit of a flip where I was earning more than I ever had and working less than I had in about a decade. Living the dream, right?! It would have been, except that was probably when I was the most burnt out in my career. More on that in the next section.

Optimizing for money—or not

Back to the point about not optimizing for getting rich. For most of my career, even to this day, I’ve been intentionally focused on other things like growing my skills and learning new things. Otherwise, I think I would have made some different decisions.

One in particular comes to mind.

My wife (Em) and I got married in 2008. Both having lived in Philadelphia for most of our lives to that point, we decided it was time for a new adventure together as a newly married couple. I interviewed at a few places and got enticing offers back from 2 places: digital agency Big Spaceship in Brooklyn, New York and Facebook in Palo Alto, California.

My interview experiences were very wildly different.

Facebook flew my Em and me to Palo Alto for the weekend, rented us a car, and gave us a spending stipend. I did a 6-hour interview loop, including a little bit of time with Zuck. We had a team dinner with the entire design team I would have been working with. They treated me with such respect and kindness, and I got the sense they were all a bit impressed with me and excited to have me on the team. As Em grilled them about their outside-of-work activities, they mentioned intramural Facebook sports teams and frequent weekend hackathons.

In my Big Spaceship interview, I first talked to an associate tech director. As I presented my work, he told me pretty candidly that my stuff wasn’t nearly as good as the other art directors there, and I might have trouble hanging with them. Then I met with 2 art directors who did little more than grunt and shrug as I walked through my work. Lastly, I interviewed with the CEO, who was very polite but seemed to signal that he wasn't sure if I'd be as much of a benefit to the company as a liability.

Facebook extended an offer for $150k plus equity and benefits. Big Spaceship extended me an offer for $80k, and I had to start in less than a month.

As Em and I considered the options, it felt like I’d be making way more money at Facebook but also working all the time (which reinforced my experience at the time that more money only comes with more work). We agreed that conditions for taking the Facebook job was that we’d give it three years and after that, work had to take an intentional backseat so we could play with all that cash for at least three years afterwards. Big Spaceship was one of my dream jobs for such a long time. Seeing their early Nike work was partly what made me want to get into digital design in the first place. Call me a masochist, but I was motivated by the fact that they weren’t impressed by me. I liked the fact that I was an underdog and would really have to prove myself to get respect. It felt like a place where I could grow my skill exponentially by working hard but still have a life outside of work.

I accepted the Big Spaceship role and we quickly moved from Philly to New York in just a few weeks. That tech director (Jamie) that gave me such direct feedback is one of my best friends. The CEO (Mike) who questioned my contribution potential became one of my best mentors, and to this day, I still I call him anytime I need some career advice. I wouldn’t have been able to start SuperFriendly without the experience I got at Big Spaceship.

A few years ago while driving, I was listening to the first lecture in OpenAI CEO’s Sam Altman’s “How to Start a Startup” series called “Why to Start a Startup.” He was scrutinizing the idea that people can have more impact and make more money at their own startups vs. joining an established one. He said, “Even if you joined Facebook as employee number 1000, so you joined like 2009…” and my years perked up, because that would’ve been me. He finished the thought:

Even if you joined Facebook as employee number 1000, so you joined like 2009, you still make $20M… That's how you should be benchmarking when you're thinking about what you might make as an entrepreneur.

I immediately pulled over to the side of the road, shocked. I called Em immediately, and we had a good chuckle over it.

Income to Hours Worked to Level of Engagement

One more piece of context to layer in here: finding a balance between how much you can earn against how little you need to work is important, but how engaged are you? A lot of the reason my feeds have been talking about design is the proliferation of all the tweets saying things like, “I make $1M ARR with 0 employees and work only 2 hours/week.” It sounds like a dream come true! What I wonder is: how much do they love that? If they love that, they truly are living the dream. But I don’t exactly accept that it’s a good thing by default, mostly because I have an opposite experience.

From 2019–2021, SuperFriendly’s total revenue was $5,032,251, which is more than we’d ever grossed in a three-year period. I personally made $1,082,270 across that timeframe; that’s Monopoly money, more money than I’d ever made in that amount of time. I was working the least I had in a long time… about 30 hours/week or less. I was also burnt out. But not from overwork, as you might expect.

This was the timeframe that I decided to experiment with scaling SuperFriendly. Together with my team, we scaled to our largest amount of concurrent contractors (70) and concurrent accounts (28). I just… didn’t care. Profits were dwindling. More importantly, we weren’t really moving anything forward in our mission to “create better opportunities for people who wouldn’t have them otherwise.” I reflected on this more in my SuperFriendly 2021 wrap-up.

Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term “burnout” in 1975 and defined it as:

Emotional exhaustion: the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
Depersonalization: the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion
Decreased sense of accomplishment: an unconquerable sense of futility or feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

I cared about what we were doing at SuperFriendly a lot. As I moved farther away from client work, I moved farther away from our SuperFriends, so my work was definitely much more depersonalized. As a result, I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. I spent most of my time coaching our Directors and Producers, but that didn’t seem to help or hurt anything. I think the combination of these things is why I was burnt out.

Or was it because there was a MASSIVE. GLOBAL. PANDEMIC. happening during this timeframe? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to decouple these things.

It’s easy to look at money out of context. Was it worth it to work 20-30 hours a week for 3-years and make 7 figures? Of course! I’d do it again 100 times over. But was it worth it to 20-30 hours a week for 3-years and make 7 figures while being emotionally exhausted? With that additional context, I’m not sure I would do it over again the same way.

Consent to Proceed

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:48:00 +0000

We problem-solving types are a real pain-in-the-butt sometimes. We’re usually bad listeners. We’re ever ready to submit a solution before people are even halfway done telling us where they’re stuck.

The standard advice is to listen to understand, not to reply. Let them finish their full thought and think through it before you offer a response.

Lately, I’ve been adding one extra thing to this pause:

I ask for consent to proceed.

When someone’s sharing with me—it could be a friend, a mentee, a former client, my kids, my wife—I try to listen to every detail. When they’re done sharing, I say, “I have some thoughts about that. Can I share them with you?”

It’s an extra moment of verification that they actually want my feedback. Sometimes people just wanna vent and don’t need problem-solving. I used to try asking at the beginning of the conversation, but it felt more awkward, like when you call roadside assistance because your tire blew out on the highway and ask you for a bunch of unrelated personal information like your home address before they actually help you. I JUST NEED YOU TO SEND A TOW TRUCK WHO CARES WHAT MY HOME ADDRESS IS RIGHT NOW?!!! I digress.

When someone I care about wants to talk, I let them talk. No need to preface; lay it on me. Then, when they’re done, I ask for consent to share my reactions. Sometimes they say no, and I respect their boundaries. Other times, that’s exactly what they want, and I feel extra confident in responding because they gave me permission to do what I wanted to do anyway.

The first time you do this, you might feel like you’re being extra annoying. Like, they’re talking to you because they want your opinion, right? So why do you have to ask?

There’s a concept in basketball called an “extra pass,” where a semi-open player looks to pass the ball one more time to a more open player for a higher-percentage shot.

For the first player, making the extra pass could feel annoying. A lot of times, this first player is a better shooter than the person they’d be making the extra pass to. But that’s why the extra pass works. The defense usually is drawn to the first, better shooter, leaving the second person more open. It’s trading a good shot by a great shooter for a better shot from a slightly less good shooter. The tradeoff is almost always worth it.

Asking for consent is annoying when you’re not used to asking for it. But you’re trading a good shot for a better one. When you have consent, you can proceed more confidently. It allows for a better, more open conversation.

Do it enough times and it’ll feel more natural to you. Do it enough times and people will start to appreciate it about you.

The more you develop this dynamic with the people you talk to, the more you can unlock some “advanced” techniques too.

I recently talked to a friend who had a parenting dilemma, something I’m almost always reticent to talk about. Parenting is often so subjective and context-relevant that telling someone how to parent feels inappropriate to me, so I tend to shy away from it. But, it was a close friend and they seemed desperate, so we continued.

After they were done sharing their story, I asked for consent to proceed. But I didn’t only say, “I have thoughts; can I share them?” I used a variation: “I have thoughts. Can I challenge some of your thinking here? Can I push?” This question gave my friend a extra moment to prepare mentally and emotionally to be challenged. (I know this because they old me afterwards how much they appreciated this gesture.) If they weren’t ready for that, asking them for consent gave them one last out before some tough love would be directed their way.

With a different friend, we have a long-established technique of asking for consent to proceed, which unlocks a new kind of “advanced” technique. When they’re sharing a thought with me, they build the consent right into their story. Somewhere along as they’re talking to me, they’ll say something like, “And you have permission to push me on this one,” or “I’d really just love to hear what you think I’m doing well here… I’m not ready for criticism just yet.” It sets the context and the boundaries of the conversation we’re going to have, and it establishes both of our willingness—or unwillingness—to go there.

Have you used consent to proceed in your conversations and relationships? How has it helped you? Reply and let me know.

Add a Chapter

Dan Mall — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 14:05:00 +0000

I try hard not to scold or yell at my kids right before they go to bed. I try hard not to yell at them in general, but before bed especially. I don’t like the idea that the last memory they have of the day is a negative one, that they were a disappointment or a failure or anything like that.

But I don’t always make good on this goal. We’re all tired at the end of the day and sometimes there’s laundry all over the floor or dishes that didn’t get put in the sink or something that ultimately results in more work for me than I anticipated. So I scold. And I see in their faces that it hurts.

Once I cool down, I almost always regret it. And I’m disappointed in myself that I, as the adult, couldn’t have the discipline to wait until morning or say it in a different way. But I’m resigned.

“Well,” I think, “I guess that day was a wash. Nothing I can do about that.”

I recently came across some advice that changed I mind. (I wish I could remember where I learned about this. If this sounds familiar to you, please let me know so I can credit the source.)

I read somewhere to think of this day like a story from the child’s perspective. For example:

In the morning, I went to school.
In the afternoon, I came home and played.
At night, Dad yelled at me for my room being messy.

This story (oversimplified to make the point) has an unhappy ending.

As a parent who influenced that story, I often think, “Well, I screwed up that story. All I can do is try to help make tomorrow’s story a better one.” I think the truth is that that story’s finished.

But that’s not the truth.

As parents, we can always add a new chapter to the story.

The next morning, I can wake up with my kid, give them a giant hug, and apologize for not treating them well the night before. I can say, “I’m sorry I yelled at you last night. I’m frustrated that I had more work to do after a long day of already working hard. When you get home from school, can we clean up your room together and celebrate afterwards by playing some video games together?”

Now, the story is different. It looks more like this:

In the morning, I went to school.
In the afternoon, I came home and played.
At night, Dad yelled at me for my room being messy.
The next morning, we connected.
In the afternoon, we cleaned my room together, listening to my favorite music and telling silly jokes.
Afterwards, we played video games and I beat him in Mario Kart twice. I'm amazing!

“Dad yelled at me for my room being messy” still happened; I can’t change that. But, instead of that being the conclusion, it’s just a plot point.

We can change the ending by adding more chapters.

What I love about this idea is that there’s no statute of limitations on when we add new chapters. Yep, you can add to last night’s story this morning. You can add to last year’s story this year. Parents with older kids or adult kids: you can add to stories from 20 years ago today.

The story is always continuing to be written, so don’t be afraid to add more chapters.

Config 2023 Recap

Dan Mall — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 12:40:00 +0000

I just got back home from 5 days in San Francisco for Figma’s Config. At 8,500 in-person attendees (and many more online), it was the largest conference I’ve ever attended and spoken at. I’ve been to almost 300 conferences since I started speaking in 2008; this post contains my reflections on Config 2023 as well as some general tips about how I make the most of a conference experience.

My talk

I meet with many people who are discouraged about their design systems. That could be because they’re just starting and they foresee a daunting mountain of work ahead of them. Or, they’ve had a design system for years and are disheartened at the lack of traction against their expectations or see steadily accruing design or technical debt. I wanted to do a talk that encouraged everyone that it may not be as bad as it seems, and I wanted to share actionable tips that attendees could put into practice immediately. I’m honored that my talk was selected among thousands of submitted proposals.

The preparation process to give a talk at Config was rigorous. They assign a content reviewer that helps you prepare your talk for the 2 months leading up to the event. Luckily for me, I was paired with my longtime friend Rogie King.

It usually takes me about 3–4 weeks to create a talk from scratch. Fortunately, this was a talk that I’ve given before a few times, so I only needed a few tweaks to get it tailored to the audience at Config.

A few days before the event, Rogie messaged me to ask if I’d be willing to take part in a design competition on stage that turned out to be Figmatch. Given that I’ve had practice doing this kind of thing before, I happily obliged!

My team was amazing: I was partnered up with Clara Ujiie, Anna Fine, and Joey Lamelas. I hadn’t met any of them before, but I’ve been admirers of their work for a while. In our initial prep, I sneakily volunteered to take on any onstage presentation duties so they could focus on designing. I brought my best dad jokes and trash talk. The strategy paid off: the audience voted us the winners!

The best part of in-person conferences

I used to relish in-person conferences as a way to learn and teach (not to mention a great excuse to travel).

Then COVID-19 happened.

Many conferences moved online, and I became a quick convert. I loved the idea that I could still attend events and present my own stories from the comfort of my home office without leaving my family for days.

After a few years of this, it dawned on me that the beauty of in-person conferences was never the talks for me. It was always the experiences I could have with other people. (I got glimpses of this from Dann Petty’s Epicurrence events, but it really solidified for me over the last few years).

When I attend in-person conferences now, I’ll try and attend at least a few talks, but I also make it a point to linger a bit in common areas and strike up conversations with whomever’s around. This is great for catching up with old friends I haven’t seen in a while, but I find that it never feels like enough time to catch up with everyone for long enough. This time, I tried to be content with just a few minute catch-up and made a point to follow up and schedule some Zoom time with people I want to talk more with.

What I like even more is being able to meet new people. Over the last few months, I’ve made a concerted effort to share more online, especially on my newsletter, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, doubling down on what I’ve done for years on this blog. It often feels like shouting into the ether, without much response as to its value. But meeting new people who tell me how much a specific article or talk has meant to them in their career development is a sweet salve to the otherwise disenchantment that my efforts mean nothing to anyone. It really fills my cup.

When my cup is full, I love using that energy to fill others’ as well. This is the beauty of in-person experiences that remote ones don’t always make room for by default.

I did two things at Config that I’m going to try to make a habit at every in-person conference I attend from now on:

Host a basketball game
Host a special dinner

🏀

Conferences tend to be fairly sedentary experiences, so I like the idea of doing something active somewhere within them. I got 10 people together for some 5-on-5 full court action at a local outdoor court. Afterwards, one of the attendees (Moghid Saad) shared a sentiment from the Config zine that I thought summed it up perfectly:

It’s been said “you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Here are the highlights from our game:

🍽️

Similarly, I’m a big believer that you can learn a lot about someone by sharing a meal with them. Conferences can be intimidating if it’s your first one or you’re attending alone or if you’re an introvert. They can also be really special and memorable too.

I offered to host a special dinner for folks who haven’t had an experience like this before. I ended up doing a tasting menu with 7 other Config attendees at Sorrel, and the food and company were spectacular! Here are the amazing dishes we got to eat together:

Conferences are about community

Overall, I had a great time at Config. Yes, Figma announced some amazing new features and I learned a lot from the talks I attended. But I loved being able to meet so many new people and make some great new friends. For me, that’s what makes an in-person conference so worthwhile.

Mastering Manual and Mundane Work

Dan Mall — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, I manually created and exported 28 certificates of completion for the latest cohort of people that have completed courses from Design System University. According to my time tracking software, this took me 2 hours and 56 minutes to do.

I could have found some way to automate this. All the ingredients are there: the certificates are heavily templated and very little changes from one to the other except the content... a perfect candidate for some automation. There’s probably some plugin or bot or software that can generate all of these certificates in seconds, given the proper configuration.

Was it a waste of time to do manually?

I say no. Here’s why.

First, consider this sarcastic quote from Google engineer Zhuowei Zhang:

Never spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it

Often times, it’ll take longer to figure out the automation than to just finish it manually.

But even if I could automate it just as fast or faster than doing it manually, I still think the manual work is worthwhile. Maybe not all of the time, but certainly not none of the time.

Entrepreneur JK Molina said it well:

Sometimes improving... is as simple as being willing to do what others are not.

The founder of Grubhub walked all over San Francisco to collect menus to then manually input the menu items into the system. There was no API of menu items they could simply utilize. If there was, anyone could have built that business. It was solely because the data wasn’t easily available that only the people willing to manually collect and input it could start that business. The willingness and ability to do the hard work that other won’t is a major competitive advantage.

In his talk "Do Things the Long, Hard, Stupid Way," designer Frank Chimero talks about working this way as a gift to those who are the recipients of the end result of this kind of work. I’m a sucker for multiple course tasting menus. The only way to eat anywhere from 4- to 22-course meals is for each course be fairly small, often about one bite. Despite their size, sometimes these courses take hours of preparation to make and assemble with meticulous instruments of precision like tweezers and particular sauces... and only moments to eat. But it’s this long, hard, stupid way that makes me enjoy this kind of meal more than most. Truly, it is a gift to my palate.

But it’s more than just a gift to those who experience the results of this way of working. It’s a gift to those who work this way too.

When I’m training new designers, I try to give them some manual work as early as I think they can handle it. This can be something like creating a spreadsheet of 100 companies they want to apply to or sketching 100 different logos for a fictitious product. Their first instinct is usually to try and automate it. Automation is great when it helps you to work smarter, but my hypothesis is that they try to automate it because they’re trying to get out of doing it, because they’re scared of it. They’re scared that they’ll be bored or that they’re above this kind of work or that design is supposed to be doing more glamorous things that this.

In my experience, there are 2 ways to face work that you’re scared of:

Find a way to avoid doing it.
Do it so much that it’s no longer scary.

The first way precludes a skill. The second way procures one.

The first way requires smarts. The second way requires bravery.

I’ll take bravery over smarts any day.

For new designers, I want them to experience "flow" as early as they can in their career. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term to mean "the feeling when things are going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness." In his book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, he outlines the elements that describe flow:

There are clear goals every step of the way.
There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
There is a balance between challenges and skills.
Actions and awareness are merged.
Dimensions are excluded from consciousness.
There is no worry of failure.
Self-consciousness disappears.
The sense of time becomes distorted.
The activity becomes autotelic.

For new designers, #3, #6, and #7 work together to beat you down. New designers are often in a state where they’re still fighting their tools. It’s hard to design logos in Illustrator because the pen tool is weird and Bézier curves are a mind-bender. You can’t get into an effortless state of flow because new skills require conscious effort.

Manual, mundane work normalizes all of that. The fact that you could "do it with your eyes closed" is a feature, not a bug. It’s a quick way to achieve flow. As your skills grow, the challenges can grow too, allowing you to achieve flow on more difficult tasks. But no one starts this way. If you don’t have the practice to do simple, hard work when you first start, you won’t have the muscles developed to more complex, hard work when you’re more senior.

When it comes to doing mundane work, a lot of people think their job is to find or create a solution. They don’t realize that the real job is to be the solution.

Lastly—and somewhat ironically—doing manual work is often an antidote to burnout. In her book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Emily Nagoski defines burnout by three components:

Emotional exhaustion: the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
Depersonalization: the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion
Decreased sense of accomplishment: an unconquerable sense of futility or feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

Manual, mundane work addresses points 1 and 3 head on. Manual work isn’t very emotionally exhausting because you probably care too little about it, not too much. And because manual work is usually pretty easy to do, you can often accomplish it in less time than you might think.

Which brings us to point number 2: one of the biggest reasons people burn out is that they don’t care about what they’re doing, often because they’ve lost touch with the people they’re actually doing it for.

The only reason to do manual, mundane work—to do something the long, hard, stupid way—is because you care. That’s the difference between the best designers and everyone else. Or the best chefs. Best athletes. Best plumbers. Best anything. They care more about the people experiencing what they do that they’re willing to do a little more than everyone else.

When you care more, everyone wins.

How to Pitch Anything to Anyone

Dan Mall — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 19:05:00 +0000

Through running my own agency for a decade and working at others for a decade more, I’ve been involved in winning somewhere from $10 million to $15 million of work. Needless to say, I’ve gotten pretty good at pitching.

Sure, pitching is very common in service businesses, especially within the sales divisions of those businesses, but don’t make the mistake of thinking pitching is only for salespeople. Everyone pitches and everyone gets pitched, probably more often than they think on both accounts. When you see an ad for a candy bar, you’re being pitched. When you lobby for a promotion, you’re pitching.

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Parents of young kids are constantly pitching. Have you ever seen a parent in a public place try to get a screaming child to calm down? The frazzled parent resorts to some version of “you have to listen to me because I’m your parent”—one of the worst pitches possible. The wise parent is unflappable and withholds attention until the child chills out or isn’t too good for a snack or iPad bribe… all pretty great pitches.

I’ve learned that there are 2 important ingredients in a great pitch:

1. Surface FOMO

First, if you’re pitching something to someone, you must communicate that you have something that they want. Pitching is a very particular way of asking for something. If you pitch something to someone that they don’t want, no transaction will happen. It’s a simple, obvious guideline that so many unintentionally violate but not being intentional about this part.

I’m fortunate that I regularly get messages from people trying to pitch me on working for/with them at their company. I often accept these conversations to see what’s out there. I’m almost always disappointed because their pitches are so bad. I always politely ask a version of, “Why would I want to work at your company?” The answers are usually awful, because they’re not thought through:

“You have the opportunity to become a senior design leader.” Sir, I’ve been a senior design leader for many years now.
“You’ll have a chance to make an impact at scale.” Ma’am, have you seen my portfolio and the clients I’ve worked with?
“You’ll make $XXX in total comp.” Son, I make twice that right now.
“You’ll have full autonomy.” Bruh, I run my own business.

Clearly, they haven’t done their homework because they’re pitching me things I don’t want or need, so most of these conversations don’t go anywhere.

(Note: I have a totally different approach if I’m the one who applied for the job instead of them reaching out to me. If I applied, I’m the one pitching, not them. So, the onus is on me to pitch them on why I’m something they want. Whomever wants it more should do the work.)

If you’ve done your homework, make sure part of your pitch reinforces what they don’t have that they want, and that you’re a great avenue to getting it.

2. Articulate the potential profit

The second important ingredient in a great pitch: you must communicate that they’ll gain more than they’ll lose in this transaction. In other words, what you’re pitching has to be profitable for them (even if that’s in a different form than monetary profit). Most pitches ask someone to give up something. That’s ok, as long as they get something more in return. Financial examples are the clearest ones. Many people who buy a share in the stock market for $5/share do so if they expect it’ll rise to $10/share. A company might spend $25,000 for a new website if they believe that new website would earn them an additional $50,000 this year. Give up something to get something more is a classic investment strategy. Through that lens, most pitches are a request for investment, so the person pitching should make clear how the gain outweighs the loss.

(This is why value pricing is a natural approach when pitching, because it keeps the conversation focused on what the other party gets.)

Some people treat pitching like zero sum: if one party gains, the other has to lose. This is nonsense! The best pitches are the ones where everyone wins, and the mechanics of that are that one party’s success is dependent on the other’s success. The most obvious versions of this are things like commission or royalty structures. If you can pitch a win-win option, it significantly increases the likelihood that you’ll get a yes.

Examples of good pitches

So, next time you’re pitching someone, try to make clear what’s in it for them, no matter how large or small. Here are a few examples:

Sending a LinkedIn connection: ”Connect with me to get someone who will like every single one of your posts!”
Pitching your boss on a promotion and a raise: “By giving me this new position, I’ll make back my annual $4500 raise in less than 2 months with all the new sales I’ll be able to garner.”
Get your 11-year old to wash the dishes every day: “I’ll give you $10/week and you’ll have enough money for your end-of-school party in a month.”

And yes, I’m speaking from personal experience on that last one.

Pre-Launch Jitters

Dan Mall — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 16:12:00 +0000

I did my first public talk about design in 2008. Since then, I’ve spoken at around 250 events. I still get nervous before each talk.

I thought it’d go away at some point. And that would probably be the point that I was “a pro.” When that didn’t happen after a few years, it made me question whether I had the right to be on stage.

Until I started to learn more about nervousness.

Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Adele, Ozzy Osbourne, Barbara Streisand, Eminem, and so many more world-renowned professional performers have stage fright. That doesn’t make them any less professional—or awesome.

We’re supposed to get nervous when we go on stage. It’s our bodies’ natural stress response to warn us of possible threats. And there are threats—even if they’re more imagined or perceived than real—when we present ourselves authentically in front of others. What if they see me for who I am and judge me? What if they don’t like what I have to say? What if they already know what I’m saying? What if they don’t care?

I’m only a few days away from opening Design System University to the public on June 5, and I’m noticing that I have the same nervousness I usually have before stepping out onto a stage. I feel the jitters. What if no one shows up? What if it’s too expensive? What if it’s too cheap? What if no one cares about the thing I’ve been working on for months?

For me, the solution is to try and articulate my specific fears, acknowledge the thoughts and the feelings, and not let them stop me from doing what I set out to do.

A few year into doing public speaking, a fellow speaker asked me if I got nervous before giving talks. I said yes, and they asked me to describe the feeling. I mentioned a few things: about 30 minutes before going on stage, I feel extra alert, things move a bit in slow motion, and I feel like I have to pee a little. They said, ”That sounds like adrenaline.”

Huh.

It does. Ever since that conversation, I wait for the adrenaline rush. I can anticipate it now. And shoot: I think I actually like it. (Am I even addicted to it? Is that what’s kept me speaking for the past 15 years?)

Three days before launching DSU, I think I’m feeling the adrenaline rush. The excitement of hard work (hopefully) paying off. The thrill of putting something new into the world that wasn’t there before. The risk that people might not care, but the potential reward that they might.

Artificial Intelligence & Humanity

Dan Mall — Sat, 27 May 2023 17:28:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of AI. I use it a lot—multiple uses per day for ChatGPT, Bard, and Midjourney—and I’ve come up with a few guidelines for where I do and don’t rely on it:

Overall, I rely on on AI to help me design more and design faster.

I don’t rely on AI to help me design better.

I definitely don’t rely on AI to design for me or instead of me.

For better or worse, the process I learned in design school was:

Come up with a ton of ideas
Choose a promising set from within those ideas
Riff on those ideas, even if creating more in the combination and variation of them
Converge those ideas until arriving at a promising solution (or set of solutions)

Step #1 takes forever. It always does. When I’m designing logos, my first step is to draw 100 versions. At its worst, there’s a separation between the designers who are willing to do this and the designers who aren’t. Not to mention the designers that are capable of doing this vs. the designers that aren’t.

This is where Midjourney helps. (I’ll use “Midjourney” as a placeholder for “general AI tool” in this example.) Because I’m human, I’m not as good at coming up with the quantity of ideas that a computer can in the same amount of time. Where it often takes me hours or days to draw 100 different logos, Midjourney can do that in a matter of minutes.

Midjourney sucks at step #2. Of the four images generated, how would it know which are good and which are bad? Only the prompter can decide, because they know the criteria, and there’s no way to share it yet. I imagine that’s why there’s the ability to request variations on any particular image. Why doesn’t Midjourney do variations automatically? Aside from business reasons, it doesn’t have a way to determine which of the original ideas to riff on.

Once it’s directed to riff, though, Midjourney is great at step #3. And it goes back to sucking at step #4.

What can we learn from these steps? AI is great anything quantity-related and bad and anything quality-related.

Why is AI so bad at the quality-related part? One reason is that it works too fast. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, media theorist Steven Johnson talks about the importance of pace in originality:

…snap judgments of intuition are rarities in the history of world-changing ideas. Most hunches that turn into important innovations unfold over much longer time frames. They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there’s an interesting solution to a problem that hasn’t yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength… Because these slow hunches need so much time to develop, they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. But that long incubation period is also their strength, because true insights require you to think something that one has thought before in quite the same way.

Many of the planned innovations in AI seem to promise an even speedier generation process with higher quality results. But maybe what we need is a slower generation process, with room to ruminate and let ideas collide on their own. It takes me 2 days to draw 100 logos and 2 minutes for Midjourney. I used to think it was the “100 logos” part that was crucial, but lately I’m entertaining the idea that it might be “2 days” part that’s the secret ingredient instead.

That’s not to say that speed isn’t valuable… only that when speed is deployed is an important factor. I’m reminded of the anecdote of famed graphic designer Paula Scher drawing the logo for the new Citi—a merger between Citibank and Travelers Insurance Company—in a matter of seconds in a meeting. As she explains it:

Travelers Insurance Company had a red umbrella [in its logo]. [Citi has] a “t”. The bottom of a lowercase “t” has a little hook on the bottom. If you put an arc on the top, that’s an umbrella.

When asked later how she was able to arrive at that idea so quickly, she said:

It happened in a second. How can it be that you talk to someone and it’s done in a second? But it is done in a second… it’s done in a second after 34 years. It’s done in a second, after every experience, and every movie, and after everything in my life that’s in my head.

This logo idea comes from the all of the things she’s experienced in her life. I might even posit that Scher is the only one that could have come up with this logo, as no one else on the planet has the same combination of experiences that she’s had. Said differently, the combination of her own experiences is the training data for how to generate this so quickly.

Along those lines, it could be safe to assume that the right training data can lead to similar results. For example, if we could somehow feed Midjourney all of Paula Scher’s experiences, could it conceivably design logos they way she does? Could it have arrived at the Citi logo?

I say no. I’m no expert on machine learning, so please do correct me here if I’m grossly misinterpreting, but, as I understand it, diffusion—the kind of model Midjourney and other image generators like it use—works by understanding the relationship between an image and the text used to describe it, at scale. So, if it finds millions of images that relate the word “cyclops” to an image of a face with only one eye as opposed to two, the likelihood is high that a prompt containing the word “cyclops” desires a one-eyed face as a result. In other words, it leans heavily on averages; the closer the training data matches an average, the higher degree of confidence that the result is more “correct,” or at least desirable.

The problem is that this is the polar opposite of what we consider creativity to be. Creativity isn’t about averages. It’s about the outliers, sometimes the one thing that’s different than all the rest. Often times, the only thing we can credit for that deviation is serendipity.

Back to Johnson:

…serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you’ve made is meaningful to you.

To date, AI has little criteria on understanding what’s meaningful to me, or you, or us. Because, as humans, we’re really bad about understanding what’s meaningful to us, and why. We laugh and cry at the oddest things. We sometimes find pleasure in the mundane, and we’re sometimes apathetic at the pleasurable. So the only way for AI to figure out something that we haven’t is for the creation to surpass its creator.

Until AI can figure out that “happy“ part, it’s just accidents. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either; the pieces of my design process that thrive on accidents—whether happy or not—are the pieces I’m happy to outsource to the machines. If I embrace the role of AI as an accident generator, then I’d gladly give it all the areas of my life where accidents have little penalty: the parts that have little to do with my humanity. I find it best said by novelist SJ Sindu:

We don’t need AI to make art. We need AI to write emails and clean the house and deliver the groceries so humans can make more art.

The “Free” Part of “Full Price or Free”

Dan Mall — Fri, 19 May 2023 11:40:00 +0000

In Full Price or Free, I wrote about a pricing strategy that helps me decide how I want to work with my clients. Many of the replies focused on the same concern: what happens if clients pick the free option but you don’t want them to?

I love this question, because it exposes one of the major reasons people find it so difficult to be compensated well for their work. Clients aren’t in charge of prices. You are. Probably an obvious statement, but I’ve met so many freelancers and agency owners who don’t act like this. I bet it’s some combination of the “the customer is always right” and “he who has the gold makes the rules” mantras making them feel like the power dynamic works against them.

Clients can only pick a price that you offer. If you don’t want them to pick free, don’t offer it.

Which begs the question: why and when should you work for free?

I’ve done a lot of free work in my career, some of which I’ve felt great about and some of which I haven’t. In the versions I felt great about, the major difference is that I still felt I was getting compensated, even if it wasn’t financially. If you’re looking for a starting guideline:

Work for free when there’s another kind of immediate compensation available. Don’t work for free when there’s no immediate compensation available.

Examples:

I’ve done free work before for full creative control (compensation: guaranteed portfolio piece).
I’ve done free work for causes I believe in (compensation: pride).
I’ve done free work before to learn a new skill or technique (compensation: education).
I’ve done free work before to be owed a favor that I can redeem in later (compensation: relational equity).
I’ve done free work before to pay back a favor that I owed (compensation: integrity = relational equity).
I’ve done free work before because I thought it’d be fun (compensation: pleasure).

You can also have any or all of these things and get financial compensation too. In these scenarios, I was willing to do the work solely for these alternate forms of compensation.

The phrase “immediate compensation” is an important one here, especially the “immediate” part. I’ll almost never do free work for the hope or promise of future compensation, whether financial or otherwise. There are way too many opportunities out there to delay at least some kind of compensation.

So, don’t be afraid to work for free. Just make sure there’s actually something in it for you.

Full Price or Free

Dan Mall — Fri, 12 May 2023 17:55:00 +0000

I have two modes of working with people: full price or free. I try not to do anything in the middle, as it gets too messy.

If whatever I’m doing for someone is full price, they get to state their terms and I determine a price, which I’m pretty practiced at. If they agree to the price and I agree to the terms, we’re in business! They generally get to drive as much as they’re comfortable and I’m happy to be of service—and generally less opinionated—because I feel well-compensated.

If whatever I’m doing for someone is free, the dynamic changes. They probably want it more, so their work is basically doing it my way. We’re on my schedule. I decide how much I want to do. They get what they get, and they don’t get upset. If they don’t like it, they can pay full price.

This advice has no doubt saved me from years of finding myself doing the wrong kind of work, and I wish I had started this practice years earlier.

Next time someone wants to work with you, start by deciding whether it should be full price or free.

I’ll Match Your Effort

Dan Mall — Fri, 05 May 2023 10:05:00 +0000

My dad has always had good money habits. As an accountant and CFO, he tried to pass that along to my brother and me from a young age. (It seems to have worked at least a bit, as my brother is now a financial advisor and I wrote a book about pricing.)

One of the techniques that my dad would use when I was a kid was matching my effort. If I wanted to buy a toy or a comic book or a video game, he’d offer to pay for half. I’d have to raise the other half by doing work around the house or saving money my grandparents gave me (or begging my brother to borrow some).

This technique stuck around and scaled well as I got older too. When I got my driver’s license and wanted a car, my dad paid for half of my first used car and I paid for the other half from working part-time at a tuxedo shop that summer. When I went to college, my parents paid half my student loans and I paid the other half over the next 11 years. My parents paid for half of my wedding, and I paid for the other half from a freelance gig (which I royally screwed up, but that’s a story for another time).

In hindsight, this has been one of the most helpful models in my life. It taught me what a blessing and relief it is to have help, and that I’d also have to do my part. I use this approach a lot at home and at work when I’m coaching, teaching, parenting, and mentoring.

When I ran my apprenticeship program, I learned that many new designers and engineers come into the industry thinking there’s one way to do things—one right way and everything else is the wrong way. So they hunt for it, and it’s a frustrating journey. Part of what I try to show them to help them conquer that hurdle is that there are often many avenues to success, and I do that by matching their effort.

For example, a designer might be working on a comp for a landing page where the layout just isn’t working for the content. To help them push through, I’ll sketch a different layout with them, and I’ll ask them to do a few more themselves. If they come back and bring me 2 more sketches (3 total including the first one), I’ll do 3 additional sketches with them. If they bring me 10 sketches, I’ll do 10 additional sketches with them. The irony is that the person who can bring me 20 sketches probably doesn’t need me to do 20 additional sketches with them.

An important principle I try to follow is to not outdo their effort. For new engineers, figuring out what to Google to solve their problem is half the battle. Often times, they’ll Google 1 thing, not find what they’re looking for, give up, and ask me what to Google. I think they’re wanting me to tell them what to search for. Instead, I ask them what they’ve searched for already. If they share 1 search query with me, I’ll suggest 1 additional search query and I’ll encourage them to try and think of 2 more additional things to search for, in which case I’ll give them 2 more then. If they search for 1 thing and I give them 5 things to search for, it kinda became more my project than theirs. Like weightlifting, they’re showing me their capacity. If they only know how to come up with one search query at a time, my job is to slowly help them increase their capacity. If they can only lift 100 pounds, I’d be overloading them by putting another 300 pounds on the bar.

Next time you’re working with someone you’re trying to help grow—a mentee, a direct report, your kid—match their effort and encourage them to slowly increase their capacity. Watch the joy in their eyes as they realize how proud they are of their own accomplishment… even if they had a little help.

The Work Always Wins

Dan Mall — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 10:06:00 +0000

”Wanna know how to take charge of a meeting?” a friend advised me years ago. “Be the first to grab a marker and start taking notes on the whiteboard.”

On a separate occasion, I remember being a senior designer, interviewing creative director candidates to be my boss and run our design team. The first candidate came in and did an excellent job answering our questions. The second candidate came in and, before we even asked our first question, they said, “I made a few slides to share; would you mind if I hook my laptop up to the projector and walk you through them?” Even before seeing the slides, we knew who we wanted to hire.

What's the underlying principle behind both of these stories? The work always wins. Our industry is rife with meetings where we all pontificate ad nauseam. Talk is cheap. Ideas are worthless. Everyone can and does talk; everyone has ideas.

Wanna separate yourself from the pack? Make something while others are busy talking. When everyone just brings ideas, show up with a comp or a prototype or a wireframe deck or pages of sketches. With ideas, there’s no way to tell if someone is sharing something they’ve been thinking about for a long time or making up on the spot. But if you bring a prototype to a meeting? Clearly, it’s pre-meditated. You’re signaling that you’ve spent some time thinking about this beforehand, and that’s likely more effort than others have put in. On a level playing field, people tend to honor or defer to those who have put the work in.

Ideas are hard to say “no” to. For one, sharing ideas is supposed to be a form of divergent thinking, and that’s not an appropriate time for critique. More importantly though, ideas are often too vague and non-specific to know what you’re saying “no” to. So it’s easier to say ”yes,” which often conflates acquiescence with approval. Showing up with something tangible short-circuits vagueness and expedites clarity.

I bet you’ve been in meetings where the time spent talking about a thing is longer than it would have taken to do the thing in the first place. Next time you find yourself in that situation, politely—or silently—excuse yourself to start making the thing that everyone’s talking about. Notice how much sharper that brings things into focus, because the work always wins.

How To Be a Hands-On Leader Even Though You Know You Shouldn’t But You Will Be Anyway

Dan Mall — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:56:00 +0000

Jervis Thompson is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. He was one of my professors when I was in design school at Drexel University. I didn’t just learn from him the material of whatever class I was taking. I also learned how to teach from Jervo (as all his students affectionately call him), as he gave me the opportunity to be a teaching assistant in many of his classes. One of the many phrases I hear in my head to this day when I’m teaching anyone is, “Hands off the keyboard, Dan!” As an experienced practitioner, it’s all too tempting to want to show them how to do it. All too quickly, you’re just doing it for them and they’re not learning anything.

The danger of being a manager, teacher, coach, director, or leader who came up as a practitioner is that you know how to do the thing yourself! In fact, that’s partly what sets you up well for that position: having walked the path yourself makes you an excellent guide. Combined with the pressure of also being responsible for the things your team is working, it’s too easy to take over and do things yourself.

I remember the first performance review I did with the first intern I officially ever managed. I was an art director, 10 years into my career, and she was already a better designer than I was even though she was still in school. Still though, her professional skills weren’t developed yet; she had poor time management and her designs didn’t always meet the requirements. So, I used to finish her work all the time, partially because I was scared she wouldn’t meet the deadline and/or that the work would be rejected by the client.

I’ll never forget what she said to me in her first review. “You have to let me finish my own work.” When I objected that I didn’t think she’d be able to meet our deadlines, she said she didn’t mind if I sent my own work to the client, but she didn’t want me to move her along to the next thing until she finished the current thing. She asked me to let her see her work through and guide her through that so she could learn how to be able to do it on her own eventually. Wise beyond her years. I think I learned more from her in that one meeting than she probably learned from me in a year of me being her manager.

How do you balance managing someone who’s less skilled than you are and still being involved in the work without overstepping? You want them to learn and grow. And you want to keep your skills sharp. What’s the answer?

Do the first 10% of the work.

If you’re working out the UX of a 10-page site, you do the first wireframe and let them do the other 9 wireframes using yours as the starting point. Or, you wireframe 1 out of 10 components on every page.

If you’re working on a client or executive presentation, you design the first slide and let them design the other 9. Or, you write the introduction of the script, and let them write the middle and the conclusion.

If you’re writing some code to perform a certain function, you define the variables and let them work out the logic. Or you define the methods and let them define how they work together.

If you have a 6-year old, you write the first Valentine’s Day card, seal it in the envelope, and tape a piece of candy to it and you let them do the rest for the remaining 14 kids in their class.

Do the 10% that sets expectations of the kind of work you want and creates an environment where they can succeed.

Which 10% you do is important.

Don’t do the easiest 10%. That’s abdicating, not helping.

Don’t do most difficult 10%. That’s coddling, not helping.

Do the 10% that gives them a model of how to do it well and/or what you want, and leave the 90% that they’re now able to because you did that 10% that they wouldn’t have been able to do if you didn’t do that 10%.

That’s how you help grow someone who eventually becomes better at your job than you are.

One Fundamental Decision

Dan Mall — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 10:02:00 +0000

I stumbled across a guideline a few years ago that changed my approach to consulting. It said:

My job as a consultant is to help my client make one fundamental decision they wouldn’t have made without me.

(I think it was a quote from Peter Drucker, but I can’t find the original source. Reply if you know where this comes from.)

Once I’ve done this, my work with that organization is done.

If both my client and I agree that I’ve done this, my work with that organization is a success.

(That doesn’t mean the work has to stop at only one fundamental decision. I could help a client make many fundamental decisions they wouldn’t have made without me. But if I haven’t helped them make at least one, I can’t say I’ve done my job.)

This applies to anyone (or any team) who consider themselves a strategic partner as opposed to a production partner. Stereotypically speaking, some get hired to think and others get hired to do. (And yes, there’s much fertile middle ground between the two.) Years ago, I decided I wouldn’t take on projects that required me to create someone else’s idea, as I always want to impact both strategy as well as execution.

In the past few years, I’ve started to share this idea explicitly with clients at two specific times in talking to them:

In the sales process when we’re deciding if working together is a mutually good fit
Again as a reminder on the first day of working together when we kick off the engagement

Most of my clients loved this framing. (The ones that don’t typically wouldn’t hire me.) But I can remember one client in particular that balked at this idea the first time I mentioned it. When I asked them why, they admitted that they wanted to hire me, not to help them with something that they wouldn’t do without me, but mostly to validate that what they were doing with their design system was on the right track. I hedged that they’d be paying a hefty sum for me to not do much other than give occasional thumbs ups; they wisely retorted that they saw my expertise and presence as an insurance policy, and people pay a lot of money for insurance with the hopes they don’t need to use it.

Generally, I don’t like taking this kind of work. I like making money as much as anyone, and even moreso if I don’t have to do much for it since I’m pretty lazy. In every engagement, however, I want to ensure that my client feels good about the money they’re spending on me, regardless of how much or little the amount is. No one I know likes spending money on insurance, especially if they don’t use it. It’s seen as a necessary evil, which is the opposite of how I want my clients to feel about working with me.

I also want to feel good about the work I’m doing. Sitting around giving thumbs up and down gestures when prompted makes me feel like Commodus from Gladiator: an arrogant and spoiled egotist.

The antidote to that dynamic is to hunt for the fundamental decisions that change trajectory for better or worse. That work is worthy and valuable.

Even if you work in-house, you can still adopt a consultant’s approach. Instead of thinking of it as an engagement you’re hired for, change the framing. What’s one fundamental decision your team wouldn’t have made this week unless you were there? This month? This quarter? This framing keeps the focus on how you add value to the work and the team you’re on.

Otherwise, you’re staff augmentation.

Deliver Value Every Week

Dan Mall — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 10:05:00 +0000

I have a simple process for shipping consistently. It comes from my favorite book about process, The Agile Samurai by Jonathan Rasmusson. (This is the book I recommend to everyone who asks me about process; I think every team can benefit from working in the way this book describes. This is how I try to run every team I’ve ever been in charge of.)

Here’s the first sentence of the first chapter of the book:

What would it take to deliver something of value each and every week?

That’s it. That's the process. Forget 2-week sprints or double diamond or scrumfall. However you answer this question, do that.

Need more context? I'm trying to stop myself from quoting most of the first chapter of this book, but it’s so worth it.

Pretend you are the customer. It's your money and your project, and you've hired a top-notch team to deliver. What would give you confidence the team you hired was actually delivering? A pile of documentation, plans, and reports? Or the regular delivery of working, tested software made up of your most important features each and every week? When you start looking at software delivery from your customer’s point of view, good things start to happen.

Amen. What else?

Delivering something of value every week is not for the faint of heart. It puts the spotlight on you like never before. There is no place to hide. Either you produce something of value or you don't.

When you commit to delivering something of value every week and showing your customer how you've spent their money, you become accountable.

Spicy!

(I could share more quotes, but I’ll leave it to you to read this book. It’s excellent; I highly recommend it.)

The book is written from the lens of working with customers who have hired you to build software on their behalf, but I think the lessons apply equally well to making a product for customers to consume and/or purchase.

I’m currently creating a new product/startup/company—Design System University, or “DSU” for short—and I’ve been following this approach. I officially announced it to the world 2 weeks ago on March 22, 2023, so I’ve had two opportunities to deliver value. Here’s what I’ve done so far.

On week 1, I launched a landing page with a signup form and an elevator pitch, as well as a Twitter thread including a short sizzle reel and announcing a few things to come. My hypothesis was that people would get enough value from a promise of courses they'd be interested in to sign up to stay updated via email, Twitter, and or Instagram. Some stats from the first day:

1200 visitors to the site
600 subscribers to the email list
400 Twitter followers
300 respondents to the initial survey (280 of whom asked to be contacted for further information)
100 Instagram followers

On week 2, I launched the Purpose & Promise page, wrote a Twitter thread about it, and emailed the list with the same content. In Start With Why, author Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” My hypothesis was that Sinek is right. In the email version, I asked people to reply and let me know how they might want to be involved. I got 14 emails from people, excited to be involved.

Next week is week 3. I don’t think I can go very long sharing things around or about DSU without actually showing what it is, so my hypothesis is that people can get value from interacting with a very early version of one of the core pieces of the product: a membership community for people who want to talk to others about design systems in a facilitated way. This week, I emailed 9 people I admire and trust to invite them to be my customer advisory board; 5 accepted, and I haven't heard from the other 4 yet. Next week, I’m planning to let them into the product (and maybe a small group of early enthusiasts too) so I can get some feedback from them about whether what’s there is actually valuable or not.

These are all small things, but, as Rasmusson suggests in The Agile Samurai, the practice of trying to deliver value every week creates accountability. I’m on the hook to do something (as opposed to doing nothing). And I’m “training” my potential customers to expect something every week. I’m trying to create a habit for both them and me. For example, this will be the 31st week in a row that I’ve sent out this newsletter, so it’s a habit for me to write it at this point. These kind of habits build momentum, something any new product, startup, or business would love to have with its customers.

So, whatever you’re working on, try to deliver value next week. That could be as small as an Instagram post or tweet, or as large as a new feature your customers have been asking for in your product.

I’m inspired by hearing about different ways people are creating value. What will you do next week?

Leaving Room for Creativity in Design System Work

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 13:18:00 +0000

In design system work, some people can work on the settled solutions while others can venture out, seeking the new. Both are worth investing in.

Here’s how.

I’ve written about the Pareto principle (often shortened to “the 80/20 rule”) before, which states that “roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.” Lots of natural phenomena are distributed accordingly, like population, wealth, income, and many other things.

As it relates to design systems, I find the same to be true: about 80% of any product you need to make can be made with 20% of the normal effort you put in. That 20% is the design system, a collection of common elements that make you faster. Then, you can spend your remaining 80% of time on the 20% that really needs to shine. This is where the creativity goes. Don’t spend your effort trying to be creative and innovative about the boring stuff. Stop making slightly more beautiful dropdowns or spending hours on beveling your buttons (not a euphemism). Let the system take care of all the common stuff.

So, what specifically do you spend that 80% on? Whatever will make this experience special for your user.

Next time you (or product teams you work with) design a new page or screen, use these guidelines:

For every 5 components on the screen, 4 (80%) should come from the design system and 1 (20%) should be created custom.
For the 4 components that come from the system: spend no more than 20% of your allotted time implementing and configuring them. For example, if you’re giving yourself 60 minutes to design a screen, spend no more than 12 minutes implementing these components from your design system. Any longer is too much.
For the 1 component that you make from scratch, make this the best thing you’ve ever designed or built (or as close to it as possible). Pour all your creativity into this. Don’t worry about constraints. Don’t worry about how this fits into the system. Make something amazing for the person who’s supposed to use it.

There are some people who love #2 and hate #3. There are other people who hate #2 and love #3. And of course, lots of people somewhere in the middle. Healthy design system work makes room for all of them.

Should You Work in Design Systems?

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 10:06:00 +0000

Engineering manager Michael Lopp is the author one of my favorite articles: “Stables and Volatiles.” I’ve referenced this article constantly over the last 10 years since he wrote it.

In the article, Michael talks about what happens shortly after teams get to a v1 of a piece of software. (His writing references engineers specifically, but I find that this applies equally well to designers.) He describes two groups that emerge strongly after the birth of an official 1.0: one called “Stables” and the other called “Volatiles.” Here’s the full set of characteristics for both each:

Stables

Happily work with direction and appreciate that there appears to be a plan, as well as the calm predictability of a well-defined schedule.
Play nice with others because they value an efficiently-run team.
Calmly assess risk and carefully work to mitigate failure, however distant or improbable it might be.
Tend to generate a lot of process because they know process creates predictably and measurability.
Are known for their calm reliability.

Volatiles

Prefer to define strategy rather than follow it.
Have issues with authority and often have legitimate arguments for anarchy.
Can’t conceive of failing, and seek a thrill in risk.
See working with others as time-consuming and onerous tasks, prefer to work in small, autonomous groups, and don’t give a shit how you feel.
Often don’t build particularly beautiful or stable things, but they sure do build a lot.
Are only reliable if it’s in their best interest.
Leave a trail of disruption in their wake.

Admittedly an overgeneralization, but, looking at the characteristics, which one of these groups seems to fit better the needs of a design system team? At first glance: Stables. The simplest value proposition of a design system is to create efficiency and consistency in user interface design and establish shared process and vocabulary… all words that make a Stable smile.

So, here’s a basic guideline for starters: if you’re a Stable, you’ll probably enjoy and thrive in design system work. If you’re a Volatile, design system work might be a little boring for you.

But wait: there’s more!

If Volatiles should steer clear of design system teams, where should they be working on instead? On product design teams! That’s where they’re free to innovate and invent new things. The virtuous cycle of digital organizations is where design systems and the product design process have a symbiotic relationship. Ideally, Volatiles invent new things in the product, and, as those things become more common, Stables can systematize them and make them more “boring.”

Somewhere along the way, though, the idea that, once you have a design system, everything you make will both come from it and be contributed to it became popularized (probably evangelized by well-intentioned Stables). This is an overreach of a Stable’s mentality. Setting a goal that, one day, every interface will be made wholly from the design system is a death sentence for Volatiles. It leaves no place for them and their skills of invention and innovation at all, certainly not on design system teams but also not even on product teams. It’s not inclusive, and it’s a terrible business strategy. This kind of mentality leads to a very efficient product design process that has no innovation included whatsoever. The trajectory goes from efficiency to stagnation to atrophy to decline.

How do you stop this? Figure out how to establish an equilibrium in your product design ecosystem between the diametrically opposed Stables and Volatiles. This won’t be an easy feat. From Michael’s article:

Lastly and most importantly, these groups hate — hate — each other. Volatiles believe Stables are fat, lazy, and bureaucratic. They believe Stables have become “The Man.” Meanwhile, Stables believe Volatiles hold nothing sacred and do whatever they please, company or product be damned. The bad news is that everyone is right.

But it’s a worthwhile effort. If you’re a Stable, decide what your design system won’t try to wrangle, and encourage your Volatile counterparts to go wild in these areas. If you’re a Volatile, decide the small number of areas where you want to spend time, and accept help from your Stable counterparts in doing the rest as quickly as possible.

The closing thought from Michael’s article:

I believe a healthy company that wants to continue to grow and invent needs to equally invest in both their Stables and their Volatiles.

In any thriving virtuous cycle of product design, some people can work on the settled solutions while others can venture out, seeking the new. Make sure you’re investing in both.

In the next article, I’ll share some specific targets on how to do just that.

Mentorship vs. Coaching vs. Directing vs. Modeling

Dan Mall — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 10:06:00 +0000

As the design industry has matured over the past few decades, the importance of mentorship has grown along with it. However, mentorship seems to have become a catch-all term to mean “working with someone more junior than you to help them grow.” That’s fine, but the danger is that it leaves out all the different kinds of ways to work with someone and help them grow, of which mentorship is only one flavor.

In my work, I’ve found 4 distinct ways to work with someone to help them grow:

Mentoring: telling someone how you’ve done it.
Coaching: helping someone do it their own way.
Modeling: showing someone how you’d do it.
Directing: telling someone what to do.

For example, let’s say I was working with a mid-level designer to help them get a promotion at work to “Senior Designer.” Here’s what each of the different strategies would sound like from me to them:

Mentoring: “I got promoted to Senior Designer by taking more of a role in the work of everyone on my team, not just my own personal work.”
Coaching: “What are you most excited to do right now?”
Directing: “Create a 1-paragraph description of what is and isn’t included in the role of a Senior Designer. Present that to your manager in your next review.”
Modeling: “Sit in on my next client presentation so you can hear the kinds of words I use to talk about the design.”

Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive. Coaches can direct. Mentors can coach. Directors can model. The combination of approaches makes for a much more valuable experience on the receiving end.

Some people need direction and not mentorship. Others need mentorship and not coaching. Some people need modeling at the beginning and then mentorship later. It’s important to be intentional about which one is happening at any given time.

If you’re working with someone to help them grow, consider all of these 4 as individual tools in your toolbelt.

If you’re working with someone who’s trying to help you grow (a manager, a mentor, etc.), feel free to ask for a different approach when you’re stuck. Giving feedback to the person helping you like “can you tell me what to do here?" (asking for direction) or “can you show me how you’d do it?” (asking for modeling) can help everyone.

For even more approaches, check out Support Systems for Learning.

Designing a Landing Page In 30 Minutes For $10k

Dan Mall — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 10:00:00 +0000

This week, I competed in the Relume Rumble for the Relume Design League, a competition to design a landing page live against another designer in just 30 minutes. They say it’s “where web design meets esports.” The winner of the entire bracket earns a cool $10k.

I fancy myself to be a fast designer. I can pinpoint specific times in my career when I’ve gotten markedly faster. I remember when I thought it took about a week to design a solid landing page (2007). I remember when I discovered that I could design a solid landing page in about a day (July 23, 2009). On SuperFriendly projects, I routinely practiced designing pages in a few hours to get stuff out quickly for my teams and clients (2014-ish).

But just 30 minutes? Could I do it? Could you design a landing page in 30 minutes? My gut reaction was that I thought it’d be tough but doable.

Then I watched the previous matches.

Most people had trouble finishing the page. These are award-winning designers whose work I’ve admired. Still, my experience and ego said I’d succeed if I could curb the biggest scourge for designers: decision-making.

So I practiced, using the files from previous matches that Relume made available in the Figma community. I practiced 5 times. I only finished the page once, and barely at that. Uh-oh.

I decided I needed more than an approach. I needed a plan. So I wrote one down, 16 steps in particular. I made it a cheat sheet that I printed out to adhere to during the match.

How’d my plan work? ✨🌟⭐️🥇🏆 I won! 🏆 ⭐️🌟✨

See for yourself by watching the match replay:

If you’re interested in my strategy, here’s my cheat sheet, and I’ll break down each phase and step below.

My 16-step cheat sheet for the Relume Rumble

Overall

I came up with a few guiding principles that informed these steps:

I was going up against my friend and seasoned designer, Tommy Geoco. I knew I couldn’t rely on him doing a bad design, so my many years of experience trash talking on the basketball court would need to come in handy here. (Tommy and I regularly do this with each other in Slack about Philly and Arizona sports teams, so I knew it’d be welcome.) I wasn’t sure if I could win, but I maybe I could make Tommy lose.
It’s easier to revise than create. My hypothesis was that if I could finish the page as quickly as possible—like, within the first 2–5 minutes—I could go back and do multiple passes to make it better each time.
In my practice, I rarely finished because there were too many elements on the page to design in just 30 minutes. If I could somehow combine the page into fewer elements, I’d have a lot less to design.
My wheelhouse in the last few years has been design systems, so any tie to that could probably make the work more familiar, and therefore, faster.
Most designers design linearly (i.e. one component at a time starting from the top and working their way down the page), but I’ve often been a proponent of what I’ve previously called “outside-in” or “global to local.” It’s a more systematic way of designing where the first thing you design makes the second thing easier, which should make the third thing even easier, and so on. “Outside in” means I work on the larger things first: page layout/scaffolding, structure, overall color palette. Then I work on slightly smaller details: typographic hierarchy, motifs, etc. The last steps are the small individual details that don’t affect anything else but make an individual element sing. (FYI, this is the same approach I take to front-end coding, described well through Harry Roberts’ Inverted Triangle CSS.)
I’m a good designer, but I’m a great presenter. Perhaps I could fill in the gaps of anything lacking in the design with showmanship both during and after the competition.

Prep (2:15pm – 2:30pm)

Fill water glass. Proper hydration solves many things in life.
Lotion. I’m brown. I get ashy. Moisturizing is important.
Open Figma files. I wanted to have 2 specific files handy (in addition to the Relume Arena):
- Components file: As someone who works with design systems a lot, I keep a running Figma file of common components that I like: carousels, FAQs, accordions, billboards, heros, etc. Especially in a time crunch, I figured it’d be way easier to steal my way to an original design than try and come up with something original on the spot. More on this below.
- Prep file: I planned a handful of trolling graphics that I could paste near Tommy’s working area to distract him.
Open Chrome tabs. I opened a Chrome window with 2 tabs to have handy just in case: Color Safe so I can create color palettes that have sufficient contrast, and Remove Background in case I need to quickly isolate a subject.

A running Figma file of components I’ve found over the years and like

Some graphics I could use to troll Tommy

v1 - 5 min (3:20pm - 3:25pm)

Start timer. I keep a digital kitchen timer on my desk to regularly timebox my work so I can keep focused. This was perfect to have so I didn’t need to keep glancing at the clock on the livestream.
Add "Good job" graphic to Tommy's comp. Let the trolling begin early.
Convert background to black. In my practice, I found that designing on a white background made the page feel like a wireframe and unfinished, so an easy hack was to change the background to black and design on that. However, the actual subject and theme of our match—“An AI design tool” + colorful and illustrative—threw a wrench in that plan, so I ended up converting the page background to a yellow color I sampled from one of the moodboard images instead.

v2 - 5 min (3:25pm - 3:30pm)

“Hey Tommy, tell us your life story. Hold on, I'm gonna go on mute.” More planned trolling to both make the audience laugh and throw Tommy off. However, I was so focused on the match that I forgot to do this. I ended up doing this after the break.
Write component names in blank file in PP Telegraf. The match was sponsored by Pangram Pangram, so one of the soft requirements was to use their typefaces. They gave us 37 families to choose from, and I didn’t want to waste time in the match picking fonts. So, I decided ahead of time that, no matter what the theme was, I’d use PP Telegraf, which I saw as utilitarian enough to work in any style but not so vanilla that it looked like a placeholder typeface.
Add workbook image to Tommy’s comp. Troll, troll, troll. Tommy admitted later that this one actually distracted him. Success!
Drag reference components in. Back to design system familiarity, the quickest way to assemble a page is with previously-created components. While I don’t have previously created components in this style, I can use components from different styles—like from other website—to give me an impression of what my page might look like. All I have to do is convert the components to the appropriate style by changing colors and typefaces.

v3 - 5 min (3:30pm - 3:35pm)

Style the footer. One of the things I learned from both my own practice as well as watching the other matches is that it’s so easy to spend the first half of the match getting the header and hero area perfect, creating a panic that all the rest still has to get done with half the time gone. So, my strategy was to start from the bottom in the hopes I’d have less temptation to spend a lot of time on the least important elements on the page. This strategy didn’t pan out well, as I did the exact same thing by spending too much time on the sign-up area just above the footer. What I learned was that early on, it’s important and necessary to establish a style of some kind of motif that can then be extended throughout the rest of the page.
Duplicate footer as the header. Where my “style the footer” strategy did come in handy is that I styled the footer in a way that I could reuse it as the header too.
Add troll image to Tommy’s comp. My plan was regular trolling at a steady clip, but at this point I was panicking slightly so I started to skip steps like this one.
Design grayscale vanilla components bottom up. In my practice, I learned that it was actually easier and faster for me to design components from scratch that I was familiar with than work with the existing wireframe that I wasn’t as familiar with. That strategy manifested late, as people in the chat—as well as myself—were worried that I wouldn’t get finished with 2 minutes to go, but it eventually worked out.

Break (3:35pm–3:40pm)

There’s a break halfway through to rest and reflect. I still can’t tell if the break was helpful or not.

v4 - 10 min (3:40pm–3:50pm)

Go fast! With half the time gone, my strategy was to move fast. Nuff said.

Final cleanup - 5 min (3:50pm–3:55pm)

My plan was to try and finish with 5 minutes left, and then do some final polish. Ha! Instead, it was more like the final decisions of which corners to cut to get done.

And that was it! There’s a bunch of stuff in my design that I was definitely not happy with, and a few things that I was. Also, there are a handful of things in Tommy’s design that were really smart that I wish I had done in hindsight, like a interesting shape behind the quote, simple treatments on boxes to make them look more polished, and more. Check out both of our finished files if you wanna play around with them.

Despite any regrets and shoulda-woulda-coulda’s, I apparently did enough to impress the audience and the judges to eek out a win! Next week, I advance to the semi-finals, where I take on the formidable Grace Walker! I have my work cut out for me again. I’m spending next week devising a new strategy for my match with her.

How would you have approached this challenge? Similar to my plan? Something totally different? Reply and let me know.

30-minute Challenge vs. Real Design Process: Which One Wins?

Choosing Between Two Good Options

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 10:04:00 +0000

Deciding between a good option and a bad option is easy. Should I eat the medium rare ribeye or a live king cobra? I'll have the steak, please.

Deciding between two good options is much more difficult. Should I drive the Lamborghini today or the Ferrari? (Hey, a man can dream.)

I have a tough decision between two great options to make this weekend. I started Dan Mall Teaches to pursue teaching and content creation full-time, and I’m almost able to fully do that. But, I’ve taken on a few small consulting gigs to pay the bills and because they’re fun and interesting.

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One of those gigs is with a great company that has a lot of interesting opportunities. I work with them for 1½ days each week, consulting on how to establish and grow their design system. I like the people I work with there—I know some folks from there read this newsletter… you know I’m enjoying our work together!—and they pay well, and early. My contract with them expires at the end of February. I had some Dan Mall Teaches projects lined up for March in case they didn’t want to extend our contract, and I’m pumped for these projects the more I think about them. But, in a conversation today, they mentioned that they’d love to extend our work, and they’ve already earmarked funds for me until June.

How lucky I am! And also, quite the dilemma! In some ways, I wish they would have told me that they don’t want to renew, because the decision would have been made for me. And sure: I still have 3 days each week that I can work on my own stuff. But I’m used to working with clients full-time. Consulting part-time is new for me. I can’t help but think about ideas for my clients on my “off days.” It’s not the time I want back; it’s the mental space.

Lately, I’m burdened from the weight of context switching. Years ago, I actively tested my limits and learned that I could work on 12 simultaneous projects without feeling like I was dropping too much. But even if I can do that, I don’t like it. I’m craving focus. I want an answer to the question, “What would my work look like if I was able to wholly focus on it?”

Pragmatically, I could use the cash from consulting. Running SuperFriendly for years left me with a decent bit of financial runway to figure out what I want to do next, but it isn’t an infinite amount. I’m fortunate and grateful that revenue from my products makes up most of what I need to pay my bills each month, but it doesn’t feel consistent enough or have high enough profitability for me to feel fully comfortable with it yet. I have this urge that 1 or 2 more big ideas that I want to execute can put it over the hump where I am comfortable enough financially, but I need to find the brainspace—and calendar space—to work on them and get them out the door.

So, tough decisions ahead! Keep a good thing going with the cash from current consulting clients, or literally buy my brain space back by relinquishing the revenue that consulting brings in?

Luckily, I impulse bought a tiny book at a checkout counter a few months ago called The Decision Book: 50 Models for Strategic Thinking. Let’s use it here to make this decision the way that professionals do: by flipping to 3 random pages and blindly following their guidance.

Random flip #1: The Stop Rule

The foundation behind the stop rule is this: “simple rules are more effective than complex ones because they shorten the amount of time needed to process information, one of the most time-consuming processes of all.” For example, if we were trying to climb Mt. Everest, a stop rule would be, “If we don’t reach the summit by 2pm, we turn around.”

When I ran SuperFriendly, I had a stop rule that the amount of profit a project brings would only be a factor in deciding whether we should take a project if we had less than 3 months’ worth of expenses in the bank. I don’t have specific stop rules for Dan Mall Teaches yet, but if I carry it over SuperFriendly’s, I have a more than 3 months’ worth of expenses in the bank, so this model says I should stop consulting.

Random flip #2: The Consequences Model

At the beginning of projects, early decisions have the most far-reaching consequences, but you usually have the least amount of information then. At the end of a project, “we know more and have fewer doubts, but by then there is no longer anything fundamental to decide.”

This model suggests being courageous and making decisions based on minimal information. This model says… nothing specific about my choice.

Random flip #3: The AI model

Despite it being all the rage nowadays, this isn’t an artificial intelligence model. (Though I did ask ChatGPT and it said, “Ultimately, the decision should be based on what aligns best with your overall goals and priorities.” Thanks for nothing, bruh.)

This model is the Appreciative Inquiry model, where you focus on positive attributes rather than negative ones. Typical decision scenarios usually start with a question like, “What is the problem?” which already puts you in a negative mindset. The appreciative inquiry model suggests replacing that question with, “What is going really well at the moment?” instead.

This model says I should continue consulting because it’s already going well.

So far, the score is tied. I think I know what I’ll do.

What would you do? Stick with a great client that pays well and early, or work solely on your own stuff even at the risk of less financial stability? What factors and models influence your decision-making?

The Danger of ‘Whaddya Think?’

Dan Mall — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 10:56:00 +0000

You finish the 30-minute design presentation where you expound on every important detail. Unsure of how to conclude, you blurt out, “So… whaddya think?“

Pandemonium erupts.

People with mismatched socks sound off on how your color combinations clash. Fellow designers pontificate about your misuse of the golden ratio. Your VP insists you make the logo bigger.

The calculation in the design you spent days is in shambles. What happened?

The question “whaddya think“ triggers a fight-or-flight response in the unprepared observer. Suddenly, they’re on the spot to provide value. So they start grasping at anything. Uh, I’ve seen colors before, they think, so they start rambling about that. I can’t say I like it and everything’s perfect because they’ll think I wasn’t paying attention, so lemme find something I don’t like, they rationalize.

How do you prevent this?

Don’t say, “Whaddya think?” Instead, make the last slide of your presentation the 3 specific things you want feedback on. For example:

Do the colors communicate trust?
Does the layout of the page make it look like it’s easy to subscribe?
Are you more likely to watch the video or play with the configurator?

In an instant, the pressure disappears. “Whaddya think?” is a difficult question to answer. These questions are easy questions to answer, partially because they’re closed-ended.

Having specific questions implies that some comments are "in-bounds” and others are ”out-of-bounds.” It’s oblivious (at best) and rude (at worst) if someone answers a question you didn’t ask. If someone makes a comment about the size of the logo, redirect them with, ”Oh, I’m not worried the size of the logo, but do you think the colors are doing the right job of communicating trust?”

Instead of treating it like a presentation, treat it like a usability test. Don’t ask what people like; uncover what they can or can’t do. This is a more natural interaction for both them and you.

For a bonus, make these questions both the first slide and the last slide. Putting it first primes their minds for what to look for while you’re presenting. They’re ready for “the test” because you told them in advance what the questions are. They knew what to study. You helped them focus, and you gave them permission to ignore other things. You made it easier for them to understand what you were sharing, so they’ll be more inclined to help you by giving you valuable feedback about things you asked about.

My Daily Recap Template

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 10:04:00 +0000

I’ve recently been reading about the power of recaps, so I’ve added a 5-minute ritual to the end of my day to do this.

From author Daniel H. Pink:

…instead of fleeing, we’re better off reserving the final five minutes of work for a few small deliberate actions that bring the day to a fulfilling close…

Making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator on the job. But without tracking our “dones,” we often don’t know whether we’re progressing. Ending the day by recording what you’ve achieved can encode the entire day more positively…

On good days, the exercise delivers feelings of completion; on bad days, it often shows me I got more done than I suspected.

It’s on my calendar every weekday at 5:30pm, but it’s not an engrained habit yet. I’m also not great at always ending my day at the same time, so it doesn’t always happen. But I’m working on it! I am noticing that I do feel more closure on the days that I do it, so I intend to try to make this a lasting habit.

Here’s my simple daily recap template. I have it set as a daily note template in Obsidian, my note-taking app of choice, so all I have to do is click the “open today’s daily note” button and fill in the blanks:

🏆 1 win from today

😫 1 point of anxiety/stress

🙏🏽 1 point of gratitude

🌞 Tomorrow, I will…

Do you have a similar daily or weekly ritual? I’d love to hear about what’s worked for you!

A Simple Framework For Building Trust

Dan Mall — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 10:03:00 +0000

Here’s a simple framework for building trust with anyone:

Say what you’re going to do.
Do it.
Say what you did.

This works whether you’re trying to gain more trust from someone who already trusts you or with someone whose trust you’ve lost that you’re trying to regain.

3 examples across both personal and business relationships:

1. Getting your kids to see you as someone they can trust

In the morning: ”I'll make sure to have those worksheets printed by the time you get home from school.”

At 2pm, print the worksheets and lay them out on a desk.

Kid comes home from school at 3pm. Once they’re settled, remind them that you printed out their worksheets, like they asked.

2. Getting permanently drafted onto a pickup basketball team

I was invited to play in a small weekly basketball game as an extra for someone who got injured. When I asked which weeks I was available to play, I replied as clearly as I could about which weeks I could attend and which weeks I couldn’t. For the weeks I could attend, I made sure to be there 30 minutes early and was already warming up before most people arrived. After 3 weeks in a row of this, I was invited to be a regular. When added to the group chat, I saw this message: ”Let’s add Dan Mall. Dude’s decent and reliable.” I may not be the best player, but I show up and am trustworthy, and I think that made a difference.

(And, if anyone from the team is reading, I promise I'll work on my jump shot too!)

3. Getting a promotion at work

At the beginning of each week, post a weekly standup note in Slack to your team about what you intend to accomplish this week. Spend the week working on this task. At the end of the week, post a small recap (1-2 sentences) to the team about what you did. (This also has all the added benefits of working in public.)

In your performance review at the end of the year, print out and bring both the standup notes and these recaps to the review. You’ll have 50 pieces of evidence about how trustworthy you are, and people like working with people they can trust.

What is a Design System?

Dan Mall — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 09:18:00 +0000

What is a design system? You’ve probably heard lots about them. You may have even worked on one, but you still struggle to define it.

There are many great design system books out there. Let’s see what their authors have to say about design systems:

A set of connected patterns and shared practices, coherently organized to serve the purposes of a digital product.

Alla Kholmatova, Design Systems

Design systems bring order and consistency to digital products. They help to protect the brand, elevate the user experience, and increase the speed and efficiency of how we design and build products.

Andrew Couldwell, Laying the Foundations

A collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications.

Marco Suarez, Design System Handbook

Here’s what other industry experts had to say about design systems:

The components are the trees. The design system is the forest.

Jeremy Keith, Design systems

The official story of how your organization designs and builds digital interfaces.

Brad Frost, Design systems are for user interfaces

Any set of decisions governed across an organization.

Hayley Hughes, Trust Between Teams

A library of visual style, components, and other concerns documented and released by an individual, team, or community as code and design tools so that adopting products can be more efficient and cohesive.

Nathan Curtis, Defining Design Systems

“Design” and “Systems”

There are lots of different definitions of design systems out there. Why is that?

I think it’s because there are a lot of different definitions of the word “design” and of the word “system,” and both are very broad.

My favorite definition of “design” comes from Jared Spool:

Design is the rendering of intent.

My favorite definition of “system” comes from Donella Meadows:

A set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

Put those two things together and it says something to the effect of “An intentional set of connected things that create repeated behavior.” That could apply to almost anything!

6 different kinds of design systems

In my design systems work, I’ve noticed 6 different kinds of things that can be described as design systems:

1. Brand identities/visual language as design systems

Brand identities and design/visual languages are the oldest and most common version of what people in general know as a design system. This has been around from as early as cave paintings. A design language refers to all of the different visual elements that make up a brand or a particular user interface design. That could be the colors, the typography, the spacing, the layout, all of the different visual components that combine so that a brand is recognizable.

2. Tools as design systems

Tools are some of the most common instances of digital design systems we see. UI kits are great examples. We see these a lot when we talk about software applications like Figma or Sketch, where we have these libraries of visual components that we can drag and drop into other interfaces to make it easier to design those interfaces all at once. Websites like Design Systems for Figma display a gallery of UI kits that different teams have used and open-sourced so you get a sense of how these libraries are connected with symbols and components that can be reassembled.

Component libraries are another great example of a design system as a tool. Just like we have UI kits in design programs, component libraries are the code equivalent to that. In the same way that you can drag and drop components into artboards in a design tool, with a component library, you can use shorthand snippets of code to reference other code that lives elsewhere. Component libraries are popular in frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, where you can use smaller sets of code (APIs) to reference larger sets of code in a systematic way.

3. Products as design systems

Products as design systems the one type that I like to talk about most when it comes to design systems that big organizations can use to be more efficient, more consistent, and more of a relief at scale. This is my preferred definition of a design system:

A connected, package-managed, version-controlled software product that contains the smallest set of components and guidelines an organization needs to make digital products consistently, efficiently and happily.

A lot of the popular design systems that we reference nowadays are this kind of design system: Material Design, the Lightning Design System, Shopify’s Polaris, and others like them. What makes this kind of design system a product is that they have dedicated teams that are focused on building those out day-to-day and week-to-week. They have a backlog. They have budgets devoted to them so that they can be sustained like any good product.

Think about the way a startup works and makes a product. There’s usually a dedicated team. They have a product manager. They have a acklog, they have things they have to work on. They release things very frequently to their users and to their customers. Those customers give them feedback on how that product needs to grow, what features are working for them and not working for them.

A good design system as a product at an organization follows suit. Design systems as products need to grow organically with the needs of the organizations they serve.

4. Process as a design system

A company’s design system could simply be the particular way they build digital products. It can be an outline all of the steps. This can be a very effective way that an organization scales to be more consistent. If everyone’s working with the same process, maybe that makes the output more consistent than if everybody was just doing their own thing.

This is why governance is such a big topic in the world of design systems. Governance lays out who does what and when. So, process and workflow is a really big part of how design systems need to live within an organization.

Even if there are no design or code components, simply saying, “This is how we work,” can be a really effective design system for an organization.

5. Design system as a service

At many companies, a design system team is its own entity. Product or feature teams interact with the design system team by using them like an internal agency or like a staff augmentation team. When they need something that the design system team knows scales across the organization, a product or feature team will essentially place orders with that design system team and then receive back components or suggestions or workflow tips. In that way, a design system can actually be a service to the rest of the organization and that can be really successful.

6. Design system as a practice

The last type of design system is a design system as a practice. This is probably the most mature stage for a design system to be at an organization.

A practice is a repeated exercise or performance of an activity or skill in order to acquire or maintain proficiency in it. That exercise could be repeated use of the same components and patterns. It could be incorporating a particular process. It could incorporate interacting with a design system like an external agency. It could incorporate all of the different ways that design systems can manifest within an organization. Essentially, you’re doing a thing over and over again, and, the more you do it, the more efficient the organization becomes and the more consistent the organization becomes over time.

As design systems become a practice in an organization, it evolves in order to scale better.

Do we need a standardized definition of design systems?

Is it a problem that we don’t have one definition of “design system” that we as an industry can standardize on? No! I think it’s a great thing that we don’t have one standard definition.

That said, although it‘s not a problem, it can be problematic at times. Generally, when working with a team, you’ll want to agree and actually have some shared definitions and vocabulary for the things everyone is working on. Otherwise it gets to be really complicated in how you’re working with team members.

One of the promises of a good design system is that it creates shared vocabulary among teams that might not have it otherwise. Imagine designers and engineers calling a component different things because it’s called something different in each of their workflow. A good design system will actually allow them to align on a definition of something. So, while there are different kinds of design systems, it is useful for you to say to your design team or your engineering team or your product team, "When we work on a design system, this is the version that we’re talking about." It could be any of the versions above, but it is important that your team picks one, a set, or a combination of them so that you all know what each other is talking about as you’re working toward a common goal.

Defining design systems inclusively

Not having one standard definition of design systems allows us to be more inclusive of where any team is in their design system journey. In her talk for design systems conference Clarity in 2022, Amy Hupe shared a fantastic reminder for us all to “recognize the design system you already have.” Design systems come in all shapes and sizes, whether official or unofficial. Amy closed a section of her talk with this wisdom:

We have to engage with our existing, unofficial design systems to cultivate one that serves us better.

If you have a UI kit, that’s okay! You can work toward a larger and more mature design system.

If you have a full design system practice that is mature, that’s okay too! You probably still have a lot of work to do.

A design system is never complete; you continue to work on it for as long as your organization exists.

I’m reminded of the common idea that none of us will actually achieve perfection, but the pursuit of perfection is a good journey. With a lot of things, it’s about the journey, not the destination. The Material Design team has been working on that design system for many years and they still have a lot to work on. The Lightning Design System team has been working on that for many years, and they still have a lot to work on. That’s not a bad thing!

All digital products can be improved. Your design system can be improved no matter what kind of design system you have. Hopefully, this video gives you a better understanding of all the different types that are out there and how you can move and progress to become more mature in your design system practice at your organization so that you can do better work with and for your colleagues.

2022 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 09:13:00 +0000

Continuing the tradition from 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2022. (Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links for some of the products I mention and/or recommend.)

Following up on last year’s goals

I ended last year’s review with the goals of doing less, laughing more, and eating delicious food with family and friends.

One of my favorite things this year was getting and playing the game Hearing Things. I have a pretty good poker face when playing games, but something about this game makes me convulse with laughter… like, can’t-catch-my-breath, gotta-run-out-of-the-room-to-compose-myself laughter. I’ve loved playing this game over the last year with my family and friends.

Work

Work this year was a doozy.

Arcade

One pattern I’ve learned about myself is that I like a clear mental load before undertaking any big new endeavor, even if I don’t know what said endeavor will be yet.

For two years, my startup Arcade has occupied my brain space, but I was dedicating very little time to working on it. I had to admit to my co-founders Mike Carbone and Leslie Camacho that I didn’t see a way that I could devote the appropriate amount of time and effort to being the CEO of this company. We decided to wind it down. I’m grateful for the brain space back, and I’m sad that I still don’t have the design tokens tool I want. Maybe I’ll revisit this idea again someday.

SuperFriendly

Deciding to shut down SuperFriendly—the agency I’d run for over a decade—was the most impactful thing for me this year. The last two years included a lot of volatility for SuperFriendly, like soaring revenue with dwindling profits, the end of trying to scale up, a shift away from the longstanding contractor staffing model, and more.

As I got more involved in coaching our clients last year, I realized how much I wanted to run a business with teaching more as the core than deliverables. I didn’t know how to make SuperFriendly the vehicle for this, so it felt like time to shut these doors. After 10 years, 9 months, and 6 days in business, SuperFriendly will file its final tax return in 2022.

I’m so grateful to have had the chance to run a company for over a decade. To be trusted by 126 clients and SuperFriends to do the work that we did was beyond my wildest dreams.

Putting food on the table

I’m blessed to have never had to wonder in my life where my next meal is coming from. While I’ve always taken the provision of my physiological needs for granted, closing SuperFriendly raised a big question mark for where my family’s main source of income would now come from. We definitely entered a reduce-as-many-expenses-as-possible and dip-into-savings territory for a few months. That was pretty uncomfortable for Em and me. We’re not completely out of that yet, but we’re close.

Dan Mall Teaches

In September, I officially opened Dan Mall Enterprises, LLC. dba Dan Mall Teaches as an official step making teaching at scale my main business. I’m still experimenting on what those offerings currently are, but I have ideas and plans that’ll manifest in 2023.

In June, I released the Design System in 90 Days workbook with my long-time collaborator Crystal Vitelli. It stemmed from a frustrated attempt to describe SuperFriendly’s complex process of setting up a design system practice to prospective clients and turned into a fun and quick internal project to do, as well as another foray into selling our own products. Six months later, this lone workbook has made up an unexpected chunk of my SuperFriendly salary with very little marketing other than an early launch push. I do wonder what it could do with proper marketing, and initial tests to that end are very promising.

Even more eye-opening for me is the opportunity to teach at scale that I never fully realized. In 10 years of SuperFriendly, we worked on 126 projects. With an average of 3 people on the client side that we were working with per project, that’s 378 people we’ve had the ability to teach through our work (ignoring that fact that most of our clients were looking for deliverables/output from us, not learning). In 6 months of having the workbook for sale, 444 people have purchased it. The difference in revenue from a $349 workbook and 5-figure to 8-figure projects is miles apart, but it’s inversely proportional to the amount of reach over time. It’s a quality vs. quantity thing, and I’m eager to play with the sliders to learn if a different mix works better for me and the people that interact with me.

On its own, that’s not enough to meet my financial needs, but I have a vision for a suite of channels and products that make up a formidable portfolio of teaching at scale. Again, small tests with a mix of higher-priced premium products like my video course, lower-priced lighter products like my design system email course, and other products and free resources are very promising.

Another related 2023 experiment I’m excited about is my upcoming 8-week design systems course in partnership with Dribbble. Partnerships have been hit or miss with me over the years, but the folks at Dribbble have been excellent collaborators for many years now. This kind of initiative is high-revenue and scalable, but it’s also high-effort—and it may not be profitable. I’m very curious how I’ll assess this once it’s all said and done and whether I’d do more things like this.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve started a new channel on Instagram (@danmallteaches) that has grown quickly in the 3 months I’ve had it. It’s nice to spend a few minutes or hours to crank out something small to share that people find valuable. It’s the visual equivalent of how I’ve used my Twitter account for many years now. And, although I’m a very late adopter, I’ve grown to love the fleeting nature of Stories as a way to share even quicker tidbits of… whatever, really. I like having a range of channels where I can practice varying levels of fidelity and polish.

My new YouTube channel is somewhere in the middle. It’s grown a little slower than other channels, but that’s entirely my fault. I haven’t fed the algorithm its main source of nutrition: longform videos! I have a few in the works, as I see YouTube as a major asset in helping me teach at scale. Spending time on this channel will be a significant part of my 2023.

I’m also learning that different channels are more conducive to different kinds of content. My newsletter has grown the fastest of all my new channels, but the kinds of things people seem to respond well to (or even tolerate) are very different.

In case you were already thinking it, I’m reticent to fully embrace a “content creator” moniker as I shudder at the connotation, but the denotation of the words themselves feel pretty accurate for my new focus. Still though, I definitely don’t have the rhythm down yet. I just named a bunch of things: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, a newsletter… and there’s still more that I haven’t named, like LinkedIn, this blog, etc. Seasoned content creators either pick a few channels to focus on and/or know how to batch create lots of content in focused sprints that get distributed to all their channels appropriately and automatically. I don’t have those systems in place yet, so I’m a bit too manual or clumsy about it right now for my liking.

One of the first two blockers I’m trying to address is that I’ve realized that my office setup and calendar no longer work for the new type of work I’m doing. Docked laptop attached to external monitor with fancy DSLR-as-webcam plus key and fill lights worked great when my typical day was mostly meetings with chunks of emailing and a little bit of designing/coding. But my new workflow adds a lot more specific things, like filming, editing, brainstorming, reading, writing, and sketching. Rather than most activities being centered around a desk, I want multiple spaces that allow my brain and body to feel a physical switch that can trigger a mental switch to a different mode, not to mention serve the different functions needed. As I type this article, I’m waiting for a new table to be delivered that I’m hoping can act as both a space where I can sketch and read as well as serve as a beautiful setting to film at. I’ll share more updates as my space progresses (because content!).

On the front-of-house side, I’m excited that this will give me a lot of different ways that I can interact with and impact people. On the back-of-house side, I’m excited to learn how to run a very 👏🏽 boring 👏🏽 business. One of the things I loved about running SuperFriendly was that it was always interesting. Some projects had incredible margin; others were razor thin. Some projects were the most exciting we’d seen yet; others were solely to pay the bills. The business model required lots of moving parts: many clients, lots of inquiry fielding and communication, a massive network of SuperFriends with shifting availability and interests, and more. The variety and range was vast.

As a result, there was never a dull moment. But sometimes, I needed a dull moment, even if I didn’t want one. SuperFriendly was very much doing a lot of things the long, hard, stupid way, on purpose. With Dan Mall Teaches, I can see some ways to bring some predictability, both from a content and a revenue perspective. Expenses are consistent and low, so recurring revenue with high margins is definitely possible. The picture is hazy, but I can make out its shape in the distance. In contrast to SuperFriendly, I want everything on auto-pilot now. I’m learning a lot lately about how to automate every part of a business, and I can’t wait to see what that frees me up to do.

A near-term goal for 2023 is to hire an intern. This will be very different than the apprenticeship I used to run. I want someone who can knock things out for me using the tools and systems I’ve developed for myself. This will be a paid position, starting part-time at first and growing in responsibility and compensation over time. I’ll write a proper job description in early 2023 with the goal of hiring in Q1 or Q2.

Mentorship, advising, and coaching

As desired, clearing my plate stokes the frequency illusion that new things “just float my way.”

In the last few months, I’ve gotten more requests for mentorship than I have in the last few years. While it definitely fits my aspiration to impact more people, I’ve never figured out how to make this work. I don’t believe that mentorship is an act to be provided gratis. It can be, but it can also be part of a commercial transaction too. As with all my transactions, I want my customers to feel like they’re getting more than their money’s worth and for me to feel like I’m more-than-well compensated. I may spend some time in 2023 trying to figure out how these two things can work in harmony for me.

Though I’m focused on teaching at scale, it’s not lost on me that there’s value in sharing my experience one-to-one or one-to-few. (And heck, it pays the bills well too, especially now when I need it.) I’ve been doing some advising a few days a week with startups like Supernova and coaching a few design system teams in a light touch way. I’m incentivized to have one or two of these going on at any given moment to keep fresh on what current struggles are for my customers. I have yet to find a way that this contributes the amount I’d like to my financial portfolio of offerings without taking up too much of my time to do other things I want to focus on.

Speaking

Conference talks are an obvious way to teach at scale, something I’ve been doing now for the last 16 years. However, as I shared in last year’s review, I’m growing less and less fond of teaching and sharing in that format.

In 2022:

I participated in the February 2022 panel of Adobe’s The Perfect Match game show.
I did a fireside chat about design systems with Jeremy Keith at Leading Design in New York.
I joined Michelle Chin and Luke Murphy from Zeroheight on an online webinar to talk about design system team happiness.
I spoke about design systems over Zoom with the crew at Thesis.
I spoke about design systems in London at Zeroheight’s Converge.
I spoke to a group at YouTube and Google remotely about design systems.
I was a guest on Harrison Wheeler’s Technically Speaking podcast.
I did a livestream with Tommy Geoco about design systems.
I joined Joey Banks to talk about design system teams of one on a Twitter Space.
I taught a design system workshop remotely in 4 days over 2 weeks at the Design Ops Summit.
I spoke about design systems at Clarity in New Orleans and taught a full-day workshop on design tokens.
I spoke at Smashing Meets Design Systems remotely with fellow speakers Hayley Hughes and Ben Callahan.
I joined the Smashing Hour online to talk about, well, everything!
I talked to Lex Roman’s Growthtrackers group about how to price and package your services.

On creativity & creating

Not that I doubted it, but I’ve embraced even more this year that I’m a maker. I like making things. I don’t know that I’ll ever stop making things.

What I have learned this year is that the channels for expressing this making can change, even as often as daily.

Videos & photos

In 2022, I took 37,476 photos and videos, which is 129% more than last year’s 28,893 photos and videos. (Coincidentally, last year I shot 129% than the previous year. Apparently, my photography quantity grows by exactly 129% each year 🤣 ). Of the photos and videos I took this year, I posted 85 (0.22%) to my photo Instagram account, which was 23% less photos than I posted in 2021.

I didn’t buy any new photography gear this year (with the exception of another tripod and a few small lights), which reinforces the feeling that I’m pleased with my setup. I’m comfortable with my gear, and I think that’s coming through in the work. For reference, my go-to setup is a Canon EOS R with a EF 24-70mm f/2.8, EF 16-35mm f/4, and EF 100-400m f/4.5–5.6.

I can see a few small changes and pickups for next year:

I did more of both portrait and food photography this year than in previous years. If that continues, I may pick up a macro lens like the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8.
I use a Sony Alpha a6400 as my webcam, and I keep a cheap Neewer 25mm f/1.8 lens on it. However, I’ve been using it lately to do two angles for video work, so I’m looking out for a better lens for that. My main video setup is my Canon EOS R with my EF 24-70mm f/2.8 on it, so maybe a 50mm f/1.8 for the Sony would be a great complementary pickup that wouldn’t hurt my wallet too much.
My EF 16-35mm f/4 is getting a little long in the tooth, so maybe I’ll upgrade to an EF 16-35mm f/2.8 or RF 15-35mm f2.8.

Here are a few of my favorite shots I took in 2022:

Over the last two years as I was leading and managing more at SuperFriendly and designing less, photography became my primary creative outlet for making.

As soon as I started working on Dan Mall Teaches, I had little desire to shoot photos, post to, or even check my photo Instagram account. It was a near-visceral change, and my creative energy went into creating content for my new business as much as I could spare it.

This website

I launched this new website at the end of October. This is the 6th major version of my personal website. I had two main goals for this version of the site:

Write more. Success! This year, I wrote 24 articles, up from 14 in 2021 and 4 in 2020.
Make this site my second brain. I have private notes in a suite of note-taking apps, but I see no reason most of that stuff can’t be public. Also, I’m itching to put my all photos in galleries on the site and to have an area where can I post my notes from books I’ve read. I’m hoping 2023 can be the year I make this happen. These are the kinds of projects I can give to my intern when I hire them.

Podcasting

A dozen people have mentioned having a podcast to me. I’d like to do one, but I don’t have any bright ideas on a particular angle yet, nor is another project a priority right now. Maybe I’ll put in the work to figure this out in 2023.

Artificial intelligence

It has blown up over the last few weeks, but artificial intelligence is an official part of any creation process I do right now—and into the foreseeable future. I generate most of my share images with Midjourney, and I use it and DALL•E to generate layouts and color palettes when I’m starting any new design composition (Instagram carousels, landing page designs, etc.). I riff with ChatGPT about different variations of ideas. I use vidIQ’s AI title recommendations and daily ideas for content starters. Writesonic even helped me write this year in review, and Hemingway helped me make it more readable. I’m going on hour 12 of writing this article; maybe next year, AI can write it for me.

Family & Home

Relative to work, home life was copacetic in 2022, by design. We’re 2 years into our new neighborhood, and we’ve settled in.

Also, I’m as private about family and home stuff as I am public about work and business stuff, so I’m that much more apt to share less in this section. But, a few small tidbits, for funsies.

We started the year going through all of the Marvel movies in timeline order. It’s been one of the most fun things I’ve done as a dad. We skipped a few when we first started, but throughout the year, we’ve filled in the gaps. The only ones they haven’t seen are The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, She-Hulk, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness; it might still be a few years before I let them watch those.

11-year old Sidda and 9-year old Charlie are both into singing and dancing right now. Sidda had roles in the local Frozen Jr. show last year and James and the Giant Peach Jr. show this summer. Charlie’s in chorus at school and will join big sis in a show this summer. They sing and choreograph their own dances together at home for hours.

Our family was featured in our town’s local magazine! It was fun for us all to do a short interview and photo shoot in our house last spring.

This year, we got suckered into installing solar panels on our house. The whole ordeal was a bit of a hassle, but now that it’s over, I’m glad we’re doing at least a small part to help the planet move towards clean energy. While we were at it, we installed a electric vehicle charger in our garage. Both Em’s and my car leases were up this year, so we both bought used Teslas. They’re so fun to drive, and we don’t ever have to worry about stopping at gas stations to fill up anymore!

We took a few fun trips this year as a family. In the beginning of summer, we drove to Acadia National Park, half because we’ve always wanted to go and half to see how an electric car would do on a road trip. (It was awesome like we expected, and it was awesome like we expected.) At the end of summer, we went to Alaska for a week. We did a lot of cool things there, but the coolest by far was taking a helicopter to the top of a glacier and dogsledding there for an hour. That’s definitely one of the most special moments we’ve had together as a family.

Outside of our nuclear family, my parents had some struggles in 2022, the residual effects of which threw me for a loop that I haven’t quite recovered from. That’s all I’ll say here about that.

Health, wellness, and self-care

I’m proud of the fact that I’ve played basketball regularly pretty much all year. I play about 2 hours every time I go, which is once or twice a week. I’m still not that good, but I enjoy it a lot. It’s great exercise, and I usually burn about 1500–2000 calories every time. I’m playing enough that I’ve even started to practice outside of the weekly games to work on parts of my game. I bring my GoPro to record the games so I can see what I need to work on—and also to make highlight reels that make me look better than I am 🤣. I’ve been working on my shooting form and my Euro step, and I can actually see improvement week-to-week! I’ve joined a new group of people to play with that starts in early January, so I’m looking forward to how I’ll need to adapt to play with and against a new crew.

Back in February, I was all set to travel and spend a week workshopping with a client, but I didn’t go because I got COVID. The first day was pretty rough with fevers and chills, but after that, I felt fine, other than some stray congestion that lingered for a few weeks.

I still drink a lot of soda.

In July, I vomited for the first time in 10 years. I’m still not sure why. I woke up in the middle of the night with a pounding headache, threw up, and went back to bed 🤷🏽‍♂️.

In August, I started going to a chiropractor. I initially went with some help for neck pain, which cleared up within the first week. Then, I didn’t know what I was going for. I felt the same for 2½ months. I didn’t feel any different for weeks after I stopped going 🤷🏽‍♂️.

On the mental health front, it’s been over a year since I’ve been working with my most recent therapist and coach, and she’s a keeper. She understands me like few others do, she doesn’t take any of my BS, and she knows where to affirm and where to push me. I’ve grown to trust her pretty quickly, and she hasn’t steered me wrong. More of this, please!

Books

In 2022, I read or attempted to read:

The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, by Ben Fritz
The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, by Michael D. Watkins
Avengers: Infinity, by James A. Moore
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke
~~How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal About the Greatest Game on Earth, by Nick Greene (abandoned)~~
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim
~~Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall (abandoned)~~
How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters, by Michael Bungray Stanier
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, by Michael Schur
You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism, by Amber Ruffin
Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say—and What You Don’t, by L. David Marquet
Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential, by Tiago Forte
Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, by Bob Chapman
The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed, by Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, by Daniel H. Pink
$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No, by Alex Hormozi
Marriage Be Hard: 12 Conversations to Keep You Laughing, Loving, and Learning with Your Partner, by Kevin and Melissa Fredericks
Boundaries with Kids: How Healthy Choices Grow Healthy Children, by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend (currently reading)
Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become an American, by Wajahat Ali (currently reading)

Travel

For the third year in a row, most of my travel was personal instead of work-related. In 2022, I visited:

St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands
Jacksonville, FL
Gardiner, MT
Washington, DC
Columbus, OH
Falmouth, Jamaica
Bar Harbor, ME
Anchorage, AK
London, UK
Benton, PA
New Orleans, LA

Sole man

I added a few new sneakers to the collection in 2022:

Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG Dark Marina Blue/White/Black
Nike Go FlyEase Sunrise
Air Jordan 1 High OG ‘Rebellionaire’
Nike Dunk High x AMBUSH Flash Lime
Air Jordan 1 Mid SE ‘Zen Master’
Air Jordan 1 Mid SE ‘Newsprint‘

Miscellany

I started the year with a full beard, which I thought I’d keep around for a while. No one in my family liked it, so I got rid of it.
In January, I posted my most liked tweet ever: a few sketches for a speculative mobile phone feature where people have to include why they’re calling you before they’re allowed to dial.
In 2021, I started doing quarterly lunches/dinners with my friends Wil Reynolds and Alex Hillman. I’ve grown to look forward to this—daresay need it even—and I come away energized each time. I’m grateful to have friends that I can confide in.
One of my proudest professional moments this year was having a 4-page interview in the 16th edition of the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook. I read these books cover-to-cover when I was first starting in my career. It’s a great honor for me to be featured in one years later.
I played Wordle for 272 days straight. I meant to play for a year, but I forgot one day. So I stopped.
I ate at some great new restaurants this year: Alpen Rose, Matthew’s, LMNO, Bar Hygge, Roost, Wonderland Cafe & Lodge, Copper Horse Restaurant, Green Eggs Café, Bourbon & Branch, Urban Farmer, Wokuni, Ole & Steen, 5ive Spice, Totto Ramen, Wilder, Lindey’s, Father Bull, The Dead Rabbit, The Rookery, Faro, Royal Sushi, Omakase by Yanaga, Harp & Crown, Sushi Zo Hanare, Métier, Via Locusta, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, Bar Harbor Lobster Co., Hansen’s Outpost, Best Burger, Swiftwater Seafood Cafe, Wild Catch Café, Gold Rush Bistro, Ficus, Dishoom, eat TOKYO, Goldie, Herbsaint, Añejo, Win Son Bakery, Quality Meats, Fiore Rosso, Kalaya.

2023

My goals for 2023 are the same as last year’s: to do less, laugh more, and eat delicious food with family and friends. I love Justin Welsh’s latest newsletter about anti-goals, and I’ve been spending these last few days of the year, reflecting on how I can do less of what I don’t like doing and more of what I do.

I do also have a few specific things I’m looking forward to getting, doing, and trying;

My Dribbble design system course launches in February. I’m very excited about this!
I have a few new pairs of sneakers I’d like to pick up: Air Jordan 1 Mid “Bred Toe,” Air Jordan 1 Zoom CMFT “Black Light Smoke Grey,” Women’s Air Jordan 1 Mid “Alternate Swoosh,” Air Jordan 1 Mid SE “Heat Reactive,” Women’s Air Jordan 1 High OG NRG “Aleali May - Court Lux”
Launching a secret project I’ve been working on for a while

Happy holidays to you, and wishing you a wonderful start to 2023!

Yes, Under These Conditions

Dan Mall — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:46:00 +0000

As much as I can, I try to say “yes” to people. I’m not a people-pleaser in that I don’t compromise my own feelings just to avoid conflict, but I do like when people say “yes” to me, so I try to do the same for others. I also have priorities and good boundaries, so I realize that I can’t say “yes” to everything.

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I’ve learned that a good middle ground for me is to answer, “Yes, under these conditions.” Part of my worldview is that there are almost always multiple ways to solve any given problem, so I try to explore (and sometimes exhaust) those options before drawing a definitive line at “no” if I can.

This works great in parenting. My kids have asked me, “Can I yell at the top of my lungs?” My default answer as someone who generally likes quiet is “no,” but my “yes, under these conditions” answer is, “Sure, if you go outside.”

Or, they’ve asked, “Can I eat all the cookies I can?” Again, gut reaction is “absolutely not,” but I’ve found a version through “yes, under these conditions” that’s honestly more fun for everyone by saying, “Yep, you can eat all the cookies you can for the next 3 minutes. I’m setting a timer. Go!”

This works with colleagues and people that report to you too. “Can I do a blue sky design exploration of this idea?” “Sure! If you can finish some designs that gets the developers the stuff they need to keep busy for a few days, you can spend the rest of the week doing some explorations.”

This technique also allows me to try new things—read: take some risks—while still keeping my exposure limited. You won’t ever catch me doing any TikTok dances on any public account, but my private, burner Instagram account is full of them. (Go ahead; just try and find it.) Or, “I’ll try those chocolate-covered ants… but I’m only gonna have two.”

Next time you’re tempted to say “no” outright when someone makes a request of you, considering pausing for a beat to see if you have a version of “yes, under these conditions.”

Whoever Wants It More Does the Work

Dan Mall — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:46:00 +0000

I moved every year in college. It was easy, because I barely had anything to move from apartment to apartment. I was dating Em through all that, then we got married, and then we had kids.

More than a decade and half a dozen places later, I dreaded moving when the prospect came up. We had so much stuff! Could we afford a 3-bedroom? How long would it take me to get accustomed to a new home office?

Lucky for me, Em did all the work. She wanted to move badly. She did the Zillow research. She booked reasonably priced movers. She found a place that fit my sensibilities too. She put money away for months so we could make a down payment and afford our new mortgage.

All I had to do was say yes (or no).

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My emotional response was to say no. Once I really thought about it afterwards, I didn’t have a good reason to. All the objections were already removed. So I agreed—or, more accurately, I didn’t object—and I love the new house we’ve been in for the last 2 years. It’s so much better for our family in every way.

We have a saying in our family: “Whoever wants it more does the work.” Em wanted to move more than I did, so she did all the work. If I had to work on it—putting money away, looking for houses, etc—the effort probably would have been short-lived, because I didn’t really want it in the first place (regardless of the fact that it ultimately turned out to be something that benefitted me). I probably would have stopped my effort because “it was too difficult,” when the real reason was actually that I didn’t have enough motivation to see the effort through.When you want something, working hard towards it is sustainable, because it’s a goal that you’re intrinsically driven to achieve.

Flattening the power dynamic

In any relationship, the one who wants the least has more leverage, and, therefore, more power. One way to have healthy relationships—between partners, colleagues, friends—is to identify and call out the power dynamics as early as possible. In a healthy relationship, the goal is not to exploit that power dynamic but to flatten it in a way that each party gets what they want and can put forward appropriate effort to that end. Too many times, we employ an inappropriate level of effort due to secondary factors: guilt, fear, ignorance, inexperience, lack of information, and so much more.

This line of thinking has many benefits in a work context. When I’m pitching a new client, I think, “Do I want to work with them more than they want to work with me?” If I understand that they want to work with me more than I want to work with them, then why I am spending weeks writing a proposal unpaid, just to have them potentially opt for a cheaper service provider? If they want to work with me more, they should be working harder than I am!

It cuts both ways too: for my dream client, I’ve gladly cut my price to a fraction of what I’ve charged others, because it’s my version of ”doing the work.”

For service providers, understanding this dynamic and acting appropriately to it is a major benefit in getting paid appropriately, especially when value pricing. For employees, understanding power dynamics are a helpful aid in upholding your boundaries at work.

The great thing about this approach is that doing and demonstrating your work is powerful equalizer. Typically, people who have more power in any given situation don’t do much. They don’t really have to; they can just say something and trust that it will be done. When you do the work, you put the work up against the words of the person in power.

For example, your boss might say in a meeting, “We shouldn’t invest in an usability lab because it would cost too much.” If you showed up with a handout showing that a usability lab costs less than the company’s annual software budget that largely goes unused each year so you propose reallocating that software budget to the usability lab instead, costing the company no more money than was already allocated, that’s a pretty solid case. There’s also a pretty high chance that your boss did not come to the meeting with a handout of how a usability lab would cost too much. People in power generally want to maintain the status quo (because they have power in the status quo), and it’d be a bit ironic to do extra work to maintain the status quo. This works in your favor. If it was their word against yours, the power dynamic indicates that they win every time. But when it’s your work against their word, the odds even a bit more, especially to bystanders, and sometimes, even to the person in power themselves.

Making decisions easy

In their bestselling negotiation book Getting to Yes, authors Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton of the Harvard Negotiation Project reveal many tips for winning negotations. Among them:

Since success for you in a negotation depends upon the other side’s making a decision you want, you should do what you can to make that decision an easy one. Rather than make things difficult for the other side, you want to confront them with a choice that is as painless as possible… People usually pay too little attention to ways of advancing their case by taking care of interests on the other side… Without some option that appeals to them, there is likely to be no agreement at all.

One of the most common reasons for denying a request is that it disrupts the status quo. You’re asking for a change, and change is risky. A common unstated risk is, “If I say yes, then I have to do a bunch of work.”

The easiest way to negate that risk is to already have taken care of the associated work for them. This has an added bonus of making the other person feel like you anticipated their needs.

Doing the work

Even if you buy this logic, you may be wondering what “the work” here is when you want something more than the other person. In short, the work is turning open-ended requests into closed-ended requests.

Open-ended questions allow for a range of possibilities, which is why they’re great for brainstorming, exploration, and other divergent thinking activities. Closed-ended questions only have two possible answers—“yes” or “no”—which is why they’re more well-suited to convergent thinking. Generally, closed-ended questions are easier to answer, conceivably because there are fewer acceptable answers.

As you’re trying to both get what you want and create accountability with another person, do the work of trying to discourage any divergent thinking by doing it yourself ahead of time. The more you address the “what if” responses in your pitch, the more closed-ended your request becomes.

All that’s left for the other person to do is decide “yes” or “no.”

Here are some examples of “doing the work” in both work and non-work environments where you might want something more than the other person:

If you’re pitching your boss on a raise at your annual review, bring some printouts of industry rates for average compensation for your position, a summary of your achievements in the last year, a spreadsheet where you’ve the done the math of how much money you’ve saved the company and effectively already paying for your raise, etc.
If you want to go somewhere with people that they might not be keen on, make a brochure for them that highlights the activites they’d enjoy. Last year, I made a 40-slide presentation full of photos and videos to pitch my family on doing a road trip through Portugal.
If you want to convince your colleagues of a wacky new idea, spend an extra day or two or weekend with a co-worker designing some mockups or building a prototype that prove it can be done and address any objection that might arise.
If you want to pitch your neighbors on starting a community group, outline the details of a point system where the person who does the most shifts gets a cash prize or treated to a fancy dinner at the end of the year.

Taking action… or not

So, the next time someone’s asking something of you or you’re asking something of someone, first think, ”Who wants this more?”

If it’s you, do the work to remove every perceived obstacle before they arise. Then ask for what you want.

If it’s them, see if you can find a way answer, “Yes, under these conditions.”

Ask

Dan Mall — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 15:46:00 +0000

I’m fortunate to receive a significant number of emails and direct messages where someone is looking for some advice or momentary mentorship from me.

Many of these messages have this kind of structure:

Hi Dan,

I’m looking to connect with you to learn more about how I can grow as a designer.

Hi Dan,

I’m wondering if you’d want to be on my podcast. I’d love to have you on if you’re interested.

I try and take these for the positive spirit which I assume they’re intended. I’m honored that people reach out to learn from me or want to involve me in what they’re doing; I don’t take that lightly.

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The thing that bugs me about them is that there’s no actual request here. I can certainly infer and assume what they’re looking for, but I know what happens when I assume.

I realize I’m nitpicking, but details matter. One of the most common reasons people don’t get what they want is that what they’re asking for is unclear. Here are a few tips to help you make your desires more direct.

What’s the question?

When our kids were toddlers, my wife and I would redirect their whining with this phrase, “A whine is probably a question you’re not asking. What’s your question? Is there something you want?” It was a really helpful technique in turning a hot-tempered “I don’t like peas!” to “Can I please have asparagus instead?”

Lest we think this behavior is found only in children, I was on a sales call the other day where the person on the other end spent the first 25 minutes of our call giving me “context.” Once they got to a natural pause, I asked, honestly puzzled, “What can I help with?” They spent the next 10 minutes telling me their plan. I asked again, “What can I help with?” They spent the next 5 minutes telling me what some of their personal weaknesses were. While all the info was great, I still didn’t really know what they wanted from me. I eventually left the call bewildered.

Ask an easy question to answer

When you’re asking something of someone, you probably want the result more than they want do it for you, so it behooves you to do the work. The more difficult question you ask, the less likely it is that you’ll get your desired answer.

For example, if someone were to ask me, “Can you speak to my community group?”, I couldn’t answer that question easily, even if I was very open to speaking to the group. I need a bunch of answers—both from you and from me—before I can answer yours! What would you like me to speak about? When? For how long? Who will be attending? Will you be paying me, and if so, how much? What outcomes do you want and expect for your group from having me as a speaker? Am I capable of delivering what you expect? I may choose to ask these questions to you, or, in a split second, I may decide that I’m too exhausted already to even ask these questions and instead answer a simple “no.” Either way, you didn’t get what you wanted, which was mentorship.

Instead, if you did the work to answer those questions before I even ask, that might sound something like this:

Can you speak to my community group about design systems? We meet every Thursday night and the next opening we have is January 19, which is when I’d love for you to join us. I can pay an honorarium of $200. I think we would be very inspired to hear your stories and could grow from your experience. Would you be interested and willing to speak to us on January 19? If you’re willing but can’t do that date (or Thursdays in general), let me know what days are best for you and I’ll schedule it for a day and time that works well for you

Although I might still say “no” for various reasons, I’m much more likely to say “yes” because it’s an easier question to answer than the previous one. It’s easier because:

Many of the questions I might have asked are answered before I even have to ask them.
Not only have they done the work to anticipate my questions, but they’re also offering to do more work by accommodating my schedule. This triggers a psychological factor known as the reciprocity principle: we pay back what we receive from others. The fact that you offered to do something for me makes me more likely to want to do something for you.

Rejection

A big reason that people don’t ask direct questions is to avoid rejection. As someone who really struggles with rejection, I get the strategy: if I don’t ask, then no one can say “no!” But the opposite holds true too: if I don’t ask, no one can say “yes” either.

Asking for something is risky, because you might get rejected. But all profit comes from risk. The more time and effort you spend avoiding risk, the more you delay your potential reward.

If you can, push yourself past the fear of rejection to clear ask for what you want.

You shall receive

As the saying goes, “Ask, and you shall receive.”

So, ask a direct, easy question and see how you get more of what you want!

Three Times is a Pattern

Dan Mall — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 13:31:00 +0000

“How do we know which components should be added to our design system?”

I have a simple guideline I share with teams to prevent a lengthy debate. It’s inspired by a quote from Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger of James Bond lore. Fleming writes:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.

If one team needs a component, wait before adding it to the system. Twice even… sit tight. But if three or more teams need a component right now or very soon (within the current quarter of work), that’s a good candidate to contribute into a design system. Design systems exist to solve common problems; less than three instances isn’t common enough to be worthwhile work to warrant a design system team’s attention. Design systems are a tool for scale; spending time on one-offs (and two-offs) isn’t working at scale, but three or more starts to get you in that territory.

If it’s good enough for 007, it’s good enough for me.

Great tools choose to be bad at some things

Dan Mall — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 13:04:00 +0000

Yes! I couldn’t love this any more. It reminds me of a quote from productivity expert David Allen:

You can do anything, but not everything.

Frequency illusion

Dan Mall — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 06:43:00 +0000

Also known as the “Baader–Meinhof phenomenon” or “frequency bias,” frequency illusion is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has an increased frequency of occurrence. It occurs when increased awareness of something creates the illusion that it is appearing more often. Put plainly, the frequency illusion occurs when “a concept or thing you just found out about suddenly seems to pop up everywhere.”

As someone who has both a lot of ideas and at least a small sense of FOMO, I often get the feeling that people have “stolen my idea” when I see someone release a product, a service, heck, even a tweet about something I’ve been researching and plan to do something about. I recently learned about frequency illusion, and it’s a sobering and relieving reminder that my ideas aren’t as original as I sometimes believe them to be.

Digital Nomad History

Dan Mall — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 06:27:00 +0000

A fascinating history about the many of the things that led to an acceptable culture of digital nomads in tech. In my post about shutting down SuperFriendly, I mentioned that starting a distributed business in 2012 was met with a good deal of bewilderment from prospective clients. That all but disappeared nowadays, a small contributor to my “mission accomplished” feeling in closing up shop. It’s eye-opening to see a list of the advances over the last 40 years that made it possible.

superfriEnd

Dan Mall — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 09:27:00 +0000

After 10 years, 9 months, and 6 days, it’s time for me to shut down SuperFriendly.

I started SuperFriendly in 2012 for a number of reasons.

My oldest daughter was 6 months old, and I wanted a way to be around her and my wife for as many hours of the day as I could be while still providing for our family.

I believed in a different way of working, and I wanted to test it all out. Remote work and distributed work were fairly uncommon at time, but I believed people could work asynchronously from wherever they wanted and do better work because of it. I believed people didn’t have to be fellow employees to be an effective team. I believed getting paid for outcomes aligned customer and provider more closely than charging for time. I believed teaching clients how to do what I and we do without us is a better service that making them reliant on the partnership. I believed freelancers could simultaneously operated independently and still have career paths, growth trajectories, and community. I believed all of those things fit together under one business model pretty well.

More than ten years later, I still believe all of those things, even stronger than I originally did, partly because I have proof of it now. I’m also happy that there are more people in the world who seem to believe these things too. When I started SuperFriendly, I remember having to pitch prospective clients on the value of distributed team; now much of the world works this way (or at least have had 1–2 years of forced experience in it). Network-based digital businesses were fairly rare a decade ago; now I feel like every agency out there pitches “a network of freelancers, custom assembled for each client.” I’m not arrogant enough to think SuperFriendly was responsible for that progression—heck, I stole it too—but I do like to think we contributed to it in some small way.

I’m very proud of the work we’ve done. More importantly, I’m proud of the way we did it. Personally, through SuperFriendly, I’ve had a chance to do some of the best work of my career. In a lot of ways, SuperFriendly is the best work of my career (so far). One day, I’ll find a way to share some of the work few have seen in a way that honors it.

I’ve made more money than I ever thought possible by running my own business for the first time, and I’ve also spent more money than I ever thought possible by running my own business for the first time.

I’ve learned a lot by running SuperFriendly. But for the first time in a decade, I think I’m running out of things that I want to learn or try through this vehicle. I also believe some new things now: about work, about the design and tech industry, about myself. I’m eager to continue to explore these new beliefs in different ways.

I’ve learned about myself through running SuperFriendly for over a decade. I’ve learned that I love to teach. I love to explore and create new ideas and things and quickly bring them to life with the skills I've learned as a designer. I love learning through trying things. I'm a volatile; I can't sit still very long. I love doing things I haven’t done before, even when they’re scary—maybe especially when they’re scary.

I’m not sure what’s next for me. I don’t really have a firm plan, but I do have lots of things I want to try. Maybe that's a plan itself, or at least enough of one. I’m trying to stay open to whatever might bring me energy and joy or whatever happens to serendipitously cross my path. I have some runway to take time to figure it out but that window is closing, so it feels a bit like a race against the clock. I'm enjoying creating products that seem to resonate with so many people where I can share my stories, knowledge, and experience. I'm doing some consulting with a few teams to level up their product, design system, or DesignOps practices. I've taken some interviews to join an in-house team full-time, which has simultaneously felt exhilarating, humiliating, surprising, and tiresome. I may dust off a few product and business ideas I’ve had on the shelf for a few years and perhaps try my hand at a venture-backed company. If you'd like to collaborate with me on any or all of these things—or if you have a different idea or suggestions for things I should look into—please do send me a DM on Twitter, Instagram, or feel free to write me a long email.

To the hundreds of clients and SuperFriends whose paths I’ve been lucky to cross in the last 10 years: thank you.

Surprise! Why the Unexpected Feels Good, and Why It’s Good For Us

Dan Mall — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:27:00 +0000

Generally, I’m not a fan of surprises. The drawbacks tend to outweigh the benefits for me. I’ve never really understood why people enjoy surprises, and even moreso why people enjoy surprising others.

This article explains:

[Surprises are a] strong neuro alert that tells us that something is important about this moment and we have to pay attention… Our cognitive resources are basically hijacked and pulled into the moment. That’s one of the things that’s really uncomfortable for some people, but also exciting for some people because your attention is completely in the moment.

That articulates well what I don‘t like about surprises: it feels like it’s someone’s way of hijacking my attention. It feels manipulative.

But dang… this one cuts deep:

[I hated] the feeling of loss of control and the feeling of vulnerability. As a kid, I had experienced a lot of change and my coping mechanism was to say, ‘I’m in charge. I control everything. Nobody controls me and I can control the world around me.’ I was protecting myself from negative surprises. But what I’ve learned is that I was also keeping out joy, wonder, and emotional intensity.

Oof. I’m gonna explore this idea a bit more and try to notice what I positive things I may be unintentionally keeping out.

Tonic Website Templates

Dan Mall — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Beautiful, affordable Wordpress templates. I’m saving this to refer to people who need a website without needing to build something completely from scratch.

The Rise of A.I. Art

Dan Mall — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Interesting thoughts from Jason Zada, an artist whose work I’ve followed for years. His experience with AI-generated art mirrors my own:

The more you play around with AI-generated art, the more addicted or the more frustrated you will become.

Both!

AI has already become part of my design process. I’m initially using it to McDonald’s Theory my way around an initial blank canvas, and I’m eager to see where else it leads me.

Real numbers from 16 income streams - 2021/22 income report

Dan Mall — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

I’m a sucker for people sharing the data behind the scenes of their businesses. I’ve learned a lot from this, so I try to share this kind of stuff myself.

As I explore more ways to diversify my own income, information like this from experienced people like Charli is invaluable in visualizing fruitful—and unfruitful— paths ahead. Thank you, Charli!

A Whole Cascade of Layers

Dan Mall — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

I’ve been writing CSS since 2004, and I fancy myself to be pretty good at it—at least good enough to be able to make websites with relative ease.

Then something so new comes along that I want to rethink the whole approach. That’s what Mia’s writing on cascade layers is for me. It’s another reminder just how much I still have to learn.

I built something!

Dan Mall — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

I’m an idea person. I come up with ideas constantly. Where I usually get stuck is what to do with those ideas. Write a blog post? Tweet about it? Open an LLC? Talk to an investor? Build an MVP?

Ellen’s article does a fantastic job addressing the possibilities. She outlines 4 possible paths:

Yes, this should be a VC backed company.

Maybe, this doesn't look like a venture-scale company, but is definitely looks like a company (and some other financing might be appropriate).

Maybe, but first you should keep going with this as a serious project to answer where you want to take it.

No, this is more of a personal/hobby project which is still great!

A very helpful reference that I’ll be coming back to often.

The case for null in design systems

Dan Mall — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

I really love Eric’s thoughts here, especially on the idea of ghost pages in design system reference sites.

In computer science, null is the intentional absence of a value. You can have one of a thing, 100 of a thing, none of a thing, or soon to have a thing. Null, however, means someone decided that you aren’t allowed to have the thing – period. Null denies it from even potentially being a thing.

Yes! It’s so difficult to tell when the absence of something you expect is intentional or not. Eric’s article helps you signal that some things aren’t there on purpose.

I’ve similarly recommended redirect pages for synonymous terms. For example, if a significant amount of people are still prone to think of the Toast component as “Notification,” create a Notification page that redirects to the Toast page and ensure both appear in search results. That redirect might be automatic, or it might be a simple page that explains the overlap and provides links to the canonical/preferred version. It’s an effective way to show the “right” system term without anyone ever having to be “wrong.”

The Folly of Design System “Foundations”

Dan Mall — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 08:56:00 +0000

When creating a physical structure like a building, a foundation is pretty dang important, for lots of reasons. Most importantly, in the words of This Old House, the foundation “should last forever.”

It’s way less important when making a digital product.

In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that many software development practices exist to decouple reliance on as many “forever” pieces as possible. Merging capabilities in version control systems allow us to edit, remove, or augment any part of the product at any time without damaging the rest of the codebase. Removing the first line of code ever written in any given piece of software is only ever one pull request away. Digital products are our modern day ships of Theseus.

First things, first

I’m not entirely sure where the idea that the first step in creating a good digital product starts by establishing “foundations” like color and typography came from. Perhaps it’s a relic of the waterfall methodology that implies that creating digital products is a series of dependencies that build upon each other.

The danger of thinking about anything in a digital product as a “foundation” is that it implies you must focus on this thing first, that everything else needs to be built on this supporting structure.

Lest we get too pedantic here, I’m talking as much about the idea of “foundations” as the specific word. The logic still applies whether you call them “foundations,” “base,” “core,” “fundamentals,” or any other synonym.

Whatever the reason, our sample size of prospective clients and customers suggest this is a legitimately preconceived notion. One of the most frequent questions we got when we launched our Design System in 90 Days workbook is about the lack of content about establishing color, typography, and spacing guidelines, referred to by most of the people asking as “foundations.” The main reason it’s not in the workbook is because we think there are at least 52 more important things to focus on in the first 90 days. Blasphemy, I know!

Many of our prospective client inquiries contain stories like this:

We’re honing in on our initial design language and some of our basic components, but we haven’t gotten much further than that. We’ve been chipping away at it for a while but we just can’t ever seem to make the progress we want to make. We’re planning an offsite for our design team soon to finish laying the foundations. Once we’re through that, can you help us with establishing our contribution and governance models?

In my experience, this “if you build it, they will come” mindset is the largest contributor to what ends up as a design system graveyard.

At it’s simplest, it’s inaccurate and impractical. Humans are awful at accurate predictions. Have you ever tried to design a screen by first picking a color palette and a typeface and then creating the screen? Inevitably, you have to change it once you’re actually applying those choices to a particular context. That it changes disqualifies it as a “foundation.” (More on this idea below.)

If not working on “foundations,” what, then, should the first step be? There are two ends of a spectrum that suggest different starting points:

You’re creating a design system at a large enterprise organization that has many existings websites and applications
You’re creating a design system at a new company or startup that has yet to create the first website or application

For organizations with many existing digital products

Start by identifying existing useful patterns in your current sites and applications. The chances that a brand team or product team have already picked a brand typeface are pretty high, which is how it should be. It’s the brand team’s job to establish brand standards. It’s the design system team’s job to help make those standards easy to implement in user interfaces. A design system is a system for creating interfaces that needs to work in conjunction with other organizational systems.

For new companies or startups

Creating a design system first for a new company is premature optimization.

Sure, you need a typeface and a color palette to create your first MVP. But pick quickly. Spend 30 minutes on this decision, not 30 days.

I’ll pick for you. Pick a color palette from Adobe Color. Use Helvetica. Don’t like Helvetica? Use Inter. Don’ like Inter? Use Roboto. Don’t like Roboto? You’ve already spent more time on this decision than is valuable for your startup. Any time not spent on pursuing product-market-fit is probably a waste of time at this point.

Volatility, then stability

Over the last decade, I have yet to find an article that better describes the product creation narrative better than Michael Lopp’s “Stables and Volatiles:”

The birth of a successful 1.0 is a war with convention and common sense. It is built around a handful of Volatiles who believe that “We can bring this new thing into the world,” and no one believes them.

This is the story of my experience with design systems too. It’s near-impossible to ship the first version of a design system without a Volatile or two willing it into existence through unconventional decisions and brute force.

Starting a design system with “foundations” is logical and rational. It feels like common sense. And it rarely ships or finds traction and adoption.

Style guides vs. design systems

I’ve seen a high correlation between those who overvalue the importance of “foundations” in design systems and those who are actually trying to create a style guide, not a design system (even if they’re not aware of that or the difference).

Style guides are a collection of rules. They tell you what you’re allowed to do and not allowed to do within a given context. Use this blue. Geometric patterns aren’t permitted. Cool colors only. While the best style guides allow you to create within the rules, most only succeed at enforcing consistency by censuring and eliminating unwanted variation. Useful, but restraining.

Design systems instead should be a collection of processes. The best ones focus more on what you can do and give you the tools to do it.

Perhaps the most important difference between a style guide and a design system is their approaches to the idea of change. Most style guides try to limit change. Design systems lay the groundwork for change to happen easily, elegantly, and scalably. Design systems are at their most valuable at the moment of change. When a big rebrand comes along, a well-connected design system can reduce that effort from months or even years of individually modifying and refactoring existing application code to a few weeks or even days of changing a few design tokens.

Within the context of design systems, I find it difficult to reconcile the ideas of “foundations” with continually pursuing a framework for elegant, organizational change.

The slippery slope of “foundations”

So, if not first, when do you get to pick colors and typefaces?

Later. Or whenever. Maybe first, but also maybe not. Anytime.

I’m not saying colors and typography aren’t important. I’m saying they don’t have to be the first thing you do—and they often shouldn’t be. I’m suggesting we loosen our reliance on the sacredness of things like colors and typography in the beginning stages of design system work.

If colors and typography are foundations, then surely we should choose a color palette and a typeface before we move any further, right? And, if this is what we build everything on top of, shouldn’t we take ample time to do some color and typography studies to ensure we’re making a decision that lasts? Suddenly, you wake up 6 months later to realize you haven’t actually made anything that an end user can interact with.

The idea of “foundations” in design system work is a black hole. For systems-minded designers and engineers, the gravitational pull of spending months studying to find a perfectly harmonious set of colors, workhorse type family, data visualization library, or animation suite is near impossible to resist. When done too early, these are self-serving (and often selfish) activities that distract from the real focus of design systems: making it easier and better for feature teams to create things that further the organization’s mission.

A design system is a product, so the process to create an adopted one should resemble the process that startups use to create adopted products: create a minimum viable product to test a particular hypothesis, measure how customers respond, and learn whether to pivot or persevere. Picking primary and secondary colors isn’t a test of any particular hypothesis, not one that matters when you’re first starting anyway.

Spending time on “foundations”reveals its own hypothesis: that an objectively better design system will find traction. That, if the code is cleaner and the design is tighter, designers and engineers will naturally make the wiser choice to use it. Perhaps of any common assumption I’ve seen in design system work, this is the one I’ve found to be the least true.

I’ve seen design systems gain adoption for a number of unorthodox—and honestly contradictory—reasons:

Leadership mandated usage, even though it was incomplete
Documentation was more integrated, even if it was less clear than other options
There were one or two specific components available that other design systems and component libraries didn’t have, even if other systems were more comprehensive
Component configuration fit a specific mental model, even if it was objectively more complex

The reason I’ve seen least was that the design system was simply better. “Better for me” or “better for our team” wins over “better.” The fidelity, comprehensiveness, or even existence of “foundations” seems to make little difference.

The exception to this is the specific scenario where leadership has mandated upgrading to a rebrand within a certain timeframe. In this case, simply having the new brand attributes like colors and typefaces in the design system is the primary draw to adopt it.

Reframing “foundations”

If “foundations” is a misleading label for things like “color” or “typography,” what should we call them instead?

Nothing.

Call them what they are: “colors” and “typography.” A growing trend in design system work is that everything is a component—thanks React—so these can be components too. File them alphabetically like you do everything else.

If you really need an umbrella term, consider something like “Identity” that doesn’t imply a hierarchy or sequence and allows these pieces to be independent, reusable, and modifiable like every other component.

A cautionary tale for “foundations”

We worked with a client recently who came to us because they weren’t seeing enough traction with their design system, despite it being up and running for the past year with a handful of components and “foundations” built in. We ran a few internal pilots with them to set some benchmarks for how much a design system could help if more widely adopted. Within that pilot work, we barely talked at all about colors and typography and instead spent most of our time on team culture activities, brainstorms for fun internal tools to build, and hot potato-ing. After seeing some pretty compelling proof points at the end of our work together, leadership decided to invest more in design system work—but with the mandate that they spend more time developing out more of the “foundations,” against our final recommendations.

Six months later, the team launched a beautiful, new, custom-built reference website—probably the most beautiful one I’ve seen yet—featuring a restructured set of design tokens and a lot of documentation about the design language. Not much has changed in the design system support Slack channel; questions from feature designers and engineers about how to use the small set of components available and when new components that meet their needs continue to pour in, around 3–5 each day.

A month later, the design system team announced that they’re cutting back their availability for design system support and co-creation with feature teams to instead dedicate that time to making “foundations” their top priority.

Almost two years after they initially began design system work, they’re taking applications from feature teams who’d like to try out the new library of foundations once it’s ready… whenever that might be.

Measuring Quality with Design Systems

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 May 2022 08:50:00 +0000

As a follow up to our previous conversation about measuring speed with design systems, Amy, Nathan, and I recorded another chat about measuring quality.

Many thanks to Lucijan Blagonić for capturing these notes about the conversation! (Links added afterwards.)

Decision making and consistency

It’s harder to align on consistency when you have many teams using the system — and sometimes DS team doesn’t even own that question of consistency of how something is used in a product.
It’s important to agree on what consistency means for us internally (consistency of what with what).
Sometimes we just need to agree on something to move things forward by making a provisional decision, as trying to solve all things up front might feel like trying to boil the ocean. Conversation can be facilitated in the direction (e.g. designing a card):
- There is no alignment on X, so let’s not have opinions or try to solve X now,
- We need to agree on X, even if we don’t have a best answer (and be open about it).
Prepending “provisional” to the decision disarms and empowers the team and helps us agree on enough so that we can move forward (with the data we have) and revisit in a couple of weeks after we get new information.
“Design systems need to provide certainty” is a line DS teams often tell to ourselves and get into trouble with obscuring that we are uncertain about something. It’s empowering for teams to know we don’t have the answers sometimes, and to know where the gaps are so they can fill them.

Design systems

The most matured and effective systems are those that change at the way that is predictable: make the change visible, communicate it really well, and understand that people might not want to upgrade something (or they might want to upgrade only parts of it).
Speed is important to people, and they often choose a lowered quality product if it’s faster (to adopt, to use). If you remove the constrain of speed, it will lead to higher quality, but will take longer for the system to evolve and erode satisfaction and trust.
A leak in quality is multiplied in a design system.
Design systems are more about proximity to certainty than certainty itself (moving thinking from DS as a library and more as a way of doing things). And the way of doing things always changes, design work is often culture work as opposed to just building components.

Working together

Teams react better when there is a clear expectation. Be explicit about the decision (“this is our best guess”), sometimes we need to put things live and we don’t know the answers.
Set a better expectation when communicating upcoming work (e.g. Upcoming Q4, 2022), that way teams can plan their own work if it doesn’t fit their timeline.
Setting up release cadence can alleviate uncertainty, e.g. quarterly releases for non-breaking changes, yearly releases for breaking changes. This helps with planning and it addresses the uncertainty to a certain degree and helps teams plan ahead.
PMs see a breaking change and they think it’s a complete UI refactoring, release cadence can help with planning (you might even introduce a “systems week” that can be planned in sprints).
We are not building with them, we are building for them. They choose to depend on us, and they want to understand what is the nature of that dependency.

General takeaway: You have to build the idea into the company culture that it is OK to go back and change things, and the idea should be ingrained in the product teams.

Identifying Useful Design System Patterns

Dan Mall — Fri, 20 May 2022 06:44:00 +0000

Many design system teams think their job is to define best practices for the rest of the organization. Excited about being blessed by leadership as the team to enforce these best practices, the team often resorts to their wish list of things they’ve always wanted to have or try:

“Let’s reduce our color palette to just the essentials!”
“Typescript might be a great thing to try.”
“This seems like the right time to define some motion guidelines.”
“We’re finally all switching from spaces to tabs!”

This smells like the classic xkcd comic about standards:

This is exactly how that happens. With design systems, there's a specific term for what this leads to: a design system graveyard. Almost every SuperFriendly client is on their third or fourth try at a design system, because the first few “just didn’t take.”

How do you avoid this trap? It’s Activity #5 in our upcoming Design System in 90 Days workbook: identify useful and non-useful patterns in existing design and code.

In other words, don’t try to create best practices. Instead, start by collecting the common practices, and then identify what you want to continue doing within that subset.

A step-by-step way to do that:

Collect what’s being practiced. (Don’t worry about BEST or COMMON yet. Collect everything.)
Within that, look for what’s COMMON.
Within that, look for what’s GOOD.

Here's an example. Above are a few “card”-like components, collected from an insurance website. What’s common here?

Small-ish sans-serif body copy (8 or 8)
Support for an image, icon, or illustration (7 of 8)
An all caps headline (6 of 8)
Some sort of rounded corner call-to-action (CTA) link that looks like a button (6 of 8)
Left-aligned text (5 of 8)

What’s less common but close? These potentially become variants.

CTA that’s has either blue or caramel background
Text alignment (left or centered)

The same kind of pattern spotting applies for the markup too. Here are 3 different ways this similar element has been coded (simplified for the purposes of example):

<div class="article">
  <a href="#">
    <div class="article-padding">
      <div class="row">
        <div>
          <img class="article-image img-responsive" src="#" alt="" />
        </div>
        <div class="article-text">
          <h2>Headline</h2>
          <p>Donec sed odio dui. Etiam porta sem malesuada mollis euismod.</p>
          <div class="flat-button article-button">Learn more &gt;</div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </a>
</div>

<div class="cta-feature threeColumn col-sm-12 col-md-4">
  <div class="module">
    <div>
      <div class="icon-price-selected"></div>
    </div>
    <div class="col-sm-12 no-padding">
      <h3>Headline</h3>
      <p>Donec sed odio dui. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod.</p>
      <a href="#" class="btn btn-primary">Learn more</a>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<div class="calloutBox">
  <div class="lpleft">
    <img src="#" alt="" />
  </div>
  <!-- End lpleft -->
  <div class="lpright">
    <h3>Headline</h3>
    <p>Donec sed odio dui. Etiam porta sem malesuada magna mollis euismod.</p>
    <a href="#" target="_blank"><span>Learn more</span></a>
  </div>
  <!-- End lpright -->
</div>

What’s common?

Headline marked up as <h3>, followed by paragraph (2 of 3)
Image comes first (3 of 3)
Kebab case (2 of 3)

Less common?

Wrapper elements
Name (article, feature, callout)

Identifying these factors are key in increasing the likelihood of adoption. These can be identified as early as Day 5 and prepare you to created abstract versions on Day 39.

Most teams get adoption backwards. Instead of feature teams adopting a design system component, step 1 is for the design system to adopt an abstracted version of a component that multiple feature teams’ already have in use.

Then, initial feature teams re-adopt the abstracted component. After that, more teams are even likelier to adopt that same component.

You’ll find 50 more activities like this to do in our Design System in 90 Days workbook, releasing on Wednesday June 1, 2022 at 12pm Eastern. Subscribe to our email newsletter for updates on the release!

Measuring Speed with Design Systems

Dan Mall — Sun, 01 May 2022 12:22:00 +0000

Amy recently tweeted, “Increasingly I just think speed is a really dangerous and unhelpful design system metric.” Nathan and I both had some reactions to it, we had a quick, private group chat about it, and decided to discuss the topic informally in a way that others could listen into. Here’s a recording of the conversation we had.

There are many things we see eye-to-eye on, partially because we all influence each other through sharing our thoughts about design systems through tweets, articles, and many other forums. There are also a few things we see differently that came up in this conversation that I”d love to highlight here.

Speed as dangerous ammunition for leaders

Amy brought up a wise point that the overall culture of the tech industry is to focus on speed at the expense of most other things. The recently-popularized mantra “move fast and break things” comes to mind, and there’s certainly a good number of teams that adopt this school of thought as a rallying cry. Amy pondered whether the ability to go faster is weaponizing leaders to further the toxicity of driving their teams past breakneck speeds, at the expense of people’s well-being.

In my opinion, the problem isn’t the metric; it’s the culture. Speed—whether we’re talking about the efficiency of the team or the ability to get to market faster—is one of the strongest appeals of investing in a design system. Rather than throwing out the motivation, I say get rid of the leader that weaponizes it. Turn around the culture that allows someone to take a benefit that can enable good and pervert it to run people ragged.

Bold words, I know, and certainly easier said than done. But that’s the work. As consultants, our job is partly to teach teams new skills. More importantly, we have to teach teams—and especially their leaders—what to do with those new skills. We don’t outlaw money just because people use it to buy illegal drugs and weapons. We instead try and teach our kids that it’s better to buy someone a sandwich. And there’s always more educating to do.

The struggle is more real for someone that works in-house, especially if you don’t have the privilege of finding another job. (Yes, the simplest solution to working under a toxic leader is to find a different leader to work for, either at the same company or a different one, but that’s not an opportunity afforded to everyone.)

So what do you do in this situation? Hide the benefits. Design systems help you work faster. If a sprint of work would have taken your team 2 weeks of effort and a design system helps you do it in 1 week, work at half speed instead, don’t tell your boss, and turn it in at the 2 week mark anyway. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but one right still makes a right. If your boss won’t use the time savings for the benefit of your team, you can take the benefit and spread it around to your colleagues under-the-radar.

Overindexing on quality

Nathan also talked about quality and its high importance to design system success, but I think quality isn’t as important to design system work as people generally think it is. I’ve seen teams chase quality at the expense of adoption, and I think that’s the wrong tradeoff.

First, let’s define “quality.” Quality is “the degree of excellence of something.” As it relates to design systems, I’ve mostly seen that relates to components and either how beautifully they’re designed or how well they’ve been coded. I’ve worked with teams that will delay releasing a component for an extra week or two or four because the design could be better or because they’d like to refactor some code because it’s not as clean as they’d like it to be. Most times, those extra weeks don’t make any difference to how enticing the components are to feature teams. In my opinion, it’s just a waste of weeks that could have gone to other things that increase the likelihood of adoption.

In my opinion, the quality of design or code are some of the easiest things to improve iteratively, partly because:

The initial levels of design or code quality needed for a feature team to find a component useful enough to implement in their codebase is usually lower than many design system teams think.
Any improvement to a component is a software update away, especially for non-breaking changes like design quality updates—read: CSS changes only—tend to be.

I don’t believe we’re at the stage in our industry where teams are looking to adopt or create design systems as a way to improve the quality of their product offering. Sure, the promise of higher quality is there, but that’s often framed as a beneficial by-product, not the actual motivation. The real draw is the time saving.

Said differently, focusing on quality is a privilege available to the most mature teams. The majority of teams I encounter would love the ability to improve the quality of their products, but those are future problems. For now, they’re focused on what I believe is one of the primary draws of having a design system: establishing a shared way of working within an organization and having a tool that supports that. To me, that’s a smart roadmap and prioritization decision.

Take two

How’d all this sit with you? Strongly agree? Vehemently disagree? Amy, Nathan, and I have teed up a follow-up webinar to continue discussing these topics. Join us on May 3, 2022 and let us know what you think!

Design System Coverage

Dan Mall — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 10:19:00 +0000

We worked with United Airlines from late 2017 – early 2020 through our friends at Big Medium to help them get their Atmos design system stood up. Two years later, it’s interesting to see how the design system has rolled out to their flagship website, among other digital properties.

(Note: though we were intimately familiar with the initial design system work, we haven’t had much interaction with the teams there since—other than remaining casual SuperFriends with each other via the socials—so this is very much an outsider’s perspective.)

Here’s the current version of the United Airlines homepage as it stands today (April 7, 2022):

Here’s the current version of the United Airlines homepage, broken down by what is an Atmos design system component (highlighted in neon green) and what is not (highlighted in pink).

Fascinating! As a reminder, this isn’t based on any insider knowledge of any back-end code or logic. This is purely an analysis of front-end HTML. You can perform the same assessment yourself by inspecting the HTML of this page and looking for any class that starts with atm-, the design system “namespace” that we used for all Atmos components.

Here are all the different kinds of components that live together on one page:

Components that come straight out of the design system
Components that are custom built for this page or a specific feature on this page
Components that are forked or duplicated versions of what also lives in the design system
Components that started here where an abstracted version eventually ended up in the design system
Components from the design system whose styles are being augmented and/or overwritten
Design system components nested inside of non-design system containers
Custom components nested inside of design system containers

What variety! And that’s ok! This is the reality of enterprise product design at scale. It reflects the nature of parallel roadmaps, design system team resourcing and bandwidth, business priorities, and many more factors.

Design systems aren’t all or nothing

Some organizations seem to hold up the ideal that, once a design system exists, everything in an interface can and should be built with it. Not only is that an unrealistic goal for most enterprises, but it can often be a toxic mindset that anything less than 100% coverage is misuse of a design system at best or utter failure at worst.

We often use the Pareto principle—often known as the “80/20 rule”—to set an actionable target for teams: aim for up to 80% of any given page to be made of design system components and leave room for 20% of the page to be custom. That remaining 20% is where the invention and innovation can happen. One of our recent clients added some anecdotal and complementary motivation to this: they reported that they spent only 20% of their sprint time creating 80% of their pages with the design system, which then freed up 80% of the sprint time to work on the 20% of custom functionality that really made the experience sing. This is exactly the kind of efficiency that design systems should enable!

One nuance to add to this 80/20 rule for page makeup is that 80% is the maximum target. It’s not the starting point. So what’s a good starting target for design system coverage on a page?

We used to suggest 10% as a starting point, with a plan to work up to 80% eventually, likely over the course of a year or two. Coincidentally, the United Airlines homepage shows this in action. Of 8 major sections of the page—admittedly a tad oversimplified for the purposes of this example—1 major section (12.5%) is powered by the design system.

But even 10% is too ambitious sometimes. So we’ve started to tell our design system team clients that they should start by trying to get 1 component adopted by a few feature teams simultaneously. It seems trivial, but there’s actually a mountain of work that goes into implementing one component—especially the first component—into a codebase that will eventually make its way to production. The effort from 0 adopted components to 1 is the steepest, and there’s a long tail of decreasing effort from there.

And, for teams where even 1 component is too much to take on, get anything adopted is a good first step. We often suggest a plain neon green box, like a <div> with a width, height, and background color. At first, teams think we’re joking. But we’re not! Once the hurdle of getting something from one codebase imported into another is crossed, it’s easier to revise and iterate into more, better, and higher quality components than it is to try and create a perfect one the first time around.

So, don’t worry if you aren’t creating everything with your design system! Be kind to yourself, your colleagues, and your teams. Feel free to start with just one component, or even just one neon green box. If you can make that happen, it’s all downhill from there!

10 Years of SuperFriendly

Dan Mall — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 09:44:00 +0000

My birthday was two days ago!

Ten years ago—also on my birthday… February 1, 2012—I got myself the gift of my very own agency called SuperFriendly. Now, I’m just on the other side of a decade of running it. What a journey it’s been! It’s the longest job I’ve had by far; every other job I’ve had prior was no longer than 3 years. I never thought I’d be at the same place for 10 years, much less a business that I’m in charge of. I’m so grateful for the opportunity.

A decade of making a living

I recently shared that 2021 was a less-than-ideal year for SuperFriendly, but, on the whole, it’s been a pretty great business over a decade. I started it in 2012 as a way to be in control of my own pace of working so that I can be as available for my wife and newborn daughter as possible. Financially though, I was prepared to make less money than I ever have and even had a secret plan B to ask my parents if we could move into their basement to keep our expenses low. Fortunately, even year 1 of a new business made me more money than I’ve ever made up to that point in my career. There have been up years and down years, but on average, SuperFriendly has been a great living for me. I make more than I’d make at a Silicon Valley tech startup without a need for any complicated RSU vesting or crippling VC pressure, and it’s allowed my family and I to travel the world together, invest in running an apprentice program for years, buy our dream house, donate significantly to causes we believe in, support my sneaker collecting hobby, and much more.

Financially speaking, my pricing approach for SuperFriendly has been built on value pricing from the start… the idea that any price we charge must be “worth it” for both the customer and the service provider. One thing I’ve learned over time that many people miss about value pricing is that the idea of “worth it” isn’t solely confined to the dollar amount of any individual transaction. When I look at SuperFriendly at a more zoomed out level—say, over a quarter or a year—it’s much easier to spot what financial decisions have been “worth it.”

To prove my case and also because I like getting gifts for others on my birthday, I put together some more detailed information about how we’ve done this over the last decade. Inspired by Self Aware’s recently released document, here’s a decade of SuperFriendly’s project information including price, deliverables, duration, and team. (The details have been abstracted to protect our clients’ and SuperFriends’ private information and also because they’re not contextually important here.)

I’m noticing that I’m nervous about sharing this info so publicly, mostly because it shows that SuperFriendly has generally done well. I don’t want it to come off as bragging, even though I’m proud of what it shows. I hope that making this information public provides some helpful context into things like:

how an agency can evolve over time in type of work, team, price, deliverables, etc (for agency owners)
how to price work given some kind of relative measure about scope and fee, especially if you’re working through an agency (for freelancers)
how agency compensation works and the factors that go into it (for folks hiring agencies)

I’m tempted to share even more, like adding columns for profit margins and number of hours worked among other things, but I’ve always had a personal policy to try to be as transparent as possible without sharing others’ private information. Sharing more than what’s here starts to get uncomfortably close to crossing that line. Still though, I do hope that something is better than nothing in this case.

The main domain

I first launched SuperFriendly in 2012 at the URL superfriend.ly. At the time, new TLDs were starting to be created, and many adverb-y companies opted for the .ly domain too. I decided to ride that trend.

Over the years, SuperFriendly’s work started to evolve more and more into design systems. In 2018, we took the plunge and made design system work our primary value proposition. We launched a new website saying so at superfriendlydesign.systems and have had that one ever since. While it makes clear what we do, it’s certainly a lot of letters. That hasn’t been a problem from a website perspective; most of our traffic is inbound from referrers like Twitter and LinkedIn and other websites, so the actual URL isn’t something that’s terribly important. However, a .systems domain isn’t very familiar to any non-techy, so I’ve kept my superfriend.ly email address the whole time (which still occasionally gets confusing when I have to give my email address over the phone to some hotel front desk or airline customer service agent).

From the beginning though, I’ve chased the .com. When I started SuperFriendly, the domain was taken, so there was no decision to make. But I still check occasionally. Last year, I noticed that the domain was available, but for significantly more money than I’ve ever paid for a domain. For big purchases that I can afford, I have a soft policy to not buy it on the spot, but if I’m still thinking of it frequently a week or more later, I get it. I thought about the domain at least once a week for about 8 months.

On Christmas morning, I woke up and purchased the domain. SuperFriendly’s unlike any job I’ve ever had. On the dawn of 10 years of doing it, I wanted a symbolic gesture to celebrate that.

As of yesterday, SuperFriendly has a new website at superfriendly.com!

I’ve long liked the idea of starting over when something gets too convoluted and overloaded. (I call it “declaring bankruptcy.”) Though there’s some work involved that isn’t trivial, as a volatile, there’s something invigorating and exciting about the blank slate of a new website and the empty state of a new email address inbox.

Time to fill them with possibilities.

So long, SuperFriend model

Speaking of fresh starts, one thing that’s always been around since the beginning of SuperFriendly is the SuperFriend Model, the idea that every team is composed of expert freelancers from our SuperFriend Network. I was the only full-time employee of SuperFriendly for the last 10 years, and, if I could have figured out a way for even me to be a freelancer for SuperFriendly, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

The SuperFriend model was integral to SuperFriendly. It became a competitive advantage. It was a part of every pitch. We’d win big and lose big because of it. But that competitive advantage has been long disappearing. In 2012, the idea of a distributed collective of experts, assembled ad-hoc as the need arises was unique. SuperFriendly certainly wasn’t the first to do it, but not many were doing it, so it was a major differentiator.

Nowadays, so many agencies our size have some version of “a team, custom-built for your project” as part of their value proposition that include a combination of full-timers and freelancers. It’s different than how SuperFriendly does it, but it looks identical on paper.

Also, the last two years of COVID-19 has seen the professional world move even further into a distributed, gig-economy-welcome mode. A thing that made SuperFriendly different is no longer a differentiator, so it’s time to evolve.

That’s not an easy decision, nor is it easily executed. One of my current fears is that the SuperFriend model has been so ingrained in SuperFriendly over the years that new potential clients would have a difficult time reconciling a SuperFriendly that doesn’t work that way. For the past few weeks while working on the new site, I’ve also been simultaneously working on a version of SuperFriendly rebranded: new name and new identity for the new decade in business. Just about everyone I ran the new name by hated it, most of all my wife (who originally came up with the name “SuperFriendly”) and my kids. As much as I liked the new name and putting aside that any new name wouldn’t hold up to a decade of familiarity, I simply can’t run a company my family and friends can’t stand.

Ultimately, I’m ditching the rebrand version and sticking with “SuperFriendly.” A recent Twitter poll and LinkedIn poll I issued about the topic has given me a bit more confidence in that decision, though I have to say that a rebrand is almost never far away.

Thank you, SuperFriend Model, for the role you’ve played in the last decade. SuperFriendly couldn’t have been as successful without you.

Crystal, clearly

I first met Crystal Vitelli in 2012, when she worked for an agency that hired SuperFriendly to do some work for them. In fact, Crystal was SuperFriendly’s 4th client, hiring us just 35 days after we opened for business. I was instantly impressed with how she ran projects, so when she decided to freelance a few years later, I knew I wanted to work with her. Her first project was producing a project in early 2015 for the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, some of SuperFriendly’s best design system work ever. Over the past seven years since, Crystal has been integral in every successful SuperFriendly design system engagement (except one, because she was on maternity leave). When I’ve been out for extended amounts of time, I’ve left SuperFriendly running in her care, and it’s always been in better shape when I got back. Crystal is one of the few people I’ve worked with that and I can fully trust with every single thing at SuperFriendly.

To start a new decade at SuperFriendly, Crystal is joining full-time!

A new SuperFriendly

It’ a lot of change all at once, but that’s the kind of opportunity that gets me fired up. A new decade of work is a blank slate to try new things for another decade.

One thing that we’ve been leaning into lately is the design system coaching, advising, and consulting. Because a lot of SuperFriends (myself included) are practitioners first, many clients have hired us for some deliverable output, like a component library in code or design files and artifacts or fully built websites and native applications. While we’re good at that, we also see our output retired sooner than what internal teams might make. My hypothesis is that our work doesn’t last as long because it didn’t include the people who have to take it over in the creation of it. Providing training at the end of an engagement isn’t truly inclusive design.

In the past, I believe our work has persisted because of the quality of it. But, as enterprise organizations are attracting and keeping better talent in-house, the in-house team’s work quality often can match and sometimes exceed ours. What they often lack, though, is the knowledge and practice of how to do good systems work, a thing we have a lot of experience in.

We’re doubling down on that. Hiring SuperFriendly means hiring Crystal and I as coaches for in-house teams. I work with teams on the Design and Engineering fronts, while Crystal works with them on the DesignOps and Production aspects. And every once in a while when we need it, we bring on a specific subject matter coach around topics like collaboration, accessibility, performance, motion, and more. We’re there to impart to teams what we know about how to do successful design system work. In the past, it’s been a lot of “watch us do it first, then you try.” But honestly, that plan often falls apart for lots of reasons. Sometimes, there’s only time for the first part. Sometimes, there’s too much of a gap between us doing it and them doing it. Sometimes, it’s too easy to fall into the temptation of us continuing to do it while everyone there is just sitting around watching.

So we’re constraining the options as a forcing function. What would happen if we led with “you try from the start?” We’ll let you know, though the initial tries at this way of working have already been very promising.

2021 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 09:36:00 +0000

Continuing the tradition from 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2021.

Family & Home

2021 marks the first full year my family and I have lived in our dream house. In general, I think of this as a calm house. It’s quiet. Maybe that’s the neighborhood. Maybe that’s the open floor plan or the minimal interior. Maybe we moved here in the middle of a recommended quarantine and there wasn’t much to do, so we didn’t do much other than be home with each other. I don’t exactly know why it is, but I like it.

The school district here is amazing; the kids seem to love it. I think they’re doing a great job of managing to keep the kids as safe as they can amidst a global pandemic that continues to ebb and flow.

Sidda has a teacher that makes learning fun. He seems to spend a lot of time developing his students’ critical thinking skills, and I’m grateful for that on behalf of Sidda’s future self. I’m sad that she no longer goes to school with her best friend since preschool, but we organize frequent enough play dates for them to spend time together.

Charlie seems to like her friends a lot more at the new school, and she seems to have a lot more of them here too.

This year, I saw Em start and immediately crush a new career in interior design. She’s so good at everything she does.

Our dog Max seemed to need a friend, so we got him Matilda (Tilly for short). They seem to get along fine enough, although there are a little too many “I’m the big brother” moments for my liking, even though she’s already way bigger than he is.

Our new house has a pool. It’s the first time I’ve lived in a house with a pool, so I learned how to swim this summer. I’m so proud of myself for this! I’ve loved being in the water since I was a kid, but I never knew how to tread water or figure out what to do with my breathing. I watched this video, paid pretty close attention to my kids’ swim teacher, and practiced every day for at least an hour or two. By the end of the summer, I was swimming! I’m still not a strong swimmer, but I’m not afraid of being in the 10-foot deep end of our pool since I can tread water enough + know how to blow bubbles underwater, at least enough to casually make my way to the edge before I get too tired. Next summer, my goal is to be able to jump off our diving board without holding my nose!

Health, wellness, and self-care

Gosh it’s been tough to find some kind of regular way to invest in my physical health. I was playing basketball weekly in 2019, and then COVID happened. I started playing regularly again in September in a local pick-up league after getting vaccinated in April, and I did that every week until the end of the year. I was looking forward to picking that up again this year, but then Omicron. Grr.

I’m not sure what I’ll do to keep fit. I hate running. I’m vaguely interested in yoga lately. Em just got FightCamp, so I may try that. One of the nice things about photography is that I walk a few miles while shooting once every week or two.

I still drink a lot of soda.

On the mental health front, I’ve been working with a new therapist since August, and that’s been great. I previously used BetterHelp, which I thought was more than affordable. But I guess you get what you pay for. I was matched with and tried 3 therapists that I just didn’t jive with, and the 1 that I did jive with wasn’t licensed in my new state after I moved so I couldn’t continue working with her.

After that, I sought out a therapist who could work with me on the specific things I wanted to work on. A friend referred me to someone who is both a therapist and a coach. I’m paying more than I ever have for my mental health, but wow it’s worth every penny.

In 2021, my brother and I got matching tattoos in memory of our grandfather. This year we finished those tattoos.

Videos & photos

In 2021, I took 28,893 photos and videos, which is 129% more than last year’s 12,641 photos and videos. Of those almost 30k photos and videos, I posted 111 (less than 1%) to my photo Instagram account, but the point for me was to invest more in shooting the photos as opposed to posting them. I’m proud to say I’ve done that!

Halfway through the year, I upgraded my Canon EF 70–20mm f/4L USM lens for a Canon EF 100–400mm f/4.5–5.6L IS II USM, and I’m so glad I did. Having a versatile spread of focal lengths (16–35mm, 24–70mm, 100–400mm) makes me that much more excited to shoot to see what I can capture.

I also picked up a DJI Air 2S drone this year, and I’m loving it. It’s not just the photos or videos; I really enjoy flying it around and seeing what the world looks like from that perspective.

Here are a few of my favorite shots I took in 2021:

I became way more comfortable with video processing and editing in 2021. I found a lot of excuses to shoot some home videos and make thanks and happy birthday videos to send to friends and clients that forced me to get better at Final Cut Pro. I’ve got a new course coming out this year that will certainly make those new skills come in handy.

Books

This year, I noticed that I enjoyed my reading more than I typically have in past years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I had less of a stomach for business books than I typically do and I turned to more memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies written by or about mixed race people and/or people of color.

In 2021, I read or attempted to read:

DisneyWar, by James. B Stewart
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah
~~A Meal with Jesus, by Tim Chester (abandoned)~~
Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court, by Kareeem Abdul-Jabbar
~~You, Your Child, and School, by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica (abandoned)~~
~~Leading, by Alex Ferguson and Michael Moritz (abandoned)~~
~~Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (abandoned)~~
A Promised Land, by Barack Obama
Subtle Acts of Exclusion: How to Understand, Identify, and Stop Microaggressions, by Tiffany Jana and Michael Baran
~~No Rules Rules, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer (abandoned)~~
Got to Give the People What They Want, by Jalen Rose
~~Humor, Seriously, by Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas (abandoned)~~
We Promised You a Great Main Event, by Bill Hancock
~~Great Demo! by Peter Cohan (abandoned)~~
Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours, by Jim Butcher
The Effective Executive, by Peter F. Drucker
Mixed Plate, by Jo Koy
~~Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X. Kendi (abandoned)~~
~~Executive Presence, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett (abandoned)~~
~~Reimagining Collaboration, by Phil Simon (abandoned)~~
The Vision-Driven Leader, by Michael Hyatt
~~That Sounds Fun, by Annie F. Downs (abandoned)~~
~~Hit Refresh, by Satya Nadella (abandoned)~~
Lying, by Sam Harris
Give People Money, by Annie Lowrey
How to Art Direct, by Laurence K. Withers
The Marathon Don’t Stop, by Rob Kenner
~~Lead with a Story, by Paul Smith (abandoned)~~
~~Utopia for Realists, by Rutger Bregman (abandoned)~~
Just as I Am, by Cicely Tyson
~~The Woman Who Would Be King, by Kara Cooney (abandoned)~~
~~Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (abandoned)~~
The Big Picture, by Ben Fritz (currently reading)

Travel

For the second year in a row, I didn’t travel once for work. All of my travel in 2021 was for personal reasons. I visited:

Nassau, Bahamas
Washington, DC
Hunter, NY
Orlando, FL (twice)
Tucson, AZ
Asheville, NC
New England
Shenandoah Valley, VA
New York City, NY
Los Angeles, CA
St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Sole man

I added a few new sneakers to the collection in 2021:

Paris Saint-Germain × Air Jordan 1 High Zoom Comfort “Paris”
Air Jordan 1 “Bordeaux”
Nike DBreak-Type
Air Jordan 1 Hi FlyEase
Nike Kobe 9 Elite “Inspiration”
Air Jordan 1 Mid “Chile Red”

Work

Work was tough for me in 2021. I wrote a lot about that in my SuperFriendly 2021 Wrap-Up.

Arcade was also a big part of my professional life in 2021. Unfortunately, a lot of my attention was focused on trying to lead SuperFriendly, so progress on Arcade slowed to a crawl as a result. I’m hoping to dive back into Arcade in a serious way in 2022.

Dream project

2021 finally gave me the chance to work with my dream client of 23 years. While I can’t say too much more here, the work was my favorite kind of challenging and the team was incredible to work with. I’m still figuring out how to celebrate an achievement I’ve waited so long for, but I think I’ve landed on what I’m going to do. Hopefully I can share more about this soon.

Speaking

Early in my career, it was a big dream to speak at a conference. As much as being on a conference stage still feels like a great honor to me, I’ve spoken about design at almost 200 events and platforms in the last 13 years of my career. This is the first year I’ve strongly felt that urge waning.

I don’t think I have much that I’d like to say in that format anymore.

Also, I never really admitted until recently how little I enjoy writing a talk! No matter how much advance notice I have, I still somehow end up writing the talk a day before the event, pulling just-about-all-nighters and not giving myself enough revision time to clearly articulate what I’m trying to communicate anyway.

That said, I have learned that, although I like giving talks less and less, I still really enjoy teaching! When I’m in a room full of people—physical or virtual—I’d rather talk with them than at them. I prefer an interactive format to a broadcast format. It’s no coincidence that my work and “public appearances” are trending towards teaching, coaching, and workshops. I see this trend solidifying for me in the next year.

In 2021:

I talked to the community at Freelance Founders about making more money.
I taught design systems workshops through Dribbble, Rosenfeld Media, Clarity, and Smashing Conference.
I shared my one favorite career tip at RGD’s Creative Directions.
I talked about healthy work boundaries at the HOW Design Creative Leadership Summit.
I talked to the Bureau of Digital agency owner community about the pros and cons of the SuperFriend model.
I participated in a Twitter Space conversation about design systems with Mae Capozzi, Josh Harwood, and organized by Donna Vitan
I talked to Chris Do at The Futur about running a distributed, network-based business.
I talked to Luke Murphy at Zeroheight about how designers and engineers can better collaborate.

Miscellany

I tried to make my own sneakers. That was short-lived.
Got the Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine in April and the Moderna booster shot in December
I got an undercut in the summer, which I liked. Growing my hair long again sucks though. I grew a full beard for the first time, which I think I’ll keep around for a bit.
I ate at some great new restaurants this year: La Chinesca, Kensington Quarters, Boca Tacos y Tequila, Tacos Mirasol, All Souls Pizza, Bear’s Smokehouse, Tupelo Honey, Early Girl Eatery, Reilly Craft Pizza, River Twice, Jônt, Sushi Ginza Onodera, Volver, Suraya, Lark, Cheu Noodle Bar & nunu, Uni Sashimi Bar, Laurel, The Landing Kitchen, Masa, Maggie’s Krooked Cafe & Juice Bar, Osteria, Stella, Li Beirut, Hearthside

2022

My goals for 2022 are to do less, laugh more, and eat delicious food with family and friends.

SuperFriendly 2021 Wrap-Up

Dan Mall — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 12:29:00 +0000

Against many criteria, 2021 was SuperFriendly’s worst year to date and one of my biggest professional failures. It was time for a big change.

2021 SuperFriendly in numbers

From a quantitative perspective, a lot of things seemed to be headed in the direction I wanted for the company. I decided a few years ago to try to scale the company up, to see how far the business model could stretch, and the trajectory seemed to be appropriately headed in that direction, especially against some of the goals I laid out around this time in 2020 and 2019.

Time spent

In 2019, I worked 2,040 hours, an average of 39 hours/week.
In 2020, I worked 1,903 hours, an average of 37 hours/week.
In 2021, I worked 1,642 hours, an average of 31 hours/week.

I’m generally happy to see my time spent working decrease year over year, but I also want to think that I’m learning how to have more impact with less time. This year, I felt the opposite. I worked less than I ever have, but I also felt like I had little to no impact. And yes: I was languishing. And yes: despite working less than I ever have, I was burnt out.

Here’s how I spent my time in 2021.

Creative Direction: 478 hours (29%)
Vacation: 272 hours (17%)
Admin: 221 hours (13%)
Business Development: 180 hours (11%)
Design: 107 hours (7%)
Speaking/Conferences: 104 hours (6%)
Coaching: 98 hours (6%)
Writing: 56 hours (3%)
Interviewing/Recruiting: 38 hours (2%)
Miscellaneous/Other: 88 hours (5%)

Projects

We did 25 projects in 2021, a 32% increase from 2020’s 19 projects, including:

Creating online magazine The Current with Twilio
Launching the Faith and Liberty Trail App, a guide to discovering Philadelphia’s hidden history
Online digital marketing help for Point72 like Hyperscale, Point72 Ventures, and others
Helping Bigeye release some new features and functionality while improving their design system
Design system coaching, diagnostics, and consulting for 2 apparel companies, a technology company, a learning platform, a real estate startup, a marketing platform, and more

Some of these are the best work to come out of SuperFriendly in a long while.

Revenue & Profit

By the end of August of 2021, we had already made the same revenue we made in all of 2020. 2021 was shaping up to be the highest-grossing revenue year yet.

However, by the end of August of 2021, our profit was at -4% and continuing to trend downward. In other words, we were doing more projects than ever making more money, but also spending too much money in order to do so. Another month and, for the first time ever, we would have been completely out of cash.

Why didn’t I spot that sooner? A number of reasons, really.

I simply wasn’t doing a good job paying attention. I was both busy and burnt out.
Project work is often a feast or famine business. Our pipeline has been consistently full for a few years, but we can’t control when work lands. The right project at the right time turns grim profits into abundant pockets. So there’s always hope that “if this project or that one hits by the end of the month, we’ll be just fine.” Until we’re not.
Refunds. I’ve always wanted SuperFriendly to earn its income. One of the outcomes I want for every one of our projects is for the client to feel or even say, “That was money well spent and I’d gladly spend it again.” In SuperFriendly’s history, we’ve only had 1 project where we felt we didn’t fully deliver what we should have, so we returned $5,000 to a client after completing the project. In 2021, we had 3 projects where we weren’t able to fully deliver, to the sum tune of $106,500 that we refunded to those clients. None of them asked for a refund, but I couldn’t keep that money in good conscience, knowing that we hadn’t delivered on what we promised. As CEO, all of that is my fault for not being able to lead our teams to deliver the kind of work we promise. We never withheld or retracted pay from any of our SuperFriends, so this is money we paid out of our already-thin and dwindling profits.
There continues to be a global pandemic. I imagine that had at least some effect on the undercurrent of how work has been getting done—or not—in the world over the last year. I simultaneously feel like all of this was solely my fault and also that none of it is because of the state of the world. It’s probably somewhere in the middle.

People & Purpose

In 2020, we hired 55 SuperFriends. In 2021, we hired 58 SuperFriends (5% growth).
In 2020, we paid SuperFriends a total of $2,333,039.62. In 2021, we paid SuperFriends a total of $1,158,482.49 (a 50% decrease).
In 2020, we paid SuperFriends an average of $42,418.90 each. In 2021, we paid SuperFriends an average of $21,453.38 each (a 49% decrease).
In 2020, we hired 23 women (42%). In 2021, we hired 25 women (43%).
In 2020, we hired 21 people of color (38%). In 2021, we hired 25 people of color (36%).

In short, we didn’t improve really at all on any of our goals in hiring and creating better opportunities for more underrepresented folks in tech, and we didn’t pay our SuperFriends as much either.

Life-changing

As important as that info above is, it’s still just reporting, not really analysis. Or—more crudely put—data puking. What should we do next year as a result of all that data?

It turns out that there’s another metric that’s more important to me, one that I didn’t even realize existed until 2021, despite running SuperFriendly for almost a decade. When I think about what I want SuperFriendly to do, what impact I want it to have in the world, I want it to change people’s lives.

And sure: lots of business owners wants their company to change lives. It’s a trite idea by now, which is partially why I never really gravitated toward that kind of language before. But 2021 made me realize that that’s the specific phrase many of our previous SuperFriends and clients use when talking about their experience working with and for SuperFriendly. I realized it in 2021 because it didn’t happen as much, and I started to notice the lack.

The phrase “working with SuperFriendly was life-changing” often came up in the context of our apprenticeship. It was an intentional format to help people learn more, and, as a result, earn more too. (Expect to see the “learn and earn” language show up in future versions of SuperFriendly.) This was a direct action tied to our mission of “creating better opportunities for those who wouldn’t otherwise have them.”

I stopped the program in 2018 because I wasn’t doing a great job creating those kinds of opportunities for my apprentices between all the other things I was also doing. That was the primary impetus for wanting to scale SuperFriendly up. At the time, I was directing most of SuperFriendly’s projects myself. My hypothesis was that removing myself from client work and business development allowed others—and more of them—to occupy those roles us to create more pairing scenarios for more apprentices, interns, and junior people. And thus began almost 3 years of trying to scale up with more projects, more senior people to pair with, more money to provide more support to more people.

What I learned was that there’s a hefty overlap between those who say SuperFriendly was life-changing for them and those who worked directly with me (vs. indirectly with me or not at all). In 2021, I only count 2 SuperFriends that mentioned to me that their interactions with SuperFriendly were life-changing, and both of them worked directly with me. There have been other versions of the idea for others, like the fact that they learned a lot or that they love their team, but that particular phrase that was so prevalent before is now all but gone.

I can’t help but think that this decrease in changing lives is correlated with my lack of involvement in client work. As a CEO, I have less relevance to an apprentice than I have as a creative director, designer, or engineer. That’s an uncomfortable idea to me, but I’m trying to create space for the idea that this isn’t at all a judgment on others as well as giving myself permission to be better and more interested in an aspect of work that other people aren’t.

Changing someone’s life is difficult. It’s also a completely separate effort to take on. I lament that it’s not part of our industry’s job descriptions for creative directors or tech directors, but that’s the current reality. I didn’t expect for our more senior SuperFriends to figure out how to improve the lives of the other SuperFriends on their teams, but I certainly wanted it. I watched our SuperFriends struggle to balance tension between delivering for clients and supporting their team, and, as much as I encouraged them to prioritize the latter, I didn’t have a clear rubric for how to do that. “Do it how Dan would do it” is not a playbook, and I actively discouraged that line of thinking. But I also didn’t have a good alternative to put in its place.

Scaling is difficult too. I’m learning that it’s not my gift, and I’m not sure I’m interested in doing the work to get good at it.

What I am gifted at is seeing how there’s not tension but synergy between growing people and creating successful work and clients. One begets the others. I often remind our senior folks about the principle of “SuperFriends over clients,” which I’ll admit sounds a bit counterintuitive for a client services agency. It often confounds them, but I see it clearly. I’m slowly growing more comfortable around the idea that I have a vision for that that others don’t, and that’s where I should be putting my focus.

The edges of the SuperFriend Model

The SuperFriend Model—a network-based approach to staffing projects real-time with appropriate expertise—was ironically one of the things that got lost in the scaling (ironic because it’s a model designed specific to respond to the ebb and flow of scale). As much as I’ve actively rejected it over the years, 2021 saw SuperFriendly starting to act like a traditional agency, embracing the flaws of that model—mainly the crushing pressure of continual overhead against irregular and unpredictable pipelines—and not really adopting any of its benefits.

In 2021, I learned more deeply what the SuperFriend Model needs to succeed, some of which we had and some of which we didn’t. It needs a network supply that exceeds the pipeline demand. It needs someone whose job it is to continue to grow the network. It needs a steady supply of work. It needs laser focus on a niche. It needs ways to support and engage the people in the network. It needs a mechanism to train people in what it means to work like a SuperFriend. It needs a large and steady amount of working capital. All of these things and more combine to create life-changing opportunities for a SuperFriend, and, when that happens, it always translates to benefits for our clients. As many of those things become less available—especially capital—the SuperFriend Model becomes more and more difficult to sustain.

Back to the future

What does all of this mean? It means I’m concluding the experiment of scaling SuperFriendly.

A friend and mentor of mine recently shared with me that they often longed for their days of running a small company even though they worked at one of the largest companies in the world. Why? They had more impact at their smaller company, despite the massive scale difference. Their parting words to me in that conversation were, “Scale isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

I’m returning to working on client work again, for a number of reasons.

With profits down to almost nothing, frankly, we need the cash. I’ve often shied away from working on projects myself with the logic that we could probably get someone else to do better work for less money. But I often forget that I’m also one of the most profitable SuperFriends because I can play multiple roles on a project from design to strategy to engineering and more. With less people who can do more things, there’s less to manage and more money to put away for a rainy day. I’m returning in part to the original, older version of SuperFriendly, albeit in a new way with the benefit of a decade of hindsight.

The other big reason for me to return to client work is that it’s the best vehicle for me to teach, which I love doing. Pairing someone with me while I’m working has historically been one of SuperFriendly’s most successful ways to accomplish our mission of creating better opportunities for those who wouldn’t otherwise have them.

SuperFriendly in 2022

With a decade of hindsight, it’d be foolish to throw out some of the things that have worked in the past. Alex Hillman recently compared the opportunity to start over to the ability to replay a video game after you’ve beat it but with the new powers and items you earned the first time around.

Here are some advantages and principles SuperFriendly’s had over the years that I’d like to play up in 2022:

A sharp focus on design systems
Minimal overhead
Connection to amazing people in the industry
Priority on growing SuperFriends
Relentlessness on helping clients do one thing they wouldn’t have done without us

A lot of that is continuing what we were already doing, but the big change is going to be relinquishing trying to do it a some large level of scale. I’ll probably share more of this in detail in the future, but I’m aiming for 4 clients or less in 2022, all of which I will personally be heavily involved with. I think less clients and less revenue will lead to deeper impact, larger profits, and better opportunities for SuperFriends. Less quantity, higher quality.

I’m grateful for the ability to run a business where I can change, experiment, and try different ways to accomplish my mission. Amongst all the change over the years, a constant has been that SuperFriendly is my better opportunity that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

Design Systems Prepare You for Change

Dan Mall — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:42:03 +0000

There’s a specific moment where everyone clearly realizes the value of having—or not having—a design system. It’s the largest test of a design system’s effectiveness.

What’s the moment? It’s when something changes… especially drastically.

Let’s set the scene.

First: definitions. “Design system” here doesn’t mean Figma or Sketch files, or brand/design languages. “Design system” means a version-controlled, package-managed, software product that’s a dependency in websites and apps.

Many organizations try to spark the flywheel that is the virtuous cycle between design system and product(s) releases, often using a method like the Measuring Spoon Cycle.

And it works! They use the flywheel to continue creating and releasing new and updated features and products. Essentially, they use it to continue what they’ve already been doing… except faster, more consistently, and at higher quality—the typical promises of a design system.

The return on investment is slow at first. At the beginning, using a design system might take the same time as not using one. Eventually though, the marginal gains start to add up. Teams start saving a week at a time, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks. That increase in efficiency might take a year or two to start seeing.

Suddenly, something changes. Those changes usually come with these kinds of watershed events:

Rebranding
Mergers/acquisitions
Technology re-platforming
Migration
Re-org
New tool integration, e.g. CMS
New process change, e.g. agile

These changes can be local to a team or be organization-wide. They’re often unplanned, so they bulldoze established roadmaps. Even when they are planned, they’re not trivial to pull off, much less pull off well.

In these scenarios, a design system (along with an established design system practice) is a pivotal factor. These processes sometimes take years where a connected design system would make it take weeks.

Two quick examples of how it often works in each of those scenarios:

Change		Task	Effort
Rebranding	Without a design system	Feature teams try to find spare sprint cycles to re-acclimate to and update old code	2 weeks × # of teams
Rebranding	With a design system	Small team changes a few design token aliases. All apps `npm update` to “receive” the rebrand.	2 days
Merger	Without a design system	All teams update their product’s header and footer with a new logo	2 weeks × # of teams
Merger	With a design system	Small team updates global header and footer components OR updates token alias/logo path served by digital asset manager	2 days

This is where connected systems shine and really prove their value. This is where the ROI is much clearer: do you want this task be months of complicated code updates or days of relatively easy configuration changes?

Not surprisingly, these events often inspire people to think, “While we’re doing this, let’s look into creating a design system too.” Creating a design system at one of these inflection points ideally makes the next one easier and smoother.

The true test of a design system is how it works at scale, specifically making changes at scale. Organizational change tests design systems more than the product creation process does. The product creation process is simply practice and muscle-building for organizational change at scale. If a team isn’t set up to quickly change, say, the density within a particular screen of an application, that doesn’t bode well for their ability to change the density within a whole application or an entire suite of products.

The most important part of design systems isn’t the components; it’s the connections. In connected organizations, change is smooth. In disconnected organizations, change is disruptive and often destructive.

In summary, design systems prove their value most in how well they prepare your organization for change.

Design Systems & Magic

Dan Mall — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 10:15:54 +0000

There’s a scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where Harry and his friend Ron arrive late to their first class of the year of Advanced Potion Making. Harry tells Professor Slughorn that they don’t yet have textbooks, so Slughorn sends them into the closet to get some.

There are 2 books left: a brand new one and an old, beat-up, used one. Ron and Harry fight over it, and Harry gets stuck with the old one.

The first assignment given to the class is to brew an acceptable draft of Living Death, and whomever can do this will win a vial of Liquid Luck as a prize. Slughorn says the recipe for Liquid Luck is found on page 10 of the textbook, but he also warns that only once ever did a student manage to brew a potion of sufficient quality to claim the prize. (Foreshadowing!)

All of the students struggle, but Harry discovers that his old textbook—labelled property of “the Half-Blood Prince”—is full of notes written in the margin that show how to do succesfully brew this potion. The notes share tips like, “Crush with blade” instead of “cut” like the instructions say. Or use 13 beans instead of 12.

With his annotated textbook, Harry’s the only one who manages to make the potion successfully and win the prize. It’s almost like cheating to have someone who’s done it before tell you how to do it successfully.

Many teams approach making a design system like writing a textbook. They write down the ideal way to build a product in theory. They try to guess what would be the perfect Card component for everyone.

But that’s just a spec. It hasn’t really been proven yet. This is why a pilot methodology is so useful. A design system isn’t writing a spec beforehand. It’s doing something successfully, and documenting it afterwards.

Front-end designer Brad Frost says a design system is “the official story of how your organization makes digital products.” Said differently, it’s a collection of stories for how teams at this organization have made digital products that highlights the patterns that emerge from seeing all those stories in one place.

Make a cheat sheet for people who create digital products after you have. Crush; don’t cut. Use 13 beans, not 12. Inline alerts here, not pop-ups. This shade of teal because it has higher contrast against the background. Not because that could work in the future, but because that has worked in the past.

Stop trying to make a design system by making abstract components. Instead, give your team a use case. Pick a potion to brew. Living Death. The main product Dashboard. The Intranet. Put yourself in the shoes of the people trying to use the design system by trying to making something close to what they’d be making. If they need to be making intranets, keep making intranets first to work out the kinks.

Try to follow the textbook, and make notes about where the textbook just isn’t right.

That’s the design system. Not the textbook. The design system is the notes in the margin. That’s what’s been contributed back: the stories, the solutions.

Originally published on Twitter.

Design Tokens Resources

Dan Mall — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:57:38 +0000

We work with many of our clients around their design token architecture for their design systems. Many times, this is the first some team members have heard about design tokens, so here’s the starter guide we send them in order to get them acclimated.

WTF are Design Tokens, a great video overview by Jina Anne, coiner of the term “design tokens.”
Design tokens explained and why your company should use Arcade, from former design intern Julia Fernandez. (Full disclosure: Arcade is a sibling company to SuperFriendly.) Julia shares from the point of view of a designer that just learned about design tokens for the first time.
A guide to design tokens, from InVision.
Design Tokens: An Intro For Designers, from Sympli.
A bit more code-centric, Nathan Curtis’ “Tokens in Design Systems” walks through some of the decision-making process behind design tokens. Particularly useful is the framing of “options vs. decisions.”
Adobe’s design system Spectrum has an incredibly useful structure for their design tokens. Their separation of global tokens, alias tokens, and component-specific tokens is something we use every time we create a token architecture for a organization.
Design Tokens in Figma: How to get started, today, by Jan Six. (Jan is a collaborator on Arcade.)

We’ll continue to add to this as we find more great design token introduction resources.

Happy design tokening!

It’s Easier to Revise than Create

Dan Mall — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 05:17:00 +0000

I’m very fortunate to have had Jason Santa Maria as one of my first creative directors. There’s one thing in particular that Jason once said to me that I remember every single day in my work: it’s easier to revise than create.

When we worked together, Jason would always finish his work hours or even days before I finished mine. At first, I chalked it up mostly to the fact that he had more experience than I did. But once I actually watched his process, I realized he was doing something important that I wasn’t: he was finishing his work faster by worrying less about whether what he was doing was good. I would push elements in my designs around for hours; Jason would place an element and leave it there. He’d get everything on the screen, and that’d be the end of his first version, even if it looked horrible. That allowed him to finish that version in an hour or less. Then he’d start on the next wave of work: revising what he’d made. The creation part—that first pass of going from nothing to something—is one of the most difficult parts of making something. Many have labeled it the tyranny of a blank page, and one of the easiest ways to move past that stage is to fill it with something—anything—as quickly as possible. Jason is an expert at this.

The McDonald’s Theory

Designer Jon Bell puts this same concept to use when helping a group decide where to eat for lunch, a seemingly simple task that often escalates into long bouts of frustration for the hangry. He calls it The McDonald’s Theory. He says:

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge.

Magic! It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

This explains a lot! It’s why your co-workers have few suggestions when you ask them what to design, but everyone suddenly has a strong opinion when you ask them to critique something you’ve already made. It’s why starting a startup and getting to the first MVP of a product sometime takes months or years, but subsequent releases are much faster.

These things can be frustrating if don’t understand why they happen. But once you realize that it’s easier to revise than create, you can use it to your advantage. Free yourself from the pressure of making something good at the initial stage, quickly get to the part where you’re revising instead of creating, and watch how much more quickly you can build momentum.

May 30 – June 5, 2021

Dan Mall — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 04:50:00 +0000

Work

Worked 23 hours
Created and released new Work page for SuperFriendly site
Updated SuperFriendly logo for Pride Month
Workshopped launch items for new site with Matt Kenefick and Matt Cook
Weekly aiming session for Joshua Blankenship with Crystal Vitelli
Workshopped with Crystal Vitelli
Weekly Arcade aiming session for Mike Carbone and Leslie Camacho
Prepared and delivered May update for SuperFriends
Eavesdrop on Patrice Embry and Joe Rinaldi’s weekly business development meeting
Weekly Arcade team meeting
Demo Arcade for new potential partner
Think time for new project Orientation
Weekly Opportunities call for SuperFriends
Working sessions & new client Orientation with Sara Soueidan, Afyia Smith, and Patrice Embry
Weekly aiming session for TJ Pitre
Scheming with Tsilli Pines

Personal

Therapy session about the role of compliments in my life
Took the kids to swimming class
Had the kids’ friends over for Memorial Day
Took the fam to Applebees
Had some of the best sushi in the world at Masa with Emily Mall and Matt Sherlock
Spent 6 hours and 46 minutes in bed (22 minutes less than last week). Average bedtime: 10:42pm. Average wake up time: 5:38am.

Watched

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (again)
3 episodes of The Shop
Sixers vs. Wizards, games 4 – 5

Notable Reads & Listens

Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Season 2 of The Dream Team Tapes
Bit is a standard infrastructure for components.
I learned about and used Dropbox’s file request feature for the first time.

May 23 – May 29, 2021

Dan Mall — Sun, 30 May 2021 09:40:00 +0000

Work

Worked 21 hours
Participated in the Drexel Westphal Digital Media 2021 Senior Show
Gathered assets for new partnership idea
Weekly aiming session for Patrice Embry, Crystal Vitelli, and Joe Rinaldi
Weekly Arcade aiming session for Mike Carbone and Leslie Camacho
Recorded podcast episode
Drafted Orientation agenda
Weekly aiming session for Lina Calin and Joshua Blankenship with Crystal Vitelli
Prospective client workshop with Johanna Ostrich, Sara Soueidan, Jarrett Coger, and Joe Rinaldi
Caught up with Joe Rinaldi about SuperFriendly biz dev
Arcade Figma token plugin workshop with Jan Six, Mike Carbone, Leslie Camacho
Schemed with Maya Houcheime
Weekly aiming session for Lauren Deal
Typetura demo with Izzy Flores and Todd Libby
Shared SuperFriendly’s new work for the Faith and Liberty Trail
Brainstorm for Zen Lara, Willem Schrieks, and Abby Fretz with Patrice Embry

Personal

Helped my uncle move from an apartment to a new house
Set up a Ring video doorbell at the house
Shot photos with Jeff Clark and Gil DuRoss
Shot photos with Dontae Benn
Flew my new drone for the first time to get comfortable with it
Took my kids to swim class
Took Em to dinner at Harp & Crown
Spent 7 hours and 8 minutes in bed (20 minutes less than last week). Average bedtime: 10:49pm. Average wake up time: 6:15am.

Watched

The Wolf of Wall Street
Cruella
Sixers vs. Wizards, games 1 – 3

Notable Reads & Listens

Finished Mixed Plate by Jo Koy
Started Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Top 20 Rocky Quotes to Get You Through Hard Times

Building Momentum

Dan Mall — Sun, 23 May 2021 04:59:00 +0000

Have you ever felt like your projects were going a little bit too slow, like they were just dragging on you couldn’t really build momentum? I have two quick tips that I want to share with you that hopefully will make your projects feel faster and lighter.

Fight the Waterfall

On waterfall projects, most people are sitting around, except for one or two who are doing the majority of the work at that moment. Typically, that happens when designers are designing and developers are waiting around for the designers to finish.

One of the ways to correct that is to start all of the pieces of work a little bit earlier. The key to starting work early is not succumbing to the pressure of having to finish the work. Don’t worry about finishing. If you’re a developer, you can start doing things while your design or information architect are working because a lot of your work actually isn’t dependent on their work. Some of it is, so you probably won’t be able to finish, but that shouldn’t stop you from starting.

When you start things earlier than you expected to without pressure, it starts to feel like you’re building momentum.

Typically, when you share work with your colleagues or a client or a stakeholder, you might expect them to have feedback. So, sharing work-in-progress feels premature because how can others be expected to give feedback if the full context of the work doesn’t yet exist?

Here’s the key: when you share work-in-progress, share it with the caveat that no feedback is needed at this point. You’re simply sharing it to let people know where you are. For example, if you have to make 12 wireframes, share it when you finish 2 or 3. Rather than spending a whole week to drop 12 wireframes, share 2 – 3 wireframes every 2 days. The more often you do this, you start to build rhythm, and rhythm builds momentum. It’s hard to feel the rhythm when there’s too much space between the beats.

The true hack here is that you’re avoiding one of the biggest things that drag projects to a halt: waiting for approval. If you’re posting work-in-progress often without feedback needed, you’re starting to create a work cadence that’s moving by default, rather than standing still by default. You’re short-circuiting the stop-and-go whiplash that comes with waiting for approvals. You’re creating a project culture where the default is progress and momentum that anyone can stop when necessary, instead of one that constantly needs to be jumpstarted again.

Sir Isaac Newton said it best in his laws of motion: “an object at rest will stay and rest and an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by an external force.” It’s science!

May 16 – May 22, 2021

Dan Mall — Sun, 23 May 2021 03:02:00 +0000

Work

Worked 23 hours
Prepped for the week
Design revisions for new partnership idea
Weekly aiming sessions for Lauren Deal and TJ Pitre
Weekly aiming session for Patrice Embry, Crystal Vitelli, and Joe Rinaldi
Arcade demo for Brad Frost
Arcade demo for Danny Banks
Took new self-portraits for personal site
Recorded and posted a quick tip about Building Momentum
Caught up with Ben Callahan from Sparkbox
Weekly aiming session for Lina Calin and Joshua Blankenship with Crystal Vitelli
Weekly workshopping with Crystal Vitelli
Talked to an enterprise design director about speaking at their internal conference
Biz dev check-in with Joe Rinaldi
Promotion effort for SuperFriendly’s work on The Current
Attended client content strategy presentation
Reviewed client project Figma file
Visited Vocatio Career Prep School to see the facilities in person
Weekly Opportunities call
Built new SuperFriendly product landing page
Planning session with Sara Soueidan, Afyia Smith, and Patrice Embry

Personal

Swam in our newly renovated pool!
Second session with new therapist
Sidda skinned her knees pretty badly for the first time
Slept an average of 6 hours and 39 minutes per night. Average time in bed: 7 hours and 29 minutes. Average bedtime: 10:23pm. Average wake up time: 5:48am.

Watched

Coming 2 America
Lovecraft Country, episode 2

Notable Reads & Listens

Finished The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Started Mixed Plate by Jo Koy
Tutorial no. 6—Tight but not touching kerning
Demo Your Values First
Apparently, I was user #28 on Dribbble.
This face is the highest compliment you can receive from another musician.
Metajive’s new site is lovely!
Literati’s new Atlas Obscura book club sounds fun!

May 09 – May 15, 2021

Dan Mall — Mon, 17 May 2021 04:43:00 +0000

Work

Worked 31 hours
Wrote last week’s weeknotes
Arcade API workshop with Mike Carbone
Weekly aiming session with Patrice Embry, Crystal Vitelli, and Joe Rinaldi
Taught days 3 and 4 (of 4) of my design systems workshop for Smashing Conference
Spoke at HOW Creative Leadership Summit
Schemed with Lauren Deal and Josh Clark about what to do about an account wrinkle
Made more updates to SuperFriendly playbook
Monthly check-in with Nikki Loffredo
Emailed client to do an account reset
Weekly aiming session for Lina Calin and Joshua Blankenship with Crystal Vitelli
Weekly workshopping with Crystal Vitelli
Created new Project Value Sheet for client project approach
Wrote client workshop brief
Talked to Pat Murdock about new initiative
Workshopped new Arcade demo with Julia Fernandez, Jan Six, Mike Carbone, and Leslie Camacho
Wrote and posted vision thoughts for new Design System Diagnostic project
Attended the “Getting Unstuck” Snack ’n’ Learn from Jen Dary
Weekly check-in with Julia Fernandez
Weekly client status call with Lauren Deal and Lina Calin
Helped prep a SuperFriend for an upcoming interview
Created project hub for new client
Contract negotiations with book publisher
Eating meeting with new project team
Schemed with Matt Kenefick about a new project
Schemed with Afyia Smith about a new product
Caught up with Jared Ponchot
Preliminary interview for an upcoming podcast episode

Personal

The kids and I took Em to Zama for Mother’s Day
Took the kids to swimming lessons
Started talking to a new therapist
Met my new niece
Had my nephew over for a sleepover this weekend
Slept an average of 6 hours and 26 minutes per night. Average time in bed: 6 hours and 43 minutes. Average bedtime: 10:59pm. Average wake up time: 5:38am.

Watched

Coming to America
Started The Other Dream Team
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Episode 1) (again)

Notable Reads & Listens

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Finished Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours by Jim Butcher
The Dream Team Tapes, season 1, episodes 1 – 7
DACI Decision-Making Framework
Stark’s Public Library looks like an incredible resource.
Eyes peeled for Yoon Ahn’s AMBUSH x Nike Dunk High.
Inneract Project empowers underrepresented youth through design education and links them to opportunities to explore design in career and life.

May 02 – May 08, 2021

Dan Mall — Mon, 10 May 2021 01:56:00 +0000

Work

Talked to Josh Clark about a new project
Caught up on email/Slack (or tried to) after being out of the office for a week
First aiming session with Patrice Embry, Crystal Vitelli, and Joe Rinaldi
Taught days 1 and 2 (of 4) of my design systems workshop for Smashing Conference
Talked to Josh Silverman about a new project
Caught up with Ewart Jackson
Aiming sessions for Lina Calin and Joshua Blankenship with Crystal Vitelli
Caught up with Christina Faith
Gave a talk—“Show Them the Future”—at RGD Creative Directions
Fireside chat about money and pricing at RGD Creative Diretions with Julian Brown
Weekly meeting with Jan Six, Mike Carbone, and Leslie Camacho at Arcade
Gave Arcade demo to Nathan Curtis
Gave Arcade demo to Jina Anne
Designed landing page for client pitch
Wrote up weekly and monthly strategy and new MVP document for Arcade
Caught up with Jacqui Frey
Arcade strategy conversation with Mike Carbone and Leslie Camacho
Weekly SuperFriendly Opportunities call
Weekly client account status meeting
Client pitch with Afyia Smith, Lauren Deal, Josh Clark, and Joe Rinaldi
Talked NFTs with Patrice Embry, Anthony Colangelo, and Russel Quadros
Aiming session with Lauren Deal and TJ Pitre

Personal

Kids sold their art at a local craft fair
New plaster finished for pool
Got my hair cut

Watched

Biography: “Macho Man” Randy Savage
Shrek (again)

Notable Reads

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Spider-Man: The Darkest Hours by Jim Butcher
Started Great Demo by Peter E. Cohen
OH no Type Company might be my new favorite type foundry.
There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing (hat tip: Joe Rinaldi)

Play with Arcade

Dan Mall — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 05:30:00 +0000

I used to laugh quietly to myself when SuperFriendly clients came to us, asking to license our design system product. “We’re a services company,” we’d politely reply. “We don’t have a design system product to license to you.”

Inevitably, the next question would be, “Do you have a product you would recommend to us?”

When we dug further, many of those requests seemed to be specifically around design tokens, a concept pioneered by design systems evangelist Jina Anne during her time at Salesforce, working on the Lightning Design System. Of course, clients wouldn’t be asking for design tokens by name; they’d instead be looking for solutions that helped them “scale their brand,” “create a source of truth,” and other aspirations like that.

As much as we had—and have—great relationships with many friends building tools for the design system space, none of them really seemed to accomplish (or accomplish well) what these clients were asking for. So, like many services companies that see the same unsolved problem over and over again, we figured we might as well be the ones to try and solve it.

I built an embarrasingly simple proof-of-concept. I showed it to my friends Leslie Camacho and Mike Carbone, and we decided to officially start Arcade together in June 2020. For the last 10 months, we’ve been quietly building Arcade and using it on our own products—this site is actually powered by Arcade.

Today, we’ve launched a brand new site and are ready to open up Arcade to a small number of teams to kick the tires and see how well a tool like Arcade serves their needs. The early access fee is $2500, and we’re looking specifically for teams that already understand and use design tokens, are open to our opinions on how to better manage brand decisions, and have a well-rounded, cross-disciplinary team of at least one designer, one engineer, and one product manager.

Does that sound like your team? Is Arcade the kind of solution you’ve been looking for? Head over to usearcade.com and apply for early access!

You can read more about Arcade from other perspectives:

“Eat Design Tokens for Breakfast,” by Mike Carbone
“Arcade is looking for teams who want to scale brand decisions with confidence!” by Leslie Camacho

Talk to us about this article on Twitter!

Support Systems for Learning

Dan Mall — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 14:10:00 +0000

As we at SuperFriendly work with newer and/or more junior SuperFriends, I’m recognizing the need for different ways to support how people learn and grow. Learning comes in many different forms, and I’m learning that people need help with a lot of them. Learning can’t just be something a professional does in their own time outside of work; it has to be an integral part of the work itself.

Here are some specific support systems we’re trying to invest in more:

Knowledge Transfer

Definition

This is probably the most common form—more commonly known as “teaching”—that most think of when they think of “learning.” Knowledge transfer is the idea that someone possesses information that you don’t, and you get that information by them bestowing it to you. The education system is primarily built on this type of learning, where experienced teachers bestow their knowledge upon eager students.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

In order to do good work, SuperFriends need information about the client, which happens early in projects mostly through sales and onboarding conversations. So, they’re being “taught” the information they need to do the work they’re hired for.

We also hold monthly Snack ’n’ Learns—a cross-time-zone version of Lunch and Learns—open to all SuperFriends across a variety of topics, some directly applicable to SuperFriendly projects like a panel about demos of things we’re all working on and others much more broad like an overview of network effects.

My Subjective Assessment

C- (average). We currently don’t do much yet to help SuperFriends patch skill gaps through knowledge transfer. One of the biggest criticisms of our apprenticeship from former apprentices is that it focused too heavily on developing power skills and professionalism more than it did skills of craft. If someone isn’t strong enough at a skill like, say, UI design or data analysis, all we do now is assess that they’re underqualified, suggest they try to get better, and don’t match them to a project yet. We’ve started to try and correct that in small ways by doing things like purchasing online courses and conference/workshop tickets for SuperFriends.

How We Can Do a Better Job

We’ve been creating a few libraries that SuperFriends can access at any time. Purchasing an online course should mean that all SuperFriends can utilize it (provided that the license allows for that). We’ve also started the process of collecting the Snack ’n’ Learn sessions into a curriculum that will eventually becoming a “SuperFriendly Fundamentals Library” that we can use to onboard new SuperFriends.
We’ve started conversations with people who we can hire to act as consultants for the team of SuperFriends. They wouldn’t be on the team itself or be client-facing; their roles would be purely to support filling in knowledge gaps that SuperFriends need to do their work.
For the last year, we’ve been trying a pairing system for every discipline on a project (design, engineering, producing, etc.) That’s working well in theory, but we still have a lot of kinks to work out in how to allow ample room for this style of work, as well as what kinds of expectations to have about each person in the pair. We’re continuing to tweak this dynamic from project to project and pair to pair to see what feels most useful, and I’m very hopeful that this will be extremely fruitful very soon for all involved.

Knowledge Seeking

Definition

Knowledge seeking is the typical modus operandi of the self-starter. Self-starters are generally good at finding their own solutions, as opposed to having those solutions given to them or mandated. That means a lot of reading, watching videos, exploring, and generally an insatiable curiosity as compared to the expectation of being taught by someone else. One of my hypotheses in starting the apprenticeship was that it’s not ironic to teach someone how to be a self-starter as opposed to it being a character or personality trait. I evaluated that by looking at how much the capacity for knowledge seeking—and confidence in it—changed over time.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

For better or worse—probably worse—our industry is drawn to people who do their own knowledge seeking as a matter of habit. Those who have a lot of experience with knowledge seeking tend to be more self-sufficient than others. We don’t really “support” knowledge seeking as much as we try to continually encourage it.

My Subjective Assessment

D (below average). I don’t know if it’s counterintuitive to try and support knowledge seeking, but I do know that we don’t explicitly encourage it or show SuperFriends exactly how there’s space for it on projects. It always seems to feel like something extra. That’s not great.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Reward knowledge seeking as part of the work. I’m not quite sure what good rewards are for this. Financial incentive? Public and private praise? Something else?
Explicitly discourage the idea that knowledge seeking should only happen outside of work time.
Build time and space into project plans specifically for knowledge seeking.

Purpose

Definition

As Daniel Pink articulates in his book Drive, “autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels, but those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.”

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

One of our interview questions for both new and seasoned SuperFriends at the beginning of each project is, “What do you want and need out of your work right now in the season of life you’re in?” Historically, the answers have ranged from:

Money
Distraction
Some sort of impact in the world
Opportunity to work on a specific kind of project or with a specific kind of client
Learn a new skill
Chance to hone a current skill
Learn directly from a person with specific experience

Our job on the SuperFriendly side and the Directors and Producers on the account becomes to help prioritize these outcomes for each individual SuperFriends.

My Subjective Assessment

B+ (above average). We regularly have new SuperFriends that say things like, “Wow, no one’s ever asked me what my personal goals are for a project.”

We also start every new project with a “Superpowers Session,” where, in front of the whole team, a Producer reads out why each person was chosen for this work, what they bring to it, and also what they want to get out of it. This is the first step in making everyone on the team accountable for each of their teammates’ stated goals.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Make SuperFriends’ goals more present throughout a project, not just in the beginning. Projects start with a lot of momentum around personal goals, but that tends to wane as a project gets going and everyone is in the weeds.
Normalize the idea that projects are about everyone’s professional and personal goals being met, not just our clients’ briefs. One thing I’ve been trying to say and signal lately is, “SuperFriendly is about SuperFriends, not clients.” Just yesterday, I had a conversation with a long-time SuperFriend who said to me, “I love the idea that we participate in a way we want to, but I don’t think that conversation can always be completely decoupled from how things might functionally get done.” It made me realize there’s still a lot of work to be done to get SuperFriends to accept the idea that projects aren’t just things where clients pay us to do whatever they want as a dry transaction. Instead, like grad school, I think of projects as great vehicles to explore professional and interpersonal theses, and clients get the tremendous benefit of the effects of that exploration.
One idea of we’ve been talking about for a long time but haven’t yet implemented is to encourage SuperFriends to create their own “user manuals” to guide others on how to best work with them. I imagine that these manuals would contain some semblance of how a SuperFriend would want to grow and why they do what they do, and that would be integral to how people can relate to and interact with them.

Stories & Examples

Definition

Rather than talking about a concept abstractly, one way to help people learn is to tell and/or show them how it’s happened before in an applied way. Sharing stories and examples can go a long way toward making vague ideas concrete.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

Not a lot. One of the biggest strengths of the Hollywood model is also its weakness: solitude. SuperFriends working on a project don’t know how a previous project went, because they weren’t there. That means stories have to be actively shared, because they’re almost impossible to passively stumble upon.

We have dedicated Slack channels for our most common disciplines: Directors, Producers, designers, and developers. Each has its own level of activity.

Our Producers channel is incredibly active. On the third Wednesday of every month, a different Producer will host an asychronous roundtable. They post a series of questions and prompts around a given topic, and as other Producers have time throughout the day, they’ll post their responses in threads for others to read and catch up on as they have a chance. Topics have ranged from onboarding techniques to meeting etiquette to flexibility, and lots more. Inevitably, those threads contain Producers saying different versions of, ”Here’s how I’ve dealt with or experienced that on my projects.”
Our Directors channel is a ghost town (and I say that without judgment). We had a monthly roundtable Zoom call, but fewer and fewer showed up each month, I think as a combination of little incentive, busy schedules, and not knowing what to talk about.
Our designers and developers channels have a steady buzz going, but they’re mostly functional. Lots of link sharing and debugging conversation, less story sharing.
We’ve had two Snack ’n’ Learns that specifically share stories and examples. Our head of operations Crystal Vitelli presented to our SuperFriends on “Things that Didn’t Go Well,” where she shared a few projects that went south and all the factors that led to that from contractual ambiguity to unstated expectations and lots more. We also had a panel discussion to talk about how Directors and Producers work together and how different that dynamic is from project to project, with lots of examples as proof points.

My Subjective Assessment

F (failing). We do a really poor job of sharing our stories both internally and externally. Case studies are an attempt, but they’re too time-consuming and difficult to create regularly and honestly trend more towards marketing pieces for prospective clients than helpful guides for SuperFriends.

We don’t as of yet have many good places for interproject and interdisciplinary sharing, and that constantly ails and irks me.

How We Can Do a Better Job

More Snack ’n’ Learns that scrutinize past projects for the good, the bad, and the ugly
I’ve been entertaining the thought for a while that I could just randomly record short Looms every now and again of me talking through past projects to post to teams on Slack. Over time, we could build up a collection of these that SuperFriends could watch when they need to. I think the only thing stopping me from doing this is that I haven’t spent time to think about a good format for these and I’m scared of rambling and being incoherent in them.

Mentorship

Definition

People often think of mentorship as general guidance, but it’s actually a specific kind of guidance. In The Odyssey, Mentor was the person that Odysseus placed in charge of his whole estate—including guidance of his son Telemachus—while Odysseus went off to fight in the Trojan War. Mentor himself actually did a very poor job of all of that, but the goddess of wisdom Athena often transformed into Mentor to work with Telemachus to great success.

In The Odyssey’s Millennia-Old Model of Mentorship, Harvard classics professor Gregory Nagy points out that Athena’s intention as Mentor was to instill menos into Telemachus, which translates into something like “mind, strength, courage, and force.” So, like Athena did through the guise of Mentor, mentorship is the act of giving someone else mental, heroic strength from the foundation of wisdom.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

If there’s one thing SuperFriends do, it’s talk. Especially as a company that started distributed in 2012, meetings abound, and delivering mental strength is a core ingredient of those meetings, both internally with SuperFriends only as well as externally with clients.

My Subjective Assessment

A- (excellent). Mentorship was built into the foundation of SuperFriendly from the beginning, and it persists almost a decade later at a larger scale.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Counterintuitively, we can do a better job overall by focusing less on mentorship. One thing that’s become abundantly clear is that mentorship alone isn’t enough. We can leave mentorship where it is and dial up some of the other things.

Coaching

Definition

In Coaching for Performance, author Sir John Whitmore says coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. I like that definition a lot, and I love that he takes the idea even further. He says, “Coaching is much bigger than coaching. It is a way of being that the whole world needs to get to, where the core theme is compassion for all people.”

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

We have a principle that “everyone at SuperFriendly gets a coach.” If you’re a junior designer, you get paired with a more senior designer. Same for developers. Directors and Producers coach everyone on their team. Directors do 1-on-1s with me, and Producers do 1-on-1s with Crystal. Crystal and I have Jen Dary as a coach, and Jen and her team at Plucky also coach 2 different SuperFriends every quarter.

My Subjective Assessment

A- (excellent). I think our coaching philosophy program is strong.

How We Can Do a Better Job

More rigor and regularity for more SuperFriends.

Modeling

Definition

Modeling is about intentionally providing behavior for others to observe and imitate.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

Currently, modeling doesn’t happen as much as we need it to. There’s more mentorship happening than modeling, which has led to a culture of, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

This is also another area where SuperFriendly’s business model works against us. Even our most seasoned SuperFriends don’t always understand well enough what makes a SuperFriendly project different than other kinds of projects because their insight into a volume of SuperFriendly projects is limited. That makes it more difficult for modeling to happen if SuperFriends are unsure which behaviors to model for others. This is one of my biggest responsibilities and failure as SuperFriendly’s CEO.

My Subjective Assessment

F (failing). In addition to providing Stories & Examples, modeling is our biggest gap area.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Our friends at Seer Interactive were kind enough to walk us through their Universal Role Expectations documents for their employees. Among the many excellent things in those documents, my absolute favorite was the column labeled “Sights/Sounds,” which makes clear what an role expectation actually looks and sounds like in real life. For example, an expectation on thought leadership said, “Uses email, chat, and team meetings to ask and answer industry questions and participates in conversations.” The Sights/Sounds column for that expectation says, “I learned how to create this custom report to show me X, and you might also want to use this report and generate others like it. I can show you how.” I love how specific and actionable that is. There’s definitely a version of this in SuperFriendly’s very near future.
One of my most recent conundrums is that I no longer work on any SuperFriendly projects myself, but I’m one of the most likely candidates to provide useful modeling for our SuperFriends. How can I model good SuperFriend behavior without actually working on projects? I’m stumped about this one.

Direction

Definition

Directing someone is aiming them; it’s giving them a direction, a specific path to tread. A major part of direction is specifically telling someone what to do, and, by virtue of that, signaling to them what not to do and what they can ignore.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

Following the Hollywood model, every SuperFriendly project has a Director as a key role on the project. The Director’s job is to set and reinforce a vision for the project and make sure each SuperFriend knows how the part they play contributes to the overall vision.

My Subjective Assessment

C (average). We provide the space for direction on every project by having a reserved spot for a Director, but providing direction is a tricky dynamic on a SuperFriendly project. Directing is hard, because it’s not just telling someone what to do; getting them to do it is the other half. Because most SuperFriends are independent freelancers, the idea of any kind of manager or boss or someeone telling them what to do that’s not a client is different than it looks at a full-time job. Because of a combination of factors, it’s all too easy for Directors to default more to mentoring or coaching than directing.

How We Can Do a Better Job

We can definitely provide better role definition for Directors. It’s an ambiguous job, and part of the job is to actually manage ambiguity, but we’re starting to develop a rubric for different ways Directors can operate. Over the next few weeks and months, SuperFriendly will be documenting and delivering more of this clarity for our Directors.

Accountability Partners

Definition

Accountability comes from defining standards, having a way to measure whether that standard is being met, and implementing positive and/or negative consequences based on whether the standards are met. (I’ve previously written more about accountability before.)

NaNoWriMo (which stands for “National Novel Writing Month”) is one of my favorite examples of accountability. The challenge is to write 50,000 words of a novel within the 30 days of November. That’s a daunting enough task for any aspiring novelist, but the simple fact that you know others are doing it with you is extremely motivating for just under 1 million writers that have participated. The positive and negative consequences are simple but effective: once you sign up, you feel embarrassed if you can’t make the commitment you agreed to and you feel amazing if you can.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

We don’t have anything intentional set up to encourage an accountability partner program, but a few instances of it have cropped up organically. In our apprenticeship program, multiple apprentices at the same skill level within the same cohort have used each other for motivation. And some SuperFriends have taken advantage of our community to proactively reach out to others at the same skill level on other projects for camaraderie and support.

My Subjective Assessment

C (average). That fact that we haven’t set anything up specifically for this but it’s happening anyway is a promising sign.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Set up an accountability program! That might look like pairing folks together for a period of time with the explicit charge of holding each other accountable, and supporting them in that effort.
Not exactly directly related, but this brings up the fact that we’ve never explicitly defined our skill levels. That’s definitely a thing that’s on our to-do list for the next few months that I think can have a big impact.

Practice

Definition

In my opinion, practice is the most important thing on this list for us to support. Practice is the actual application of all of these methods. Without practice, all of these other systems remain purely theoretical exercises.

The late basketball player Kobe Bryant was a student of the game. He unapologetically studied and stole all of Michael Jordan’s moves. But what separated Kobe from all the rest? It wasn’t his talent, even though he was extremely talented. It was his work ethic; Kobe practiced more than everyone else. That’s why he was better.

How It Currently Happens at SuperFriendly

It happens by default. Even though we do provide advisory services to our clients, we’re not just a strategy consultancy. We implement and execute on the work we advise on. That means there are plenty of opportunities for practice.

My Subjective Assessment

B (above average). The question here isn’t whether or not we practice, but what we’re practicing. If it was just about practicing a craft like design or coding, I’d give us an A. But sometimes the thing we should be practicing isn’t obvious. In a scenario where most would design a web page, I want our SuperFriends to practice the discernment that maybe designing a book or an instruction manual would be more useful. What I’d love our SuperFriends to practice more is flexible decision making, not always executing on pre-determined decisions.

How We Can Do a Better Job

Create safer spaces through all of the other support systems in order to allow SuperFriends to practice many other things that support their craft.

One quick nuance to point out: I often get confused about the different between mentorship, coaching, modeling, and direction. Here’s a cheat sheet I made for myself about what I think the distinctions are:

Mentorship is telling people how you’ve done it.
Coaching is helping people do it their own way.
Modeling is showing people how you’d do it.
Direction is telling people what they should do.

Since I’ve decided to grow SuperFriendly, I’ve had to be more explicit about how we can support all of our SuperFriends. As you can see, we definitely don’t have all of this in place, but making a list like this gives us some standards to meet. I have a hypothesis that the best projects contain every one of these support systems.

If your company does any or all of these support systems well, I’d love to hear about it so we can start implementing the same things to create a better experience for our SuperFriends.

Talk to me about this essay on Twitter!

My Typical Day

Dan Mall — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 16:21:00 +0000

I’ve previously written about how I schedule my day, but Colin Devroe’s blog post tag is a welcome excuse to update this info.

4:30am–5am: Wake up.
5am–6am: Mission work.
6am–7am: Get ready/get kids ready for the day.
7am–8am: Drive kids to school and get back home.
8am–12pm: Work. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I reserve this slot for flow time. On Tuesdays and Fridays, this time is open for SuperFriends and clients to schedule meetings with me.
12pm–1pm: Lunch.
1pm–1:30pm: Work wind-down.
1:30pm–2:30pm: Pick up kids from school.
2:30pm–5:30pm: Help kids with homework and do some writing/reading/sketching/thinking.
5:30pm–6:30pm: Family dinner time.
6:30pm–7:15pm: Bum around time/kids’ bath time.
7:15pm–7:30pm: Read together and put kids to bed.
7:30pm–8:30pm: Optional work wrap-up time if there’s anything urgent from the day. Otherwise…
7:30pm–9:30pm: …wind-down/ relax with Em.
9:30pm: Bedtime.

Check out Chris Coyier’s typical day.

Also tagging Julia Fernandez, Sara Soueidan, Mike Carbone, Dave Rupert, and Rob Weychert.

2020 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 08:07:00 +0000

I really enjoyed writing “year in review” posts for 2019 and 2018, so I think this is officially a tradition now.

Family & home #

Our family takes pride in adventuring together, and boy was 2020 an adventure. Our adventures typically involve traveling on planes, but that definitely didn’t happen this year.

Instead, the adventures took the form of being together a lot. 9-year old Sidda and 7-year old Charlie go to a Catholic school that held in-person classes, but Em and I didn’t feel comfortable doing that, so we opted for virtual school for the first semester to see how the school handled such an unprecedented event. That was difficult. The kids handled it like champs, but introverted Em and I really felt the lack of our own space since we were all home, all the time. We had a welcome reprieve when my parents offered to do school with the kids 2 days a week so they could have some change of scenery and Em and I could get some personal space back.

Parenting kids in virtual school was tough. I pride myself on being pretty digitally savvy, but I just couldn’t get my head straight about how and when to submit assignments; what platforms to use between Google Classroom, ClassDojo, and others; when to print which handouts for the day, and lots more. I contemplated getting in touch with the school and offering to run all of their digital platform stuff for the kids, parents, and teachers, but taking on something new that big felt just as stressful as dealing with it. So we dealt with it. Em realized that dealing with homework sorting and submitting stressed her out, and I realized that sitting with the kids while in school was frustrating to me while I tried to get work done, so we switched: Em sat with the kids while they were “in class,” and I took over when school was done and they got into homework time. Come report card time, the kids got mediocre grades, not because they weren’t learning the material, but because I didn’t submit assignments on time or at the right place. Cue flashbacks of me in school learning all the stuff but not caring enough about the administrivia. Trigger city.

Living room #

We were doing all of this from home, the old church-turned-house we bought from my parents in 2012. When I was in high school, my parents ran a personal care home business for years as a way to take care of my grandparents while they aged. After my grandparents passed away in 2006 and 2009, my parents no longer needed the business, so they sold it, but they couldn’t sell the property because of the poor housing market at the time. When I decided to start SuperFriendly in 2012, Em and I were going to ask my parents if we could move into their basement to keep our expenses low as I started a business for the first time. Before we had the chance, my dad suggested that we could take over the small mortgage left on the property. The house needed work, but paying a modest sum every month was the right kind of pressure we needed while still having a fallback that being late a month or two would be forgiven. Over 9 years, we only missed a mortgage payment once while waiting on late client payments, but knowing that we had some cushion was an incredible privilege.

That house was a blessing and served us incredibly well for almost a decade. But the issues of a poorly-built house were starting to add up over time. Pests, failing appliances, shady neighbors, and other things started to slowly manifest.

The silver lining of quarantining together for months made us realize that we could do anything together. “Home” could be wherever we wanted it to be, wherever we were together.

So we changed it.

If we were going to be quarantining, we might as well do it in a place we liked. We got a rental apartment on the beach. Our schedule was simple: school in the morning while I worked, homework early afternoon while Em worked, then go sit on the beach together for a few hours while the kids played in the water. That created just the right amount of space for us to feel less pressure; it gave us some room to live.

A new house #

We moved into our current house since a poor housing market made it tough for my parents to sell otherwise. One of the things that kept us there for as long as we’ve been is that we didn’t think we get enough money for it to make it worth selling, not to mention beginning the search for a new house, having enough money for a down payment/closing/etc.

And then COVID-19 happened.

The housing market went nuts. Suddenly, we heard that houses were selling for well above their market value. If we were ever going to sell our house, now seemed to be the time.

A few other things conspired together in our favor. First, we’ve been putting money away little-by-little for the past few years in case we wanted to move. We didn’t know when or where, but having enough money for a down payment on a decent house gave us some optionality. Then, in Em’s occasional Zillow-stalking, she came across an amazing house that wasn’t even officially on the market yet. Things happened quickly. We found the house online on October 22, saw it in-person on October 25, put in an offer on October 26, the seller accepted after some light negotiating on October 27, we closed on December 17, and moved in on December 18.

We listed our current house on December 17 and received an offer on December 19 for way more than we ever thought we’d get on the house. We’re currently waiting on mortgage approval for the buyer but hoping that gets resolved very soon so we can be free and clear.

As we moved into our new house, I found myself wanting to make it nice. I know that might sound obvious, but I realized I never put much effort into making our old house nice. Partially because it wasn’t a house we picked and also that it needed a lot of work, I approached it pretty apathetically. I always chalked that up to the fact that I’m generally pretty content, but now that we have a nice house, I’m surprisingly finding more of a desire to keep it that way. I’m nesting hardcore. For the first time, I find myself lost in picking paint colors, watching YouTube videos about minimalist desks, making multiple trips to HomeSense every week, and assembling Pinterest boards of sofas and tables. I kinda like that.

Assuming Sidda and Char leave the nest when they’re each 18, that means just about half the time they’ll live with us is gone. I want to make sure the other half of that time together is time well spent. I hope this house allows us to do that better.

Health, wellness, and self-care #

Ha!

2020’s been awful for me in terms of physical self-care.

My soda addiction didn’t dwindle at all, as I made 0 attempts to curb it. I just didn’t have the willpower to attempt it this year.

I stopped playing in my weekly basketball games in March, and I’m pretty sad about that as I’ve done very little physical fitness activity other than walking around the neighborhood every few days. Now that I live in a beautiful neighborhood, I think I’m going to start running outside even though I hate running. I’ll probably give Couch to 5K a shot.

The only good thing I can say is that I’ve been eating much less fast food as I’m really enjoying my CookUnity subscription.

I stopped working with my therapist in July because I wasn’t really sure what I was getting out of working with him. I found a new therapist through BetterHelp and working with her for the last 6 months has been great. However, because I moved to a different state, I had to switch therapists yet again. I’ve had one session with her, and so far, I’m looking forward to my work with her even more than my previous therapists.

My brother and I finally got the tattoos we’ve been meaning to get for a while now in honor of our grandfather. This was the last plane ride I took in 2020 was to Portland, ME to get this tattoo, which makes it even extra special.

Books #

This year, I read:

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
Dare to Lead, by Brené Brown (abandoned)
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, by Mindy Kaling
Teaming, by Amy Edmondson (abandoned)
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson
The Making of a Manager, by Julie Zhuo
Your Money Made Simple, by Russ Crosson
Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh
The Challenger Sale, by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Stiff, by Mary Roach (abandoned)
Do Scale, by Les McKeown
Coaching for Performance, by Sir John Whitmore
So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo
Civil War, by Stuart Moore
Save the Cat!, by Blake Snyder
Range, by David Epstein
Shark Tales, by Barbara Corcoran
Give and Take, by Adam Grant
The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin (abandoned)
It’s About Damn Time, by Arlan Hamilton
King of the World, by David Remnick
Secrets of Sand Hill Road, by Scott Kupor
Mismatch, by Kat Holmes
Joy, Inc. by Richard Sheridan
Watching You, by Lisa Jewell
DisneyWar, by James B. Stewart (currently reading)

Travel #

I usually have a list of places I’ve traveled in the year, but the list is pretty slim for 2020. From January to March, I traveled to:

Banff, Canada
Tulum, Mexico
Portland, ME

Unusually, all of those places were personal trips, not work trips.

On the bright side, because of the lack of flying this year, I was only “randomly” selected for screening twice this year as opposed to 5 times last year.

Although we couldn’t fly anywhere this year, our family still tried to take some trips together that were all within driving distance.

We spent a long weekend in Cape May, NJ this summer.
We rented a lake house in Northumberland, PA for a few days this summer and went tubing and kayaking.
Em and I took a road trip through New England to see some fall foliage.
I took the kids to the Adirondacks to see some fall foliage.

I’m hoping we can fly again in 2021, but if not, I have a feeling we’ll get creative about scratching that itch.

Videos & photos #

In last year’s review, I lamented doing less video stuff than I had anticipated and hoped that some online course ideas would be enough motivation to change that. I was right! I made a 12-video course about design systems called “Make Design Systems People Want to Use” that I wrote, shot, and edited all by myself. I dreaded how long editing takes, but I did underestimate how quickly I could get comfortable in Final Cut Pro after spending some time with YouTube tutorials. Now I don’t feel as intimidated about making videos and find myself making fun little 90-second to 2-minute videos of things like preparing a Thanksgiving meal, a silly Christmas play we did a few years ago, or random b-roll from around the house.

On the photography front, I’m still as enthusiastic about taking photos as I was a year ago. I started my photo site and Instagram account around this time last year, and I’ve posted about 125 photos to them since. Winter without snow on the East Coast of the United States isn’t terribly picturesque, so I find myself longing for a photo trip to a super snowy location or for a soon-to-come photogenic season like cherry blossoms in the spring. I’m slowly curating a list of photo trips I’d like to take soon. In the meantime, I’m still taking a few online courses to get better at this hobby, like Introduction to Landscape Photography with Tiffany Nguyen, Composite Photography & Retouching for Advertising by Erik Almas, and Hyperreal Landscapes.

I expect to do a lot more photo and video stuff in 2021.

Sole man #

I added a few new sneakers to the collection in 2020:

Nike Acronym x Air Presto Mid “Racer Pink”
Air Jordan 1 High Zoom “Zen Green”
Union LA x Air Jordan 1 Retro High NRG “Storm Blue”
Air Jordan 1 Mid SE “Amarillo”
Puma Rebound LayUp Casual
Air Jordan 1 High Zoom “Crater”
Custom Air Jordan 1 by Neo

I also signed up for The Shoe Surgeon’s course for creating a custom pair of Jordan 1’s. So excited about this one!

Speaking #

I expected to do way less “public appearances” in 2020 because of COVID, but I only did 1 less thing than last year (17 in 2020 as opposed to 18 in 2019):

I made an appearance on The Businessology Show, a podcast I helped start with Jason Blumer.
I talked to folks from AIGA Jacksonville and the national chapter’s portfolio review, where I got to speak alongside people I admire like Lisa Babb, Ellen Lupton, and Michael Bierut.
I talked design systems with Jina Anne, for Ladies that UX ATL, for The Object-Oriented UX Podcast, with the Bureau of Digital, at UX+, and at the Design Ops Summit.
I talked to Marc Fonteijn twice on the Service Design Show about pricing and then again about design systems for services.
I emceed Clarity, which was my first time emceeing a conference, and I had a blast!
It’s always a treat to doing things with local folks, so I talked to Ryan Starr at Hi-Res about my professional journey and sat on a panel for PhillyCHI about being a successful UX practitioner.
I talked to Alexis Collado about my experience as a (half) Filipino designer on his Roots podcast.
I talked to Christian Bryant about collaboration on his Stack Yack podcast.
I publicly taught design systems to Jason Lengstorf, and he enthusiastically wrote a 3-part series about our chat!
I taught a 10-week class about design systems to seniors at Drexel University.

I usually have a few events for the following year lined up at this point, but 2020 was weird. I’ll be announcing a few public design system workshops shortly, so watch this space if you’re interested.

Work #

I wrote elsewhere in detail about how SuperFriendly did in 2020, so suffice it to say here that I’m extremely grateful for my SuperFriends and my clients. I’m excited and hopeful for what we can do in 2021.

I’m also figuring out a way to make more impact while working less, and my family and I can feel it. That’s really important to me.

I co-founded Arcade in 2020 with Mike Carbone and Leslie Camacho. It’s the third business I’ve ever owned/co-owned, so I guess that officially makes me an entrepreneur? We have lots of plans for Arcade in 2021, and we’ll be sharing them on the Arcade blog as we progress.

There’s also likely one more company that I’ll hopefully be announcing this year. More on that soon.

This site #

In 2020, I published my 500th piece of content to this site, which I’ve had for 15 years! I’m very grateful to Past Dan™ for documenting so much over the years, and I really do wish I had written even more.

I wrote 35 posts in 2020, which is way more than I’ve ever posted to this site. (The last highest year was 2019 when I wrote 14 posts.) My favorites from the year were documenting my DSLR-as-webcam setup (with a few updates), tracking my evolving calendar blocking approach, and finally making public my syllabus for running a 9-month design or development apprenticeship in case others want to try to create something like it.

Of the 35 posts I wrote in 2020, 31 of them were in the new weeknotes format I was trying out. I like this format, partly because it’s a nice way for me to see what I do on a weekly cadence and because it gets me writing to my site more frequently. But that also reveals a problem: my Articles page is now mostly weeknotes, which it wasn’t really designed for. It buries all the other posts that aren’t weeknotes that I’d love to highlight more. Cue the plight of all designers/developers with a personal website, especially this time of year: I want a new site.

Sure, I could make a few adjustments to the design to solve the hierarchy problem, but like all sites that have been around for a while, there’s a bunch of medium-sized things I’ve been meaning to do. A redesign is often a good excuse to bundle all of those individual issues into an actual project. I’m proud to have constantly iterated on this site and make small fixes over the years, but it’s about time to do some work to make the foundation more sturdy.

The other big reason for a new site is a technical one. I’ve had free hosting from MediaTemple for years, ever since I met some nice MediaTemple folks at SXSW one year and they offered to host my site. Then one day earlier this year, my free hosting stopped and I was suddenly on the hook to pay $100/month, which I definitely don’t want to pay just to host this site. Just about all of SuperFriendly’s work as well as the site is hosted on Netlify now, so this new hosting charge is a good catalyst for getting everything migrated. I’m incredibly grateful for the free hosting I’ve had for years, which is way more than I deserve, but if I’m going to pay, I’d rather pay for features I value like out-of-the-box SSL/TLS certificates and smart branch deploys as well as a place where all my sites can live together.

Related, I’m excited about a new URL. When I put up my first personal site in 2005, I used danielmall.com, because danmall.com wasn’t available. I also used the handle @danielmall on Twitter so I could keep my Twitter handle and personal website URL the same.

But I’m Dan, not Daniel. No one calls me “Daniel”, except for the people that don’t really know me and assume I go by “Daniel” because of my URL.

So I switched from @danielmall to @danmall on Twitter a few years ago. And I switched from danielmall.com to danmall.me. But I’ve never really liked a .me domain for me. Feels unofficial, for some reason.

I check domain registrars every so often for danmall.com to be available. Usually, it’s not. But a few weeks ago, I saw it available for purchase, albeit at a pretty premium price. For most big purchases I make, I have a guideline to not buy on the spot but to sleep on it and decide in the morning. That usually keeps my impulse purchases to a minimum. But, as a professional web designer who has waited on this domain for 15 years, I figured this didn’t really qualify as impulsive. (Also, business expense!)

So! Whenever I can get around to making it, the new version of this site is finally going to live at danmall.com! I was also thinking that I would build the site in public and even make an affordable little course about the process in case anyone’s curious about how I design and build a site from scratch. I even have a tagline ready: “All the boring stuff you wanted to see.”

Miscellany #

Em got COVID in December. It was pretty scary for a day or two, but luckily it was only that and she recovered to being good as new just in time for our move.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. election! I’m thrilled to have Trump out of office. I still haven’t fully processed this, but I’m hoping it means 2021 will be a much kinder year for U.S. citizens.
I’m so ready for the Sixers in 2021. Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid are joined by Seth Curry, Danny Green, Dwight Howard, Tyrese Maxey, coach Doc Rivers, and more. We’re gonna win the NBA title this year, and then we’re going to win the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup.

2021 #

Goodbye, 2020. You were good, bad, and ugly.

Ready for 2021.

SuperFriendly 2020 Wrap-Up

Dan Mall — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 16:04:00 +0000

At the end of 2019, I predicted and hoped that 2020 would be a big year for SuperFriendly. I didn’t know the half of it.

A global pandemic #

I certainly can’t talk about business in 2020 without talking about COVID-19. This global pandemic had a major impact on SuperFriendly this past year, and I’m surprised to say almost all effects—at least the ones that are typically tracked in a spreadsheet… more on this later—have been positive. Financially, 2020 was SuperFriendly’s best year by far; some of that was because of plans we’ve made that manifest this year and some of that was actually because of COVID. That makes me feel relieved, proud, hopeful, sad, and ashamed, all at the same time. I’m conflicted about feeling successful in a year that’s been so devastating for so many people on the planet. (I’m actively working on this with my therapists and coaches.) What keeps me distracted from being consumed by that emotional conflict is focusing on using SuperFriendly to continue to create better opportunities for our SuperFriends and clients.

At the beginning of the year, we were working with lots of clients in the travel and hospitality industry, like United Airlines and Marriott. When the pandemic hit in March, those companies had more existential issues to focus on than their work with us (rightly so), so most of that work dried up quickly.

While our travel and hospitality work was dwindling, it’s really only by good fortune that our work with healthcare, entertainment, and education clients was ramping up, some actually because of the needs that a global pandemic was causing. For example, our work with clients like Herman Miller and Harvard Business School turned toward topics like helping people make a transition to remote work or forming opinions about what events look like in a socially-distanced world. We created “response teams” to brainstorm with our clients about things that might be helpful to them and their customers, from creating new products and offerings to discounting our own services or offering pro bono work to help them through a tumultuous time.

When people asked me earlier this year how SuperFriendly was doing, my typical response was to include some mention of volatility. COVID made our business more volatile: more clients were stopping business with us all at once than ever before, but our pipeline was more full than ever too, so it was mostly more activity than we were used to.

Now, at the end of the year, I can say that the volatility has worn off a bit, but our pipeline remains more full than it’s ever been and we have more prospects, projects, and accounts lined up for the new year than we’ve ever had at the end of a calendar year.

The SuperFriendly Systems team #

Those familiar with SuperFriendly for a while probably know the SuperFriend model: I’m the only employee (as I’ve been since I started it in 2012), and every project we do is a custom-assembled team for that client. That said, I’m not a fan of using the royal “we” like many do when talking about their offerings; I try hard to say “I” when I’m talking about what I’m doing personally and use “we” to refer to a larger group of SuperFriends.

When I talk about what we at SuperFriendly did in 2020, I do mean it’s the effort of a group of extraordinary people that’s more than just me. In the world of enterprises that need and use design systems, a common model is to have dedicated teams working on separate products or features and then having a more central “design system team” that serves each of the product/feature teams. For SuperFriendly, instead of product teams, we have project/account teams that serve each client, so we established a “Systems” team in 2020 to serve each of those project/account teams.

On our Systems team, we have roles for representatives from these disciplines: executive, business development, operations, administrative, and legal. They support our project teams in all of these areas. The people that represent each discipline work primarily on SuperFriendly, as opposed to other SuperFriends who work primarily on client work. Without these people, SuperFriendly wouldn’t be nearly what it was this year:

Matt Sherlock is SuperFriendly’s attorney (and also a friend I’ve known since high school). Matt does more than just weigh in on agreements; he regularly advises SuperFriendly and helps shape its direction from a risk profile standpoint and has since 2013.
Nikki Loffredo handles all of SuperFriendly’s administrative needs. She makes it all run smoothly, from bookkeeping, invoicing, reimbursements, travel arrangements, and lots more. She’s been a concierge for SuperFriends since 2013.
Crystal Vitelli runs all of SuperFriendly’s operations. She acts as a coach and support system for our Producers and Executive Producers. Crystal used to be a SuperFriendly client and has produced SuperFriendly projects since 2016, so she understands both sides of a client relationship better than any other SuperFriend.
Joe Rinaldi runs all of SuperFriendly’s new business. Just about every dollar that SuperFriendly made in 2020 was at least partially shaped by Joe, if not fully.
I help set direction for the company and provide some shape for some of SuperFriendly’s unique services. Most of my time goes to some split of interviewing new SuperFriends, coaching, building teams, shaping and pricing new work, and creating structure.

In addition to these folks, we hold 2 spots open for SuperFriends that primarily work on projects to weigh in on how SuperFriendly can better support teams from that perspective. For the last 6 months, Lauren Deal and Dontae Benn have been invaluable in providing their insight on what a good balance between support and autonomy can look like for teams.

SuperFriendly in numbers #

Over to some quantitative fun! Here are some numbers that illustrate parts of what SuperFriendly looked like all year.

Time spent #

I’ve generally been a proponent of the “work smarter, not harder” adage, so I’m often looking for ways to spend less time working without much significant impact on my productivity.

In 2019, I worked 2,040 hours, an average of 39 hours/week.
In 2020, I worked 1,903 hours, an average of 37 hours/week.

Here’s generally how my detailed time spent breaks down.

Admin: 372 hours (20%)
Creative Direction: 333 hours (17%)
Business Development: 277 hours (15%)
Vacation: 264 hours (14%)
Speaking/Conferences: 178 hours (9%)
Coaching: 138 hours (7%)
Marketing: 110 hours (6%)
Design: 56 hours (3%)
Writing: 39 hours (2%)
Miscellaneous/Other: 136 hours (7%)

This is the first year since I opened SuperFriendly in 2012 that I spent more time on Administrative things (documentation, reviewing, planning, etc.) than either Creative Direction or Business Development. This affirms and confirms my decision to want to spend more of my effort on SuperFriendly itself than on client work.

Projects #

We did significantly more projects this year than any other. We average about 9 projects/year. In 2020, we did 19 projects, a 111% increase from 2019’s 9 projects.

We worked on some cool things, like:

A new site for eNotes
An enterprise-wide design system for United Airlines
A new design language and templates for the University of Pittsburgh that power both their Admissions and Financial Aid sites
Some ecosystem strategy work for Marriott
Some product prototypes for Herman Miller
Design system work for Pfizer
An evolved visual identity for Boardable that’s soon to roll out
An updated site for the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School
A web application for the State of Maine
An annual report for the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation
Work you’ll see soon for FamilyLife, Twilio, the Faith & Liberty Discovery Center, Point72, and more

Revenue & Profit #

SuperFriendly made more gross revenue in 2020 than in any other year. 2019 was the best year to date, and we increased that by 145% in 2020.

However, we only made 11% profit on our revenue in 2020, which is down 17% from the 28% profit margin we had in 2019. I haven’t dug in closely enough to know exactly what the cause of that drop was, but my hunch is that our significant increase in overhead this really ate into what would have otherwise been profit. That’s definitely something to correct for 2021.

People & Purpose #

I saved the most important one for last.

SuperFriendly’s purpose is to create better opportunities for creative people to flourish. (I’ll be revising this in 2021, but more on that another time.) If we have one metric that matters, it’s creating better opportunities, whether that’s helping SuperFriends meet financial goals, learn something new, work with a specific client, gain mentorship from more experienced folks, and more.

At the end of 2019, we made a commitment to do a better job in hiring more women, people of color, and other groups of people typically underrepresented in the tech industry. And especially with the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black people in 2020 and over the previous few years, we renewed that commitment to creating better opportunities specfically for Black people at SuperFriendly. We also raised $13,770.70 for community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers.

Here are some of the specific goals we set last year in who we wanted our SuperFriends to be and how we did against all of them.

We wanted to hire at least 30 SuperFriends this year. We hired 55 SuperFriends.
We wanted to pay all SuperFriends a total of $500,000, an average of just under $17,000 each. We paid SuperFriends $2,333,039.62, an average of $42,418.90 each.
We wanted to hire at least 15 women (50% of projected hires). We hired 23 women (42% of our hires in 2020).
We wanted to hire at least 15 people of color (50% of projected hires). We hired 21 people of color (38% of our hires in 2020).
- We hired 10 Black people: 4 women (40%) and 6 men (60%).
- We hired 6 Hispanic people: 2 women (33%) and 4 men (67%).
- We hired 4 Asian people: 3 women (75%) and 1 man (25%).
- We hired 1 Middle Eastern woman.

I’m incredibly proud of all of those things! But there’s still a lot of work to be done and things to fix here. For example, we paid 12 SuperFriends above our average of $42,418.90. Of those 12: 10 are white, and 10 are men. So, while we’ve done a better job of hiring more women and people of color, having them be on the lower end of our pay scale isn’t enough. In 2021, I want to be able to say our highest paid SuperFriends are women and people of color. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to do that yet, but I’ll be working on that immediately.

SuperFriendly in 2021 #

One of the biggest changes I’m going to work on is around culture. In 2020, SuperFriends spent a lot of time focusing on how to do good work/good projects. That’s nice, but they didn’t focus as much on how to work together better. We spent too much time on the “project” part and not enough time on the “people” part. I think some of that is the default culture of freelancing, which is inherently tied into our model. Unlike an agency where you get hired full-time, freelancers default into the “hired gun” mentality where you come in, do your job with your head down, and fly out. I want SuperFriendly to be about teams. I want it to be a place where freelancers can rely on others but can still exercise the value of being independent that attracted them to freelancing in the first place. We haven’t done a good job of creating the environment for that, so I’ll be actively working on that in 2021.

That’s not across the board though; 2 of our teams did a particularly good job with not just acting like a bunch of freelancers but actually being a team. One of our teams saw their project come to a halt because of COVID, but the bond they created lasted long after their project was over. Another one of our teams was very intentional about developing their own team culture. They created their own team shirts, regularly eat together over Zoom, and build each other up on a daily basis. It’s no surprise that this team’s work is some of the most exciting at SuperFriendly right now.

In short, we didn’t spend enough time on people in 2020. (And partially justified too; for some, “doing a good job” was all they had to offer in 2020, and that’s absolutely enough.) Still though, 2021 will be about SuperFriends. We haven’t done a great job of sharing much lately about our process, our work, our values, and our purpose. A big project for me in 2021 will be to share more about how we do things, recruit even more SuperFriends, and create a culture where taking risks is safe and fun.

Overall, I’m glad 2020 is over and I’m also grateful to have gone through it in a way that could still create great opportunities for SuperFriends.

Bring on 2021.

Design Systems for Email

Dan Mall — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 20:31:49 +0000

Email design, like web design is produced using HTML and CSS. However, with email design, there are different aspects to take into consideration from layout to code to output. But if you’re a web designer, getting into email design doesn’t have to be a cumbersome process. Here are some pointers to get you started down the path of email design and using a design system for it.

Text vs. design

One of the first things you’ll run into in the email world is the debate on sending emails as text vs. designing a template. It shouldn’t be an either or thing. It really depends on what the email is for. Email as text is a design decision in itself and can range from deciding on basic text and link formatting to using a signature. For marketing purposes, you should probably always use an HTML template for emails for control over all nuances.

Email rendering

The next thing you’ll learn is that coding an email is like coding a website 20 years ago, using tables for layout and inline styling. There’s even an Internet Explorer equivalent: Outlook. While you can do some more modern things like make responsive adjustments for mobile devices, there are limitations. This stems from the fact that different email client software have their own way of interpreting security restrictions.

Tools for building emails

Despite the rendering headaches, there are development tools to help with the process:

MJML is a framework where you code using its layout markup that is compiled into compatible email code
Maizzle works with standard HTML and offers post-processing tools for more flexibility
For testing, there’s Email on Acid which will render your template across a number of different email clients

Design canvas

Because of how email software displays emails and how users typically have their windows open, the width of an email should still be kept at around 600–640 pixels. Certain spam filters check for the ratio of images to text so make sure not to overdo the use of images. And images load slower in email clients compared to browsers, so compression is even more important, especially if you want to use animated GIFs. You can do some advanced things like use webfonts and videos, but webfonts are also slow to load, and there’s very limited support for video across the board.

Design approach

Like with web design and design systems, a good practice for designing a template is by thinking modularly. Break apart design patterns like stackable containers and reusable components like buttons and headlines. For more on how to do this with email design, here’s a guide I worked on that will help you dive in to both design and code.

Responsive options

To get responsive for mobile to work, the base design has to be setup for desktop email clients first and use media queries to overwrite any needed styling for mobile sizes. If you run into limitations, you can build a separate mobile version and use media queries to show/hide it as needed. You’ll most likely end up using a combination of both techniques, using show/hide for certain parts of the design.

Maintenance and collaboration

This is where using a design system comes in. Using modular design to produce your template, you’ll find that you can use it for a range of email types. Setting up guidelines and documentation around it will help you and your team produce individual campaigns more efficiently, and effectively.

Evolving your template

A design system will allow others to better understand the design decisions made. By educating on constraints: workflows, habits, and best practices. And with guidelines that answer the why, when, and where. It will also encourage a conversation: “Can we?”, “should we?”, and “what if…” This pushes the discussion forward in the goals of your organization’s emails.

To get an idea of what to include in a design system for your email template and how to share it with your team, here’s another guide to get you going.

A Syllabus for Web Design & Web Development Apprenticeships

Dan Mall — Tue, 26 May 2020 07:10:00 +0000

From 2012–2019, I ran a 9-month apprenticeship at SuperFriendly for people new to design and development that wanted to make their way into the tech industry. I’ve previously written about why apprenticeships are valuable and what format I used; here are the details about how I ran them.

Within that 7-year span, I had almost 20 apprentices. Some finished the apprenticeship; some didn’t. Some got full-time jobs in the discipline they pursued during their apprenticeship. Some took the skills they learned in their apprenticeship and applied them to a tangential industry. Some went freelance or started their own companies. Some went back to doing what they did before the apprenticeship.

As I write this information for the first time, I’m realizing in hindsight how valuable documenting this earlier would have been for me and even moreso for my apprentices. I’m partially writing all of this down as a resource for myself in case I ever bring the apprenticeship back again.

C‘est la vie.

The final 3 months of my apprenticeship focused on preparing the apprentice for a job elsewhere, so, in terms of describing a replicable format, I’ll focus the syllabus specifically on the first 6 months (180 days).

Objective #

To unlock a new way of life for the apprentice through emergently gaining knowledge of web design and/or web development and the accompanying industry.

Prerequisites #

Computer proficiency. As little prior knowledge about design and development is preferred, as most of it would likely have to be untaught. If you can already make a design or development portfolio, you’re over-qualified for this apprenticeship.
Because this apprenticeship focuses on those interested in getting into tech, I host a several-week prelude to the apprenticeship. I ask each prospective apprentice to come to the office for 2–4 hours per day. I assign various reading and watching, from books to online articles to conference talks to YouTube videos. I also encourage them to observe the work that’s currently happening in the office and to take notes on words and acronyms that sound unfamiliar, and we spend time discussing what’s happening and why. If this is going to be a full-time career, I want the apprentice to have the chance to see what that could look like and try to envision themselves in that role. For many apprentices, it will be their first time in a desk job and/or sitting in front of a computer for an extended amount of time.

Required Materials #

Laptop

Attendance Policy #

At the beginning of the apprenticeship, in-person attendance at SuperFriendly HQ 4–5 days a week from 10am–4pm is required. During the second and third units of the apprenticeship, in-person attendance can decrease and independent remote work can increase.

(Because so much of the learning comes from passive observation, reflection, and real-time discussion, I haven’t yet figured out how to make a remote apprenticeship work as well as an in-person one, so to date it has never been an option that I offered.)

Methodology #

Every assignment comes with a conversation covering these kinds of questions:

What was easy?
What was difficult?
What did you learn?

The answers to these questions help shape the individual learning and direction each apprenticeship takes.

Calendar for basic training #

Day 1: How the internet generally works #

Conversation

Web browsers
Internet protocols, IP addresses, and URLs
Clients and servers

Day 2: Introduction to HTML #

Conversation

Tags, attributes, and values
Semantics
XML
The anatomy of a web page

Assignment

Create a résumé and bio in HTML

Day 3: How the tech industry works #

Conversation

Career paths

Day 4: Introduction to CSS #

Conversation

Block and inline elements
Anatomy of CSS rules
Specificity
The box model

Assignment

Style your résumé and bio

Day 5: More CSS #

Conversation

Layout techniques:
- Floats
- Positioning
- Flexbox
- CSS Grid
Responsive design

Assignment

Find a layout in a magazine and replicate it with CSS

Day 6–7: Introduction to design and design tools #

Conversation

What is “design?”
What’s the difference between “art“ and “design?”
Tool rundown in design tools of choice (Sketch, Photoshop, Figma, etc.)

Assignment

Choose a website on siteInspire and replicate it in your design tool of choice pixel-for-pixel

Day 8: Redesign #

Conversation

What makes a digital product “better?”

Assignment

Redesign your copied site to make it better

Days 10–15: Copy and redesign #

Assignment

Same as previous assignment with more complex original sources each time

Days 16–23: JavaScript #

Conversation

Client-side vs. server-side applications
Basic programming concepts
- Variables
- Conditionals

Assignment

Build a rock-paper-scissors game

Days 24–30: DOM Scripting #

Conversation

Progressive enhancement vs. graceful degradation
DOM traversal and manipulation
document.querySelector

Assignment

Build a progressively-enhanced dropdown menu or modal

Days 1–30 #

The first month is basic training: dipping toes into the foundational skills in being a web professional. Whether intending to concentrate on design or development, every apprentice starts with an introduction to both design and code as understanding both of these things are crucial to being a competent web professional. This first month is intended to provide exposure, not necessarily build proficiency.

Days 31–90 #

After the first month, an apprentice is encouraged to choose an area of focus between design and development. Learning much more follows the interests of the apprentice, so there’s less of a stated curriculum available as it shifts to being more self-directed. Learning includes topics that broadly address professionalism, such as:

Scoping work
Pricing
Writing proposals and pitches
Project management methodologies

Design concentration #

For those more interested in design, we do more copying and remixing assignments. The assignments progressively increase in complexity and intend to increase fluency with design tools and design solutions. The design apprentice should grow more confident solving challenges like drawing more attention to a particular piece of content, knowing if a design is accomplishing its job, shifting the mood of any particular design, and more.

Typical topics covered within this time period may include the following as they’re of interest to the apprentice:

Typography
Art history movements
Illustration
Branding
Image formats & optimization
2D & 3D Animation
3D modeling
Motion graphics

Development concentration #

For those more interested in development, each assignment intends for the apprentice to build more and better than they could before.

If the first assignment is to build 1 unstyled web page, the final assignment before moving on to real project work may be to build a fully-functioning, multi-page website with both client-side and server-side logic. Every assignment between builds up to that point, and the path taken for each assignment is to both reinforce good skills as well as address weaknesses that could use more practice from the previous assignments.

Typical topics covered within this time period may include the following as they’re of interest to the apprentice:

CSS animation
Content management systems
Package management
Image formats & optimization
Performance
APIs

Day 90 #

Every 90 days, each apprentice does an evaluation. We go through a review sheet as a way to calibrate how closely their plan of study matches against what they want to as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Days 91–180 #

After the first 3 months, a pre-defined syllabus is almost impossible to use. Apprentices are usually ready to join real projects with larger teams, and lessons learned are a direct result of the specific projects available and greatly vary from apprentice to apprentice. Because of this inevitable variation, it’s important that both the mentor and apprentice be continually focused on the specific skills the apprentice wants to advance. Some apprentices enter with stronger back-end skills than front-end skills or a stronger ability to execute user interface designs rather than present well in a meeting. That’s an advantage of the apprenticeship model of learning rather than following a more structured learning plan like a online course or university major, so the apprenticeship style should be utilized to its advantage.

All assignments tend to give the apprentice some sphere of ownership, although that ownership is very limited in earlier days and much more broader as they approach the end of their apprentice. For example, an apprentice who is new to real project work may only be in charge of the footer’s design or code, while an apprentice at the end of their apprenticeship may be in charge of designing or developing a whole section of a site or app or even the entire thing.

Day 180 #

If paced well—which is the responsibility of both the mentor and the apprentice—the end of this 180-day period should give the apprentice at least 3 examples (read: portfolio pieces) that show the broadest scope of what that apprentice can confidently handle on a project.

Hopefully this gives you a good sense of what went into the first 6 months of the SuperFriendly apprenticeship. If you’re considering starting one of your own, or even if you have an existing one, you’re more than welcome to take any parts of what I’ve done here and integrate or remix it into your curriculum. But if you do, please share that publicly too!

A CEO’s COVID-19 Calendar

Dan Mall — Thu, 14 May 2020 19:47:00 +0000

Why update? A few things have changed since I made that original schedule:

I’ve really embraced being SuperFriendly’s CEO lately, as opposed to being a practitioner that’s the de facto CEO of a sole proprietorship. That means my focus has changed from trying to create great work myself to creating an ideal environment for others to do great work. As I transition from being primarily a maker to being primarily a manager, I no longer have to protect certain time in the same way.
Related to the previous point, I haven’t been working actively on any SuperFriendly project myself in about 6 months (with a few small exceptions from time to time). I hinted at this at the end of 2019 in my thoughts about what was in store for SuperFriendly in 2020 and in my personal 2019 year in review, but I think my season of being a creative director, designer, and developer for clients is officially over. I’ll still be practicing my design and development skills to keep them somewhat sharp, but that’ll mostly be on internal and personal projects. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to client work, but I’m currently much more interested and energized by the design challenges that growing a business and growing teams bring. My calendar should reflect that shift in priorities.
In an attempt to have an intentional balance of both isolated work and meetings times, I previously time blocked time for both each day: 2 hours for meetings, 3 ½ hours for isolated work. But it was too easy to those 3 ½ work hours to turn into 2 or 1 because a meeting would run long, I’d be distracted by something else, or it was just hard to task switch fast enough.
A global pandemic happened (and is still happening). My kids are home all day. The type of work that SuperFriendly is doing has changed, our approach to work as changed, and our pace of work changed.

Here’s what my new schedule looks like.

Some details:

With the exception of an hour or so of mission work when I wake up, I spend the morning with my kids, getting them ready for the day and doing their school Zoom calls and schoolwork. This also gives my wife the first half of the day to have her own flow time.
Rather than trying to make time for both isolated work and meetings every day, I’ve consolidated and limited meetings to Tuesdays and Fridays and given myself Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays for isolated work. Moving from hourly blocking to daily blocking gives me more focused time for each type of task. It’s also easier to remember that “Tuesday is meeting day” rather than “1:30–2:30 is meeting time.”
- Across Tuesdays and Fridays, I’ve given myself up to 10 meetings slots of 50 minutes each. This means I can spend time with up to 10 SuperFriends weekly in 1-on-1s, which my weeknotes show me is increasingly more of a priority for me. I’m hoping to keep the limit of the people I directly manage in the 6–8 range that former Intel CEO Andy Grove suggested in his legendary book, High Output Management.
- Even though I don’t need flow time to design and develop things for clients, I still highly value protecting this time. Since I’ve switched to this kind of schedule, I’ve used this flow time for creating new products and services ideas for SuperFriendly, writing, reading, giving myself space for some thinking, and more.
Exercise time has completely disappeared. With COVID-19, my regular 1–2 times a week of basketball is non-existent, which was the majority of my exercise. I don’t know where to put that yet, though I suspect it may be something I do some mornings with the kids.

My previous system worked really well for me until it didn’t. So far, I’m liking this system a lot. Even if things go “back to normal” and the kids go back to school in the fall, I may still keep this schedule, or something similar to it. I’ve found very little difference in productivity in currently working 25–30 hours per week as opposed to my previous 35–45 hours per week. In fact, I may be more productive now—and happier with what I’m doing too.

Useful Sections for a Design System Reference Site

Dan Mall — Fri, 08 May 2020 10:51:15 +0000

There’s a high probability, that your first encounter with any particular design system happens through its public reference site. For example, if you wanted to learn more about Google’s Material Design system, you’d be browsing the content at https://material.io/. Or if you wanted to learn more about Shopify’s Polaris Design System, you’d be browsing the content at https://polaris.shopify.com/.

Also called a “documentation site” or “styleguide site,” we define a reference site to be “a visible manifestation of a design system, typically a URL that displays both the full component library and a set of guidelines.” The first homework assignment in our Design Systems 101 class is to build a few pages with an existing design system, and part of the point of the assignment is to emphasize how important a reference site for design system users. It’s a non-starter for your design system if you can’t even figure out how to download or import the dang thing.

Across our work with many teams creating design systems, we’ve collected a few best practices and recommendations for what sections and content users expect to find in a reference site, and where. While your terminology, syntax, and order may vary, these types of sections represent many of the things design system users need and want from a reference site. If you’re creating a reference site, consider this a starting point for your site’s information architecture.

Home: What’s the high-level value proposition for using this design system above others? Where can people find the most useful information? What’s the latest that’s been happening around this design system?
Get Started: How does one get rolling? Make download links and installation instructions extra apparent.
Guidelines: What should users know about how to make the best use of this design system?
- Accessibility: How does this design system ensure the widest range of usage for created products? What level of adherence to WCAG guidelines are recommended?
- Brand: What’s the appropriate balance of organizational, design system, and product brands?
- CSS: What methodology does this design system follow? BEM? OOCSS? Is there a global namespace or prefixes that should be used?
- Color: What’s the philosophy around using color in this design system?
- Data Display: What’s the best way to show data in any given context? Where to use a table vs. a list? Where are charts and graphs applicable? Static images vs. interactive data that can be manipulated?
- Date, Time, and Unit Formats: How does this design system suggest writing dates and times? What should be abbreviated? Metric system?
- Error Handling: What are this design system’s best practices around working with clean and complete data? What are the recommendations around reducing errors in data entry? What’s the appropriate balance of client-side and server-side validation? Is error handling real-time or only after attempted submissions?
- Forms or Data Entry: What are this design system’s best practices for creating forms? Should labels be left-aligned or top-aligned? Should tooltips or helper text be used?
- Grid System or Layout: How does one lay out a page with this design system? Is there a 12-column grid? Is there an 8-point grid?
- HTML: What are this design system’s best practices for writing HTML? How should text be indented? Wha’s the etiquette for comments?
- Icons: Where do icons live? How can they be used and referenced? Should they all be a certain size?
- Illustration: What’s the role of illustration in this design system? Should it be used sparingly? Liberally? Where? And where not?
- JavaScript: Does this design system use ES6? Does this design system’s JavaScript writing prefer an object-oriented, functional, or procedural approach?
- Localization & Internationalization: How can this design system’s elements adapt to different locales to signal the most appropriate culture fit? How flexible are the guidelines and elements to work with different languages and cultural norms?
- Mission or Principles or Values: What are the underlying philosophies of this design system? Why does it exist? What makes it distinct?
- Navigation: Should most products use vertical navigation or horizontal navigation? Why or why not? Is there a recommended minimum or maximum number of items in any given navigation? What’s the recommendation for local navigation?
- Performance: How important is performance in this design system? What elements exist to help users experience the lowest-friction interfaces?
- Process & Workflow: How do designers, developers, and product owners best use this design system? Separately? Together?
- Sound or Audio: What is this design system’s approach to working with sound? How should sound communicate appropriate personality and feedback?
- Spacing: Creating space in an interface can be done in so many different ways; how does this design system recommend doing that?
- Typography: What typefaces are allowed? How should they be used?
- Writing or Tone or Voice: Sentence case? Humor? Brevity vs. verbosity?
Components: The bread and butter of all design systems. What are all the components that can be used, and how?
- Accordion
- Breadcrumb
- Card
- etc.
Examples or Case Studies: An incredibly important section than often gets overlooked, showing examples of completed pages or products using the design system is one of the most helpful guides for design system users. It should also be one of the most exciting and inspiring sections of the reference site!
Support or Help: What resources are available to design system users when they’re stuck? Is there a helpdesk? A Slack channel? An email address?
Blog or News: What are the latest happenings with this design system? What’s being explored?
About: Who was responsible for creating this great system and reference site? Flex a little!
Release History or Changelog: Make it easy for current and potential contributors to see what has changed between each release. Frequent activity here also signals to users that the system is current, and they won’t likely be left high and dry.
Search: As a last resort.

Making Design Systems Public

Dan Mall — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 20:21:32 +0000

Designers and developers often look for ways to make their work easier without sacrificing quality. After all, a design system is an attractive idea partially because its reusability makes design and development easier in a fraction of the time.

Unencumbered access to the documentation needed to use a design system plays a big part in how much that system is used. If the system is difficult to use or a practitioner can’t figure out how to use it, they’re often content to find another resource that’s easier for them, which is likely a big part of why many folks look to Bootstrap or Material Design over creating their own design system or even using the one they already have.

This begs the question: should all design systems be public?

What is a public design system?

The phrase “public design system” seems to be shorthand to mean “a design system that has a publicly accessible reference site.” The Lightning Design System is a public design system because you can see its reference site at https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/. Shopify’s Polaris is a public design system because you can see its reference site at https://polaris.shopify.com/. SuperFriendly’s Hall of Justice is a public design system because you can see its reference site at https://superfriendlydesign.systems/hall-of-justice/.

Why make a design system public?

As design systems consultant Nathan Curtis puts it, “A design system’s value is realized when products ship features using parts from the system.” That’s why we focus so much on the piloting aspect of design systems: to focus on the products and process a design system can enable, not seeing creation of the system itself as the goal. If a design system exists but no one knows about it, how much value can you actually realize from it?

Front-end designer Brad Frost is explicit about this in his book Atomic Design. His subsection about making a design system public is part of a larger section called “Make it visible,” within a chapter entitled, “Maintaining Design Systems.” And rightly so! Making a design sytem public is a crucial part of understanding how to keep it managed and maintained. Brad explains that making a design system public:

Increases its visibility, which therefore increases the likelihood of use
Creates accountability by demonstrating a commitment to a product dedicated to consistency and reusability
Helps recruiting by publicly signaling values that attract like-minded individuals to join the organization

The value of a public design system is apparent, but that’s not to say that it’s easy to pull off. Or is it?

How to make a design system public

In theory, there’s not much to making a design system public. After all, if there’s one core skill a web designer or web developer should have, it’s taking some HTML files and putting them on a server that has an associated URL. (FTP, anyone? Perhaps this section should have been titled, “How to keep a design system public.”)

So what prevents a design system from being public? In short: business. If you work at an organization with enough sprawl to warrant a design system, chances are high that there’s an IT process for getting any site deployed. That process likely includes authentication of some form, and launching something publicly is one of the most risk-loaded actions you can undertake, so it has the most amount of rigor attached to it. We’ve seen this process take months or even be blocked all together. All of that can be a deterrent to even attempting to have a public design system.

In an interview about public vs. private design systems, LinkedIn senior UX Lead Nate Whitson makes it plain: “It’s non-trivial to be able to share all of your documentation publicly.” Nate expounds on that statement to say that sharing information outside a company means you have to additional context for the uninitiated, which amounts to extra overhead what you might write, design, and document.

But “public” isn’t an all-or-nothing kind of decision. The accepted definition of a “public design system” tends to refer to a design system with both a public reference site and an open-source code library. But in her chapter for the Design Systems Handbook, Diana Mounter describes the different degrees of how a design system can be public:

Public documentation only. The reference site is accessible to all but the code itself is hidden away.
Open-source code library. Not only is the code public, but people are free to request features and contribute back (with acceptance of contributions at the maintainers’ discretion).
Open-source documentation. People can modify and contribute only to the documentation, not the design system code itself.
Downloadable. Typically in the form of a zip file. This can allow for a downloadable version of the design system that’s different from the code that maintainers actually work with.
Publish the component library. You could publish a read-only version of your component library—Storybook, Pattern Lab, Fractal, etc.—to a URL that all can see.

In his article, “Design Systems are About Relationships,” software engineer Ryan DeBeasi shares how he’s split the difference in the past. “We didn’t have permission to make our design system public, so we did the next best thing: we treated it like a small open-source project within the organization,” which reinforces the idea that making a design system public has many different flavors.

If there’s one thing you take away from this section, it’s that easy access to even some part of your design system is likely better than none.

Should your design system public?

Yes, you should have a public design system. (What do you mean, “Why?” Because of all the reasons you just read about above! Get your head in the game!)

In all seriousness, there’s a lot of value for design system creators and consumers as well as the organization for a design system to be public. And remember: there isn’t just one version of “public.” Open access to something is better than nothing. Be kind to yourself and your team members. Give yourselves room and permission to not have fully public design system, or even a fully public design system yet. Unlock certain pieces over time, as you can. This is all a journey, so as long as you’re all marching together, you’re headed in the right direction.

Better Webcam Video

Dan Mall — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 12:55:00 +0000

I wrote a more up-to-date version of this article: Improve Your Webcam Quality

In running a completely distributed agency, I spend a signficant portion of my day on video calls. Like, most days, the majority of my day. So, if my colleagues and I have to spend a lot of time looking at my mug, I might as well try to make that a more pleasant experience for everyone involved.

The initial inspiration for this goes to Aaron Shekey. I saw a tweet of his that talked about switching from a built-in webcam to a proper camera, and I was immediately off to research how to do this. Luckily, he wrote a post about his setup, and I’m doing most of the things he is, with a few minor modifications. Thanks for all of this, Aaron!

Here’s my desk setup and all the equipment I use:

I use an Olympus mirrorless camera for my webcam with a pancake lens that has a pretty wide aperture (f/1.7) so I can get some pretty shallow depth of field.

The camera is pretty light—which is part of the reason I got this particular camera in the first place—but it’s not light enough to sit on top of a monitor like a typical external webcam. So, I use a tabletop tripod to hold it steady, which also has the added benefit of being able to position it at the exact height as well as place on my desk that I want. Since it’s next to my laptop where I typically leave my video call screen (usually Zoom but occasionally Google Hangouts), it appears to people on the call that I’m looking slightly offscreen. I could look directly into the camera, but then I wouldn’t be able to see the people I’m talking to, which is what I prefer. I may tweak this setup in the future to see if I can achieve both simultaneously.

The Elgato Cam Link with HDMI to Micro HDMI cable is what makes all of this possible. (If you’re using a different camera, be aware that you might need a HDMI to Mini HDMI cable instead of a HDMI to Micro HDMI cable.) Once it’s set it, you can switch to this camera as a video input just like you would any other webcam (built into a monitor or external).

I typically get about 1½ – 2 hours of straight video time, which is pretty decent. But, since I’m on video calls a lot, I always have 2 spare batteries charging for a quick swap in case a battery dies in the middle of a call.

My studio typically gets a lot of light, so I’m rarely in need of additional lighting to make this setup work. However, for the rare evening video calls, I’ll switch on a Lume Cube mounted behind my external monitor, which does just the trick.

I leave my camera on manual focus. That means when I first join calls, I have to manually adjust the focus ring on my lens to make sure my eyes are sharply focused. (This is why I always keep “Always show video preview dialog when joining a video meeting” enabled by default. Letting people see themselves before you see them is just common courtesy.) I tried using autofocus for a while, but the camera didn’t always get the focus right, and I spent a disproportionate amount of time on calls trying to reset the focus, distracting me from the what I actually wanted to focus on: the conversation.

Here’s a comparison between the images that come out of each screen (each screenshot taken from the same Zoom window seconds apart from each other in the same lighting conditions for the most accurate representation):

From my MacBook Pro built-in FaceTime camera:

From my LG 27" UltraFine 5k monitor built-in camera:

From my Olympus camera:

And just for kicks while I was at it, I made a silly in-situ image that displays when my video is turned off:

Is all of this worth it? I think so! While some of this is certainly ego and vanity, it’s also a form of self-care for me. I think the better I think I look, the more confident I feel. And when I feel good, I act good. Without a doubt, that’s worth a couple hundred bucks and a few hours of setup.

2019 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 18:51:00 +0000

I really enjoyed writing last year’s in review as it was a good way to assess the year and look forward to the next one. Naturally, here’s one for 2019!

A decade in review #

As we ring in the new year and new decade, it seems like a good time to for me to look back at the last year and decade and take inventory.

In 2009, Em and I left Philly where she had lived for over a decade and I had lived for most almost two decades to try on New York as one of our first big adventures as a married couple.

I left a dream job at Happy Cog, turned down a dream offer from Facebook, a took another dream job at Big Spaceship. (And yes, I know how privileged I am to have any one of those things, much less all three. I don’t take any of it for granted. I have nothing but extreme gratitude in my heart for all of those opportunities and do my best to pass it on and provide the same opportunities for as many others as possible.)

On this day in 2009, I awoke to 7 missed calls from my Mom, saying my Grandma passed away peacefully in her sleep. I miss her terribly every day, but the hundreds of memories I have of her make me smile every time I think of her.

In the decade since, we’ve moved back to Philly with renewed fervor for the city, quit my band, created two spectacular daughters, started an agency, started (and left) a podcast, wrote a book, started (and left) a SaaS product, ate some delicious food, and traveled around the world.

I live an incredibly blessed life, and I guard it relentlessly.

Here’s what’s happened in the last year.

Eleven #

Em and I celebrated our 11th anniversary in 2019! We were going to throw a big bash called the Mall Ball—get it?—but then we realized that it would really stress out these two introverts to plan and throw a giant party and that we’d much rather travel together. So we spent a long weekend in Cuba instead!

Kids & family #

Overall, our family had lots of fun adventures together in 2019. Sidda and Charlie are now 8 years old and 6 years old respectively. There’s lots of interesting things to share about them, but I’m also increasingly more inclined to keep their personal details private. Suffice it to say that the older they get, the more I’m enjoying being their dad. And the more the four of us grow together,the deeper and more interesting and exciting our family relationship gets. It’s easy at times and difficult at times, and I’m lucky to be a part of all of it.

Max #

We got a dog! This is our second try with dogs: we had to give our Rottweiler puppy to a friend after not even a week as we discovered our family was allergic. We also had cats this time last year, but same deal: allergies meant we had to give them away. We tried fish too, but they died.

But Max is a Yorkshire Terrier, which apparently is a hypoallergenic breed since they have hair (not fur) and don’t shed. We’ve had him for a little over a month now without any major issue, so it seems like he’s a keeper.

As someone who didn’t have pets growing up and is kinda afraid of dogs, it’s definitely an adjustment. Since I shut down my apprenticeship last year, my office is usually pretty quiet and lonely now, but Max is a great office buddy. He gives me lots of reasons to step away from work every so often to play. I do wish I could entertain him more than I do. He mostly sleeps all day, but for a puppy, I’d imagine he’d like to be more active.

Health, wellness, and self-care #

I’ve been drinking a lot more water this year, thanks to always having my HydroFlask or Coca-Cola tumblers filled with ice water nearby. I thought this would help me drink less soda, but alas, I’m still as addicted to cola as ever. (IT’S SO DELICIOUS.)

I’m happy to report that I’m still playing basketball regularly, an average of once every two weeks. An ankle sprain about 2 months ago has put me out of commission recently, but I’m slowly getting back into athletic activity again.

One thing I’m really happy about is that I’m eating at home more now. I really enjoy cooking, but very rarely do I block out the time to do it. So, I end up defaulting to fast food a lot. Over the last 6 months, however, subscriptions to meal services Tovala and CookUnity have got me eating quick and delicious meals, and I’m also saving a little money every month too.

I finally got laser eye surgery this year. TL;DR: if you can deal with a first few hours of inconvenience, it’s awesome. Almost one year later, I’m really loving the little things, like forgetting to bring contact solution on a trip or worrying about a contact lens getting bumped out while playing sports.

I wanted to get my second tattoo this year, but it didn’t happen. But! It’s definitely happening in 2020. I have the appointment already booked, and bonus: my brother and I are gonna get the same one together.

I started therapy again this year after about a year-long break. It’s been helpful at times, but I think I need to be clearer with myself (and my therapist) about what I want out of it.

Books #

This year, I read:

Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, by Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn
Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin
Storm Front, by Jim Butcher (abandoned)
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern (abandoned)
The Coaching Habit, by Michael Bungay Stanier
Superman: Dawnbreaker, by Matt de la Peña
The Case for a Creator, by Lee Strobel (abandoned)
The Kingdom, by Emmanuel Carrère & John Lambert (abandoned)
How Will You Measure Your Life, by Clayton M. Christensen
We are Legion (We are Bob), by Dennis E. Taylor
The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle
The Power, by Naomi Alderman (abandoned)
Never Split the Difference, by Chris Voss
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne (abandoned)
The House of X and Powers of X series by Jonathan Hickman
Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman (abandoned)
Stan Lee’s Alliances: A Trick of Light, by Stan Lee & Kat Rosenfield (abandoned)
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking (abandoned)
What You Do Is Who You Are, by Ben Horowitz (abandoned)
How to Be Less Stupid About Race, by Crystal Marie Fleming
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James (abandoned)
Make Time, by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Lost and Founder, by Rand Fishkin
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (abandoned)
Run Studio Run, by Eli Altman
Company of One, by Paul Jarvis
Expressive Design Systems, by Yesenia Perez-Cruz
Laying the Foundations, by Andrew Couldwell
The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber
Where Good Ideas Come Free, by Steven Johnson (currently reading)
The Circle, by Dave Eggers (currently reading)

That’s almost triple the amount from last year. I’m not sure if that matters, though it might be a sign that I’ve actually given myself some extra space that I was looking for last year to grow and learn.

I gave myself a lot more permission to not finish books this year. I think this comes from a combination of 2 things:

In I Buy More Books Than I Read, Shawn Blanc says, “All I care about is getting one good idea or story from that book. If I get that, then it’s worth it to me… A life- and business-changing idea for $10 or less? Sold.”
Audible has a very generous return policy: “If you’re unhappy with your book, you can return or exchange it easily as long as it’s within 365 days of the original purchase. Our exchange policy is risk-free. It allows active members to take a chance on a new narrator or story without losing a credit. Our ability to continue to offer this benefit is dependent on our members using it for this purpose only.” Because of this generosity, I return audiobooks liberally while being conscious about whether or not I’m abusing this policy, but I also purchase audiobooks liberally too. This kind of policy feels like it’s coming from a company that respects its customers, and I’m happy to reward that kind of company with my business.

Travel #

This year, for both work and personal reasons, I got to visit:

Chicago, IL
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
Breckenridge, CO (first time)
Los Angeles, CA
Havana, Cuba (first time)
Boston, MA
Scotland (first time)
San Jose, CA
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (first time)
San Francisco, CA
New York, NY
Orlando, FL

All of my international trips this year were the first times in each of those locations, and were all leisure trips with Em and friends. I had already previously been to every U.S. city I visited this year (except Breckenridge). There are a lot of places in the U.S. I haven’t been, and I feel myself getting the itch for an road trip around the country. Perhaps that’s in the cards for the next few years.

Videos & photos #

In last year’s review, I mentioned that I had “caught the video bug” and that I’d be posting a lot more videos this year.

Nope.

I did shoot a lot more video this year, but I didn’t really post many because, well, they suck. I’ve been shooting a lot more videos with my DSLR, mirrorless, and GoPro, but I don’t like any of them. And geez, editing takes so long. I’m not sure that I’m willing to put the time in to get good at this. I’m not completely writing it off, but I’m also not exactly enthusiastic about it. I do have a few ideas for online courses I’d like to make, so perhaps that’ll be the motivation that gets me over the hump.

On the other hand, I did have a lot of renewed interest in photography this year. I think the change started last year when I attended the f/8 Photography Workshop in the Faroe Islands. The weather conditions and subjects made it ideal for taking great photos, and I learned so much from the great instructors about both editing and shooting.

This year, I took two online courses that I found through Instagram (I’m such a sucker for Instagram ads):

Photography for Beginners, by Josh Dunlop at Expert Photography. I learned to shoot in a high school photography class on a manual camera that was either my mom’s or came from a flea market, which gave me a decent enough understanding of the mechanics of shooting. But I never really practiced enough to get really good at it. Even though a lot of this course was review for me, it covered all of the gaps of things I missed in the transition from using a manual camera to a digital one over the last 20 years.
Photography Academy, by Tim Shields. I really love Tim’s simple approach to teaching photography. He explains things slowly and thoroughly without coming off patronizing or like he’s dumbing it down. He suggests that there are only two things important about photography: getting sharp images and getting proper exposure. His courses are about many different but still simple ways to achieve those two goals.

In my shooting even while taking these courses, my images improved dramatically. As a designer, I’m pretty experienced at taking even the worst images and making them look good. I realized that the photos I was taking weren’t good; I was just good and making them look good afterwards. But with the tips I picked up over the last two years, the images coming out of my camera start at a much higher level, so I’m working with significantly better source imagery, which is candy for a designer.

Unlike my video work, I’m able to create photos that I really like, which incentives me to shoot and post more. I created a little site where I’ll be posting my photos, and you can also follow me on my public Instagram account @danmallphotos dedicated to my photography journey. I’m excited about doing a one-day workshop in the Canadian Rockies with Jeff Bartlett in a few weeks and am determined to take a few more trips like this throughout the year to practice photography even more.

Sole man #

I added a few sneakers to the collection in 2019:

Nike Acronym x Air Presto Mid “Multicolor”
Air Jordan 1 High FlyEase “Black Toe”
Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “All Star — Chameleon”
Air Jordan 1 Mid SE GS “Newspaper”
Nike SB Dunk High Pro (Parachute Beige/Ale Brown/Black)
Air Jordan 1 Mid S (Black/Yellow)
Nike Adapt BB Basketball Shoe (Black/White/Pure Platinum)
Nike SF Air Force 1 Shoe (Muslin/University Red/Light Concord/Muslin)
Nike SF Air Force 1 Boot (Dusty Peach/Dusty Peach)
Nike SB Dunk High Pro (Black/Iguana/Baroque Brown/White)

Speaking #

I did 18 speaking-ish/teaching-ish things in 2019, including:

An Event Apart in Seattle, Boston, and Denver
Owner Summit, Epicurrence, Artifact Conference, Dribbble Hang Time, Asbury Agile, Smashing Conference
I finally got to do some local events this year for organizations like Bluecadet and PhillyCHI
I did a few AMA sessions for Designer News and the Design Systems Slack Community
Brad Frost and I taught our designer + developer collaboration workshop in Philly, Austin, and NYC
I appeared in podcasts and videos with and for Awwwards about tech, Design Driven about the product design process, Ditching Hourly about value pricing 7-figure design projects, and Level Access about the intersection between design systems and accessibility.

In 2020, I’ll be at a few An Event Apart shows, the Awwwards conference in Toronto, and Creative South, talking and teaching about collaboration and design systems. If you’re at any one of these events, please come say hello!

Work #

2019 was a big year for me in regards to SuperFriendly. We worked on so many cool things, including:

An enterprise design system for a major airline
Khan Academy’s 2018 annual report
A site for the return of Artifact Conference
Branding for The Healthy, Reader’s Digest’s foray into health
On the Line, an online resource from Toast to help restaurant owners
A few other others that we can’t talk about or are still cooking

I made a lot of changes regarding the work I should be doing (and not doing) and roles that I should be playing (and not playing). I wrote a bit about that elsewhere and will no doubt be sharing more in the near future as it unfolds. 2020 will be major for SuperFriendly.

Miscellany #

My mom retired in 2019 after 43 years of being a nurse. Happy retirement, Mom!
I was “randomly” selected for screening at airports 5 times in 2019.
I wrote 14 blog posts in 2019. That’s up from 11 in 2018, 5 in 2017, 12 in 2016, and 11 in 2015.
I’ve collected loyalty and credit card points for years. In 2019, I started spending them, because I realized that I probably never would.

2020 #

Part of what I love about writing a year in review is that there are things I don’t realize until I look at them in aggregate. From writing this, I can see that I read more, wrote more, and learned more this year than I have in previous years. I’m really excited about that because one of my goals for 2019 was to create some space for myself. I didn’t know until writing this sentence, but mission accomplished.

This year was a recharging year for me. I’m ready to see what that does for me in 2020.

It’s been a heck of a year and a heck of a decade. Best wishes to you and yours, and here’s to an amazing 2020!

SuperFriendly in 2020

Dan Mall — Sat, 28 Dec 2019 14:50:00 +0000

I believe that 2020 will be a big year for SuperFriendly.

Midway through 2019, we officially and publicly repositioned the company to focus solely on design systems. An overwhelming majority of the work we were doing over the last few years was design systems work anyway, so we decided to be upfront about this focus in hopes that the narrower positioning would bring some advantages.

And boy, it did. The end of 2019 bore plenty of fruits of that labor. We’ve seen a 1,000% increase in the amout of leads in our pipeline compared to what we had at this time last year.

In order to figure out how to set up well for a great 2020, I found it useful to look back at how SuperFriendly has done thus far. (I shared a more detailed version of this with the team and thought it could be helpful to share some of this publicly in case it helps any other agency owner out there.)

Time spent #

At the end of 2012, I shared some data about how I spent my time in year one as an owner of a new agency that was still primarily responsible for the majority of production work. Nowadays, at the close of year seven, I’m much less involved. Here’s a comparison of how 2019 compared to 2012.

The percentages don’t add up to 100%, mostly because I only wanted to show the most significant changes between 2012 and 2019.

2012 vs. 2019
	Total Hours Worked	Average Hours per Week
2012	2,430	47
2019	2,040	39

Hours Spent per Task in 2012
Task	Hours	Percentage
Design	819	34%
Admin	700	29%
Front-End Development	352	14%
Business Development	276	11%
Speaking/Conferences	96	4%
Vacation	64	3%

Hours Spent per Task in 2019
Task	Hours	Percentage
Creative Direction	587	30%
Business Development	283	14%
Design	237	12%
Speaking/Conferences	222	11%
Vacation	224	11%
Admin	110	6%
Front-End Development	70	3%

A few takeaways here for me:

Though I’m still involved in project work a bit, my project time tends to be spent significantly more on direction than actual design and coding work. That said, we’ve made some pretty major changes that will now further remove me from both direction and production work in 2020, so I’ll be really curious to see how this graph changes over the next year.
I’ve been a fan of Cameron Moll’s Minimum Vacation Policy since he wrote about it, and I’ve been trying to put it into effect more and more each year. My general premise was to pick 2 days at the beginning of each month that I was going to take off, not to do anything specific but really just to give myself a break and time to recharge. That didn’t really go as planned, as I instead took longer breaks in big chunks, but I’m still pleased to see that I averaged 28 days of vacation in 2019 which computes to a little more than 2 days per month.

Profit #

Our profit has really fluctuated over the years and is generally trending downwards. A major focus for 2020 is to at least level this out, if not trend upwards. A profit of 58% would do the trick, but it’s a touch too ambitious to be realistic. We’re shooting for 50%.

SuperFriendly Profit
Year	Profit %
2012	29%
2013	22%
2014	36%
2015	9%
2016	36%
2017	24%
2018	-18%
2019	28%

Purpose-driven goals #

As I reflect on and continue to refine SuperFriendly’s purpose, I’ve realized that a grand opportunity is to create better opportunities for creative people to flourish. Against that criteria, I think it’s important to continually evaluate how many opportunities we’re creating, for whom, and how good those opportunities are. A quick rundown:

In 2019, we worked with 23 different SuperFriends.
We paid those 23 SuperFriends a total of $325,000 (an average of just over $14,000 each).
Of the 23 SuperFriends, 8 are women and 15 are men.
Of the 23 SuperFriends, 6 are people of color and 17 are white.

Choosing a growth rate of around 20% 2, I’ve set these goals for 2020:

In general, I tend to use 20% as standard benchmark, because I learned from Tim Kadlec’s Fast Enough that a 20% difference is when a change is noticeable.

Work with 30 different SuperFriends.
Pay all SuperFriends a total of $500,000 (an average of just under $17,000 each).
Of the 30 SuperFriends, let’s work with at least 15 women.
Of the 30 SuperFriends, let’s work with at least 15 people of color.

(Dividing each of those things by four gives us our 2020 Q1 OKRs.)

Honestly, those feel like really easy metrics to hit. I’m hopeful that we’ll reach those numbers much earlier than the end of the year and be able to set our sights on more ambitious things.

More on Bootstrap for Your Design System

Dan Mall — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 20:17:03 +0000

As much as I agree with the succinct nature of the previous article, I’m not convinced that a big decision such as this can be summarized with such few points. Let me share some thoughts…

First off, I think Bootstrap has gotten a lot better at lending itself to custom branding over the years. There was a point in time when Bootstrap was riddled with CSS gradients and overriding them was a major pain in the ass; not to mention, your dev tools would resemble some sort of infinite scrolling hell. While Dan chose to illustrate updating the CSS markup in his example, you could also achieve similar results by just changing the variables inside of your Bootstrap _variables.scss file.

$card-cap-bg: rgba($black, 0.03) !default;
$card-cap-color: null !default;
$card-color: null !default;
$card-bg: $white !default;

Perhaps this suggestion wasn’t surfaced because of the decision to switch to a BEM code convention. While I agree that code conventions are a very good reason for choosing to roll your own Design System, I think the bigger underlying motivation is familiarity, which in a large part can be driven by ego. Let’s face it: as engineers and designers, the majority of us all want to build something that is our own and when you build something that is your own, you're not only motivated and proud but you also know the ins-and-outs of the system. From a management perspective, there's a big employee satisfaction aspect to rolling your own system. This is one of the big reasons why I think people don't like inheriting somebody else's system.

Additionally, at some point you are probably going to rely on a third party component that doesn't follow the same naming conventions as your own system. And let it be known: enforcing naming conventions such as BEM is not easy. The majority of front-end developers are not deeply invested in Design Systems such as this community. Another thing to consider is the simplicity of the Card example. Once you add in JavaScript and start talking about certain edge cases and supporting different browsers, the cost to benefit ratio of rolling your own components drastically changes.

Lee, stop playing devil’s advocate and get to the point…

The reason I chose to chime in is not because I disagree with points Dan made. I’m just not convinced that a decision such as this can be summed up in such few words. Here is a list of other aspects that might come into play when choosing how to get started:

Does your team have the required skills (Engineering, Design QA, product management, design system evangelists, etc)?
What are the consequences if somebody leaves the company?
Is design/UI a value proposition for your company?
Is your design system a recruiting tactic?
Do you have budget to hire resources?
Is there room in the roadmap to actually commit to a design system?
Are you using any unique technologies that require you to roll your own system?
Are you reinventing the wheel or truly doing something different?

Should You Use Bootstrap or Material Design for Your Design System?

Dan Mall — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 12:54:40 +0000

Bootstrap and Material Design are incredibly thorough systems, so it stands to reason that many of our clients ask whether or not it’s worth the effort to create a design system from scratch as opposed to using an already mature platform.

Here’s the answer we typically give:

Start with Bootstrap or Material Design if:
- You need to get up and running very quickly
- You’re willing to forego custom branding or code conventions
- A generic or Google-vibe aesthetic suits or enhances your product
Start creating a design system from scratch if:
- Your design system needs to last 3 or more years without a major refactor
- You’re going to need custom branding or code conventions in short order, or otherwise need to make your design system distinct.

We’ve found that teams tend to outgrow OPLs—Other People’s Libraries—at about the 3 year mark. (In this context, “outgrow” means you find yourself overriding or removing more of the library than actually using it.)

Let’s see how this works with a simple example. Say you wanted to showcase your headphone product in a card. Using Bootstrap out-of-the-box, you can use this HTML…

<div class="card" style="width: 18rem;">
  <img src="headphones.png" class="card-img-top" alt="Beats Solo(3) Wireless" />
  <div class="card-body">
    <h5 class="card-title">Beats Solo<sup>3</sup> Wireless</h5>
    <p class="card-text">$199.95</p>
    <a
      href="/products/headphones/beats-solo-3-wireless/"
      class="btn btn-primary"
      >Add to cart</a
    >
  </div>
</div>

…to create a card that looks like this:

If you’re satisfied with that, great! Bootstrap is a good candidate to jumpstart your design system.

But your team might not be able to live with that, because you need or want your card to look more custom:

Perhaps you’d like your brand typeface for the card heading, so you add a font-family: 'Graphik'; declaration to the card. You use an 8-point grid elsewhere, so you change all of your type sizes, padding, and margin to multiples of 8. And your house coding style is to use a BEM-like syntax, so you modify the markup from <div class="card"> to <div class="c-card">. And you don’t want your cards so contained, so you ditch the borders.

Just for those small amount of changes, we’ve had to touch all but 2 lines of our HTML…

- <div class="card" style="width: 18rem;">
+ <div class="c-card" style="width: 18rem;">
-    <img src="headphones.png" class="card-img-top" alt="Beats Solo(3) Wireless" />
+    <img src="headphones.png" class="c-card_img--top" alt="Beats Solo(3) Wireless" />
-    <div class="card-body">
+    <div class="c-card_body">
-        <h5 class="card-title">Beats Solo<sup>3</sup> Wireless</h5>
+        <h5 class="c-card_title">Beats Solo<sup>3</sup> Wireless</h5>
-            <p class="card-text">$199.95</p>
+            <p class="c-card_text">$199.95</p>
-            <a href="/products/headphones/beats-solo-3-wireless/" class="btn btn-primary">Add to cart</a>
+            <a href="/products/headphones/beats-solo-3-wireless/" class="c-btn c-btn--primary">Add to cart</a>
    </div>
  </div>

…and all of this CSS:

  html {
-   font-family: sans-serif;
+   font-family: 'Graphik', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  }

- .card {
+ .c-card {
-   border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.125);
-   border-radius: 0.25rem;
  }

+ .c-card_image--top {
+   background: #deebf2;
+   border-radius: 8px;
+ }

- .card-body {
+ .c-card_body {
-    padding: 1.25rem;
+    padding: 1.25rem 0;
  }

- .card-title {
+ .c-card_title {
-    margin-bottom: 0.75rem;
  }

+ .c-card_text {
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+ }

- .btn {
+ .c-btn {
-    padding: 0.375rem 0.75rem;
  }

- .btn-primary {
+ .c-btn--primary {
-    color: #fff;
+    color: #198ec8;
  }

+ .c-btn--primary:before {
+    content: "+";
+    font-size: 1.5em;
+    margin-right: 0.3em;
+    position: relative;
+    top: 1px;
+ }

- .btn:hover {
+ .c-btn:hover {
-    color: #212529;
  }

- .btn-primary:hover {
+ .c-btn--primary:hover {
-    color: #fff;
+    color: #0056b3;
-    background-color: #0069d9;
-    border-color: #0062cc;
  }

And that’s all just for 1 component. Bootstrap has 24 components in it, so the lift to modify every component isn’t insignificant.

For all that effort, you might as well roll your own.

The Hot Potato Process

Dan Mall — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 08:07:00 +0000

The big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.

Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle. This is exactly what we’re demonstrating in our designer + developer collaboration recording and what we teach in our collaboration workshops.

Sit together #

It seems overly simplistic, but the best way for designers and developers to start trying The Hot Potato Process is to sit together. We’ve seen many a designer + developer pair who have worked together for years become enlightened as to how the other works within the first few minutes of sitting together.

Distributed teams #

The first piece of pushback we often get about The Hot Potato Process is that it seems ideal only for co-located teams. But, as increasingly more people are working remotely, good processes should adapt to all the different ways that people work; the Hot Potato Process is no exception to that.

If you can’t sit together in person, use video chat and other real-time synchronous tools to simulate working together in a co-located way. My teams will often leave a Zoom chat open for a few hours as a proxy for being in the same office together, even if we’re not talking to each other the whole time.

For more great tips on remote working, see Mandy Brown’s excellent article, “Making remote teams work.”

Use recordings to bridge time zone gaps #

If you can’t work at the same time due to time zones not lining up, you can record yourself working and send it to your collaborator. Your collaborator can then work alongside your recording while making their own recording. Then continue to pass recordings back and forth. Tools like Voxer, Marco Polo, and other walkie-talkie- and intercom-like apps help to make asynchronous collaboration feel a bit closer to synchronous collaboration.

Working together means working together #

If you can’t sit together in person or trade recordings or approximate these kinds of approaches, you might have to come to terms with the fact that you’re not truly working together.

Communication Arts Interactive 2020

Dan Mall — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 06:12:00 +0000

When I was first learning design, the Communication Arts annuals were often my go-to resource for best-in-class inspiration. I’m thrilled to be on the jury for the 2020 Interactive Awards along with Guillaume Braun of Akufen, Jacinte Faria of Stink Studios, Hayley Hughes of Shopify, and Phillip Tiongson of Potion.

Historically, the work awarded in this show and others like it has typically been apps, microsites, installations, and other short-lived pieces, tied to some advertising campaign or marketing push. This makes sense, as awards like this tend to be highly coveted by ad agencies and production shops as a way to somewhat objectively endorse work in an otherwise unregulated industry. In last year’s Interactive Annual, 31 of the 37 awarded pieces were tied to a campaign of some sort.

That’s not a complaint. I’ve always loved work like Tool of North America’s Jurassic Box Experience, and I hope we continue to see that kind of submission.

But I do hope to see some more work that typically goes unheralded. I’d like to see more sites, not microsites. I’d like to see apps that people use regularly, not apps that have a 6-week shelf life, where all that’s left to reference it is a sizzle reel.

I’m optimistic that this isn’t outside of the spirit of this competition. While the Commarts Interactive competition has traditionally only featured jurors that work in advertising, recent years have seen more jurors from product companies like Megan Meeker of Lyft and Libby Bawcombe of NPR. That’s a noteworthy signal that product work can be as inspiring and exciting as advertising.

I love that last year’s jury awarded sites like Cowboy by Ueno, The Cool Club by Wonderland, and Rapha by Work & Co. These are sites that command the same level of polish found in any good ad campaign but perform a business function for the company in addition to a marketing function. This is the kind of work I think we should celebrate more.

I’d love to award work that demonstrates creative use of the highest level of color contrast ratios and works well on assistive devices. I’d love to award work that’s still useful when JavaScript fails. I’d love to award work that shows smart thinking and strategy in addition to flawless execution and art direction. I’d love to award work that serves business and user needs. I’d love to award the Flighty app. I’d love to award Gov.uk’s Get ready for Brexit guide. I’d love to award the flagship Lyft app in addition to the Lyft Auto Tunes campaign. I’d love to award The Guardian’s guide to digital design. I’d love to award the Airtable and Notion platforms, not solely their apps or sites.

But I can only award work that’s submitted.

So, please submit that kind of work! If you do, you have my word that, as a jury member, I’ll do my darnedest to lobby for why brilliant, often utilitarian, people-serving work deserves a spot on our award shelves.

Avengers: Endgame

Dan Mall — Sun, 12 May 2019 02:04:00 +0000

Here’s my review of Avengers: Endgame. Warning: major spoilers included.

Spoilers #

I’m saying it again: spoilers included below. If you haven’t seen Endgame yet and you’re the kind of person that gets upset if they know things going into a movie, don’t read any further. Spoilers included for not just Endgame but also Interstellar, Looper, Back to the Future, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse, and Infinity War. You’ve been warned.

As my buddies on Comic Book Junto say, 3… 2… 1… if you’re reading past this point, it’s your fault.

Here goes.

Summary #

Overall, the movie was great. As the final chapter in an 11-year, 22-movie arc, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. And Endgame delivered.

The amount of characters and storylines to incorporate was staggering. But what Joss Whedon failed to do in Age of Ultron, Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo and writers Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus handled as well as could be imagined.

I’ve only seen it once so far and intend to many times over, but I doubt I’ll much of my positive opinion will change upon subsequent viewings. There is one thing, though, that I take issue with: time travel.

Time travel #

When we first sat down in the theater, Em nonchalantly whispered to me, “I bet they go back in time and everyone comes back to life.” 1

I go to great lengths to avoid spoilers, which to me means anything that reveals anything about a movie. That’s a trailer, a poster, a plot point, fan theories… anything. My most enjoyable movie viewings are ones where I have no clue what’s happening. Any expectations I have really affect my movie experiences.

I replied, “Gosh, I hope not.”

And then Scott Lang goes on to tell everybody about the quantum realm and seals the deal with the phrase “time heist,” which makes me involuntary produce a simultaneous “sigh & eye-roll” combo a suburban Philadelphia movie theater has ever seen.

Why don’t I like time travel? Two reasons: it’s confusing and disrespectful.

Time travel is confusing #

As soon as you open the “time travel” door, things get… science-y. Even if you don’t know it specifically, time travel is about special relativity, which quickly brings up questions like the twin paradox, grandfather paradox, and the like.

So, it stands to reason that plots based around time travel bring up these questions. How do you solve this? In my opinion, the movies that solve this best are the ones about time travel directly. Time travel isn’t just a plot device; it is the plot device.

Back to the Future is a great example. To reduce confusion, it stuck with a single timeline where the events of the past can affect the future. I believe the simplicity of the story is why it remain our collective logical explanation of how time travel works, so much so that Endgame had to spend time trying to convince us not to consider this model.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is all about the confusion that time travel creates.
Looper tackles the grandfather paradox head on.

What about movies that aren’t about time travel that still involve it? Interstellar capitalizes on the fact that the simplest explanation for the twin paradox is wormholes, and since they’re in space, this coincidentally fits. Like Back to the Future, the simplicity makes it a convincing enough explanation.

The MCU has even utilized this same technique. Janet van Dyne really shouldn’t have aged in the quantum realm, but it would have been weirder for Hank and Hope (and the audience) if she didn’t, so we went with it. In Infinity War, Thanos uses the Time Stone to reverse a tiny bit of time to get the Mind Stone from Vision’s head after Scarlet Witch destroys it—which is crazy confusing!—but we go with it because our suspension of disbelief just says that that’s how the Time Stone works.

So, instead of making all of Act II a confusing time heist, there was another option available that’s a bit more Occam’s razor-like: the multiverse. Doctor Strange introduced it, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (despite not officially being part of the MCU) gave us a great story with it at the core … heck, the Ancient One even reminded us of it. In my opinion, this could have also gotten us to an interesting place, perhaps even moreso than where the current plot left us. More on this later.

Even more significant than realizing that time travel is confusing, time travel is disrespectful to the audience.

Time travel is disrespectful #

Few things make comic book fans groan as much as retcons. It’s the ultimate case of “that thing you thought happened didn’t actually happen.” The late 90s and early aughts were where many of us stopped reading comics, and I think it’s no coincidence that that time was also rampant with retcons—from Spider-Man clones to the real story of Wolverine claws to teenage Iron Man and much more.

Time travel is a close second to retcons. While it’s not exactly “that thing you thought happened didn’t actually happen,” it’s a close “that thing happened but we’re gonna make it so it didn’t.“

One of the reasons Infinity War was so great was because of the the impact of The Decimation, more commonly known as “the snap.” Thanos erases half the population of the entire universe, and that’s how the movie ends?! What drama! It left viewers reeling, myself included, just plain shocked and in disbelief that any movie—much less part 1 of the end of this phase of the MCU—could end like that.

Time travel reverses that impact. It spits in its face. It makes it an easy undo, a joke. It says, “You know that emotion you felt? It wasn’t worth having.” I love how writer Brett Riley puts it in his article, “No More Retcons and Reboots: Rules for a Good Comics Universe”:

There were never any stakes… Nothing was sacred… If a story touched you, you had best forget it, because the companies sure would… Why do I want to read stories today that will be meaningless tomorrow? Why do I want to read about characters who might be replaced, killed for a few months, resurrected, killed again, changed beyond recognition only to be changed back again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum?

For me, Endgame’s time travel story undid a lot of the admiration I had for the boldness of Infinity War.

If not time travel, then what else? #

When I heard this was the last chapter in this phase of the MCU, I was hoping that meant everything new. New characters, new storylines, new everything. Then I saw the phase 4 movie list:

While these are exciting movies with some new characters, there are also some old ones too. The conceivable return of Black Widow, Thor, Black Panther, Guardians, Ant-Man, the Wasp, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange, and Spider-Man doesn’t exactly feel new; it still seems like a continuation.

Updated at May 13, 2019 at 10:08am (8 hours after initially publishing): David Demaree points out that this is a fan-generated list, not an official MCU release schedule, which I didn’t realize. That changes things! It means that a continuation isn’t as guaranteed as I thought. Here’s hoping Marvel actually does pursue a new chapter.

I like when things end on a high note. Despite my nitpicky time travel quibble, Endgame was a high note. We saw characters like Iron Man way more than characters like Vision, and that’s ok; we can still end it there. I think that’d be a lot more fitting than getting sick of Scott Lang because there’s two more movies with him in it. I’d rather leave wanting more of these stories than feeling like it was too much. Let’s close this book and move on to a new one. The idea of a multiverse could give us that.

Let’s leave these characters in this universe. They beat Thanos. All the snapped are (regrettably) unsnapped and back. Good on them. The end.

And let’s turn our attention to a different universe for the next decade. One where Kamala Khan is Ms. Marvel instead of Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel. One where Miles Morales is Spider-Man instead of Peter Parker. Even though we saw a graceful transition from a Steve Rogers Captain America to a Sam Wilson Captain America, the multiverse gives us a pass to not need a graceful transition. New place, new stories. ’Nuff said.

Wrapping up #

I hope you enjoyed my little “what if?” exercise into what Endgame could have been. Over a decade with these characters has been more than enjoyable. It’s allowed and inspired us to dream up even more new stories, and that’s the real success of the MCU.

Typography in Design Systems

Dan Mall — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 21:17:43 +0000

I’ve never really been happy about the way I’ve worked with typography in design systems before. As I’m currently working on another big design system, it seemed time to change that.

Common wisdom regarding typography in design systems seems to often include:

T-shirt sizing (small, medium, large, etc.)
Some context-specific dichotomy like “heading sizes” or “body sizes” or “caption style”
Some sort of typographic scale

Let’s deconstruct these a bit.

On the surface, t-shirt sizes make good sense. They follow a metaphor that just about all people can understand intuitively. But there are a few areas where I’ve seen them break down, especially when tied to a context like headings or body text:

First, they don’t scale well. Many systems need a few more options than the typical six: XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL. Because of that, I’ve encountered too many systems that try to hack it with a “Medium-2” or “Mini Large” or “XXXXXL” in them, all additions that break the simplicity and intuitiveness of t-shirt size system. I’m counting the days until I find a “Schmedium" style somewhere.

Also, it’s too easy to conflate the h4 style—intended to be shorthand for “the fourth largest heading style”—into actually meaning “use an <h4> element.” After all, <h2 class="h4">is a bit of a mindbender and seems wrong at first glance. I’ve seen those who don’t understand the power of HTML and CSS—whether that’s designers that aren’t very familiar with front-end code or full-stack developers who focus more or back-end or DevOps than front-end—feel forced to choose between appropriate styling and semantic code. They’ll pick an inappropriate element because it looks visually looks right or pick what visually looks right at the expense of semantics and accessibility, defeating the inherent advantages that HTML and CSS have out-of-the-box.

Seeing where this kind of system becomes difficult has taught me a few things:

Linear systems work well when we can accurately predict how they’ll scale, and we humans suck at predicting how others will use the systems we create. If you call a 12px text size “small” and a 16px text size “medium,” you better be dang sure no one will ever need a 14px text size, or you can kiss your system goodbye.
Abstracting styles are difficult but worthwhile. Calling it a “caption style” means it’ll likely never get used in the utility navigation, even if it’s the right style. This leads to a lot of duplication in CSS.
In a system designed to be used frequently, intuitiveness may be over-valued. It might be just fine to ask people to learn a system that has a slight learning curve. Habit may very well be the solution to the difficulty that is creating an intuitive system.

With those in mind, here are some other ways I explored to create a typographic system that works.

Guessability, an alternative to intuitiveness

The Amazon Echo was the first voice-controlled personal assistant I purchased. The thing that most impressed me was how well it catered to things I guessed I could do with it, even if I didn’t know I could.

Coming to terms with the fact that there likely isn’t a wholly intuitive typographic system I could employ and that there likely will be some sort of learning curve actually gives me a bit of leeway. I started to think about systems that could have high guessability.

I explored what kind of guessability I could achieve when drawing upon institutional knowledge, popular knowledge, and common knowledge.

Institutional knowledge

Ever since I stumbled across Andy Clarke’s Star Wars styling, I’ve wanted to try something similar. One of the design systems we’re building right now is for a major airline, so my first thought was to tie the typographic system back to a piece of institutional knowledge: in this case, the fleet. Even if designers and developers aren’t already familiar, this could be a nice way to get some engrained knowledge about the company’s main offerings. Here’s the first pass at that.

One of the biggest problems with this is that not only is it not intuitive, but it’s actually counterintuitive, essentially unguessable. I do a fair bit of flying on planes, but I learned during this exercise that a 747 is larger than a 777 and a 757 is longer than a 767. And, once I run out of 700-level planes, I have to move to a completely different type of plane—the smaller CRJ line—all of which I imagine to be incredibly infuriating for a designer or developer that’s just trying to set a 32-px headline. This is a non-starter.

Popular knowledge

Since institutional knowledge tended to have too much nuance to be helpful, I decided to try out more popular knowledge. The Brady Bunch and Simpsons characters have inherent age groups and sizes that may map to any typographic scale nicely:

While there’s some merit here, there are definitely problems as well:

If a designer isn’t familiar with the Brady Bunch or the Simpsons, the system is completely useless, because it’s unguessable.
There are scale problems here too. The Brady Bunch system features the 6 kids. But what happens if we need a 7th style? Add Alice? And shouldn’t the Alice style be larger than the Greg style? We’s back in t-shirt size territory.

Popular knowledge also seems to have just as many disadvantages as advantages.

Common knowledge

I’ve long been a believer that design systems should contain the smallest number of elements that help you design the greatest variety of interfaces. So, I set out to create the smallest number of unique typographic styles that any interface in this system might need. Starting with the magical number seven, plus or minus two, I challenged myself to create 7 and only 7 typographic styles. I think of them as “presets,” a default combination that acts as a starter to be modified.

I also tried not to be too clever about the names. There are 7 presets, named 1 through 7. The common knowledge here is that anyone that knows how to count gets this system. These are the atomic typographic units from which all the system’s typography stems.

In BEM style, each of these presets also has a bold modifier.

If we try as much as possible to stick with these 7 options but decide we really need another typographic style, it’s easy enough to tack it onto the end as number 8. No need to try to sneak anything in-between the existing presets. The guessability is extremely high here.

A typographic system in code

To actually use this typographic system in a digital product, let’s set up some canonical presets as mixins to be included everywhere. Each preset includes the combination of properties—size, leading, weight… whatever you decide—that should always travel with it. Here’s how that might look in an .scss file:

I’m glossing over a few details of how I set up my CSS files philosophically, which I’ve described in a previous article, “Cooking with Design Systems.”

@mixin text-preset-1 {
  font-size: 40px;
  font-weight: 300;
  line-height: 56px;
}

@mixin text-preset-7 {
  font-size: 12px;
  font-weight: 300;
  letter-spacing: 1px;
  line-height: 20px;
  text-transform: uppercase;
}

These are the only places in your (S)CSS that you should see font-size or line-height or font-weight declarations. Everywhere else in your code, you should be simply including 1 of these 7 presets:

.caption {
  @include text-preset-7;
}

.tabs_title {
  @include text-preset-7;
}

.kicker {
  @include text-preset-7;
}

@mixin text-preset-7--bold {
  @include text-preset-7;
  font-weight: 700;
}

If you do find individual declarations, they should be a sign to you that you’re intentionally overriding or deviating from the system.

This methodology can help you tie different elements to the same canonical typographic preset. This way, any broad changes happen at the preset level and can trickle outward to any component that inherits that style.

So far, so good

To date, we’ve built about 45 pilots utilizing over 80 atoms, molecules, and organisms, and the typographic system of 7 presets has held up without having to have added to it. That’s not to say we don’t have outliers, but so far, I only count twice that we’ve had to make something custom.

What kinds of typographic systems have you found useful?

My Experience with Laser Eye Surgery

Dan Mall — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 01:04:00 +0000

I started wearing glasses in 1995, and I switched to contacts in 1999. Two days ago—twenty years later—I got laser eye surgery. Here’s the play-by-play.

In my 2018 Year in Review, I mentioned wanting to investigate being done with glasses and contacts for good. So a month ago, I quickly Google-search for the closest laser eye surgery place1 and go in for a consultation. After a brief eye exam, they tell me that my -2.5 left eye prescription and -3.25 right eye prescription make me eligible for the procedure.

This article is more about my experience than it is a review of the LASIK office I got the surgery done. If you’re curious about how I picked, it was mostly based on a combination what was close by and reading great reviews on Google and Facebook.

Eyes naturally change over time, so apparently about 5% of patients need an enhancement after a few years. They give me two different prices: $3,902 for the surgery with a lifetime plan that covers enhancements for life and $2,611 that only covers enhancements for 2 years after the initial surgery. They also offer a $200 incentive on each plan if I do the procedure before the end of the month.

I don’t have enough time to do the procedure and recover before some upcoming travel, so I put it off a few weeks, which gives me some additional time to think about it. Knowing a little bit about how people set prices, the $200 incentive clues me in to the possibility that they might need the business more than I want to have unassisted perfect vision. A month later, I call back to schedule the procedure, and I tell them that I’d love to do the lifetime plan but that I don’t really want to spend more than $3,000 on this. After a brief hold, they say that, in addition to the original $200 discount they offered, they can do an additional $500 off for local customers, bringing the total to $3,202. I accept their clearly-fabricated but still-gracious additional discount and pick a date for the procedure.

They offered financing too, but I’m generally not a fan of that. I’m not very disciplined when it comes to using credit, so I’ll often choose to wait until I have the money to pay for what I want in full.

Surgery time #

They call in a few eye drop prescriptions to my pharmacy and tell me not to wear contacts for at least 3 days before the procedure. Eye drops in bag and glasses on my face, Em and the kids ride with me to the LASIK office. I arrive around 1:30PM. I fill out some paperwork, pay, and schedule a follow up appointment for the next day. I ask if I’ll be able to drive myself, to which they answer a resounding, “Absolutely.”

I sit for about an hour, then the doctor calls me in. He says, “Time to take your glasses off for the last time”—a bit melodramatic but I’m lovin’ it—and administers a few numbing drops.

While waiting for the drops to take effect, he asks me about my left eyelid, which droops down a little lower than my right. He asks me if it had always been that way, which I confirm. He mentions it won’t be a problem at all, but that if it affects my vision in the future, I might want to get it lifted. I silently acquiesce, as he’s not the first doctor to mention that to me.

He leads me into the operating room. An assistant asks me to lie down, and she administers more numbing drops (which I’ve read apparently reduces your urge to blink). I’m not positive of what happens after that since I don’t actually see it myself, but I’ll tell you what it feels like.

I confirmed a lot of what I thought was happening with Louis Cole’s laser eye surgery vlog. Don’t watch if you’re squeamish.

The assistant tapes my right eyelids open. The doctor applies some tool that locked the eyelids into place; I feel a little pressure on my right eye but it’s ever-so slight. The doctor swivels a machine on top of my right eye, and I stare up at a red dot. I have both eyes open, and the doctor says, “Your right eye is going to go dark,” and suddenly, it does. This is the part where they peel back my cornea to get ready to do the correction, but I don’t feel anything here.

If you want to know how laser eye surgery actually works, here’s a complete guide.

The same happens with my left eye; again, I don’t feel anything.

The assistant asks me to get up slowly as she holds my hand. My vision is blurry. She slowly leads me to another station 3 feet away and asks me to lie down again.

The doctor swivels a new machine over my right eye. I remember less about the details of this one. I look up and see red lights in a cross-stitch pattern surrounded by green lights in the same pattern. I assume this is the laser that’s going to do the correction. The doctor seems to have a tool and the best way I can describe it was like he’s “fishing around” in my right eye. I don’t feel this… more like I could see it, albeit blurry. Next, the laser seems to be doing something, and I smell a slight burning (I previously read about this, so I expected it). Doctor comes back with his fishing-around tool and then says the right eye is done. That wasn’t so bad at all!

Next up: left eye. Doctor fishes around again, but this time, I feel it a bit. It feels like something grazing my eye. Laser does it’s thing, then Doctor says something to Assistant—I can’t quite make it out, but I think I hear the word “scratch,” which worries me a bit—then Doctor fishes around again. But rather than being done now like the right eye was, the laser goes for another round. That worries me too, because that’s not what happened with the right eye. Doctor comes back to fish around, and tells me the left eye is done.

Doctor and Assistant help me slowly stand up, and Doctor says, “You did a great job.” This worries me even more, because he sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as much as me.

I ask, “Did everything go ok?”

Doctor replies, “Oh yes, everything’s great. Go home and take a nap.”

My vision is blurry at this point. I grab my stuff, throw some sunglasses on, and am escorted out to my car.

The drive home #

Em drives me home. I’m reclined in the passenger seat, and the kids are in the backseat.

I have my eyes closed, and I think the numbing drops are wearing off. Tears start to stream down my face, uncontrollably. I’m not crying; at least I don’t think so, but it feels like it, both physically and emotionally. IT. BURNS. My nose is running. When I keep my eyes closed, it burns. When I try to open my eyes, tears flood down my face. I can’t keep them open for long anyway, so I close them again, which burns, so I want to open them. The cycle continues.

I’m not allowed to rub or even touch my eyes—ever, apparently—so my beard and top of my shirt are getting damp from my tears. I try to fall asleep, but it burns too much. I fall asleep a few minutes before we pull into the driveway.

Em helps me out of the car. My eyes closed, she leads me into our room, where I settle into bed around 4PM.

Naptime #

Official instructions are to nap for 3 – 6 hours after the procedure, because there’s really nothing else you could do anyway. The night before, I stayed up late the night and woke up early so I’d be tired enough to nap. The LASIK office recommended Tylenol PM—or Valium—but I’m usually a good sleeper, so I decide to go cold turkey.

Em helps me carefully tape sleep shields on my eyes so I wouldn’t accidentally rub my eyes in my sleep. She put a glass of water on my nightstand and leaves me so I can try to get some rest. I start listening to a boring finance audiobook. Unfortunately, my eyes are still burning, which is keeping me awake. Also, the boring finance audiobook—Your Money or Your Life—turns out to be really interesting, so I’m actually paying attention instead of zoning out.

After what seems like an hour, I switch to a Chill Lofi Study Beats Spotify playlist on low volume and finally start to doze off.

I wake up every 30 minutes or so. My eyes are still burning. I try to open my eyes, and tears flood out. I close them again and fall back asleep.

After nap #

I wake up more fully about two-and-a-half hours later at 6:30PM, mostly because I’m hungry. Eyes still burning, I open them; tears still flood out, but seems like less tears than before. I force myself to keep my eyes open as long as I can before shutting them again. I sit in the dark for about half-an-hour, training myself to open and close my eyes as normally as possible.

I start the recommended eye drop routine: a steroid eyedrop and an antibiotic one every 2 hours. I eventually feel stable enough to throw some sunglasses on and venture out into the kitchen. Em and the kids have kindly turned of most of the lights in the house, and they’re hanging out in the basement so I’d have a quiet upstairs all to myself. I look slowly toward a light, then stop myself, as my eyes seem too sensitive for that. I warm up a bowl of leftover pasta and eat it in the dark dining room, mostly to get used to being awake. My vision seems clear, but I do see some spots and too much light doesn’t feel great. My eyes still sting, especially my left eye, which feels scratched (though I can’t tell if that’s just the power of suggestion from my worries about the procedure).

Em and the kids come upstairs to read stories, pray, and get to bed. I say goodnight to the kids, and hang out in bed with Em. We talk for a while, mostly about my surprisingly interesting finance book. An hour or two of engaging conversation later, I realize I haven’t thought about my eyes once, and that, now that I am thinking about them, they don’t sting as much. One of a many benefits to having a riveting wife.

Even though the pain is decreasing, I still can’t really look at light without wincing. I can’t fathom how I’m supposed to drive myself to a follow-up appt just 12 hours from now. I do my final round of eye drops for the night, tape my sleep shields on, and get ready for bed. I took a nap just a few hours ago, but I’m still tired from the tenseness of it all, so I’m looking forward to sleep.

The next morning #

I intentionally wake up at 5:30AM (just about my usual waketime) because I want a few hours to get acclimated before having to drive to a 9AM follow-up appointment. My vision is blurry, but largely because I still have the sleep shields on. I walk to the bathroom, take off the sleep shields, and look around. Things are pretty clear. Also, almost no pain at all. Wow.

I turn the light on but brace myself. No light sensitivity.

I walk around the house. Life looks pretty good.

My care instructions say I should wear sunglasses indoors for a week, not because of light sensitivity, but as protection for my eyes so they don’t accidentally get bummed or so I don’t unintentionally rub them. I pop on sunglasses, marveling at the obvious difference from feeling so rough the night before and so good now.

I drive myself to my follow-up appointment with no issues. They test my eyesight: 20/15 in each eye, 20/20 together, just 18 hours after the procedure.

We’re seriously living in the future.

Two days in #

I’m writing this post on two day after the procedure. I’m following the eye drops routine pretty religiously, as I’ve read that sticking to that increases the speed of recovery significantly. If my eyes itch, I’m supposed to use artificial tears, as itchiness is a symptom of dryness. The LASIK office suggested that I use artificial tears as often as I want, so I’m making liberal use of that. The worst of it is that my left eye still feels slightly sandy every few hours, kinda like I have a dirty contact lens in. But, it goes away immediately when I use the eyedrops.

I switched to sleeping in ski goggles last night instead of sleep shields, as it’s a little more comfortable and still keeps me from accidentally rubbing my eyes. And my co-workers seem to be fine with me joining calls with video either turned off or turn on while I’m wearing sunglasses.

Life changing #

The biggest thing I heard from people who’ve had this done previously is that it was life-changing to be able to wake up and immediately see clearly. I didn’t really experience that this morning, partly because I’ve heard it so much that I think it got over-hyped and partly because I’ve fallen asleep with contacts enough times to have experienced and remembered waking up with perfect vision.

What’s been more impactful for me so far is where I realize my previous habits and aren’t necessary anymore. I don’t have to take my contacts out before bed. I don’t have to pack 2 weeks’ worth of extra contacts in a suitcase when I travel just in case I get stuck somewhere. I don’t have to constantly carry around microfiber cloths to wipe dirty glasses. I don’t have to worry about getting a contact knocked in my weekly basketball game. These are tiny things, but I think they’re what I’ll enjoy most.

Break-Even Points for Value Pricing

Dan Mall — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 08:12:00 +0000

When value pricing—pricing work based on the value it brings your customer—here’s a question I typically ask:

“At what point does this project pay for itself?”

Great answers I’ve heard:

When 100 more students enroll.
When we get an average of 5 more leads a month.
When we add 1,000 more people to or mailing list.
When people prefer us over our top competitor.

Answers I’ve heard that make me think they’re not ready for a project (at least not with SuperFriendly):

I don’t know.
Why is that any of your business?
There’s no way we can quantify that.

Smart clients know what change they’re looking for, even if they don’t know how to achieve it. (That’s why they’re hiring help.) Sometimes I’ll try to help them articulate the value, but I don’t try to define it for them. That’s like going to a mechanic without a specific repair in mind and asking them to find a part of your car to fix.

In my experience, clients that don’t initially know what they want turn into clients that stretch out rounds of review and aren’t happy with the final result. Even when we’ve delivered something that might work for them, they can’t tell, because they don’t know what the right thing is.

But clients that know what they want from the start? They know way early on if we’re on track or off course, because they know the destination.

A client that knows what they want knows where the project pays for itself, where it breaks even. And that’s the first price ceiling. If they have a $5,000 budget and expect 1000 more signups, they’ll think they overpaid if you try to charge them $10,000 and they get 1,000 more signups (whether or not that’s accurate).

But what if you’re confident than you could get them 2,000 signups? Then they may accept a $10,000 price because you’re delivering twice the results they’re expecting. Here’s the kicker: that’s still a break-even price, even though it’s double their stated budget.

You can confidently price over any stated budget if you can demonstrate that you will deliver more value than their break-even metric. The more you understand the break-even point, the more liberty you have to assess and communicate the multiples of value you can deliver.

When you value price, every price you give a client should be at least a break-even price. Better yet, every price you give a client should be a “they got a deal” price.

Designer + Developer Collaboration Workshop

Dan Mall — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:43:00 +0000

Brad and I hosted our first public designer + developer collaboration workshop yesterday. After sleeping on it, I declare it a resounding success!

We’ve done this type of workshop before with our clients, but this was the first time we’ve hosted it publicly. Many thanks to our friends at InVision for producing it so flawlessly.

We covered:

Reducing reliance on handoff tools
Front-end design
Shia LeBouf
Principles like “minimum viable artifacts,” “death to approvals,” “anticipation,” and more
Atomic design
Spot comping

At the end of the day, we did a recap exercise to see what the attendees got from the day. Here’s what they said:

From what I learned at this workshop, I’m going to stop…

Trying to make perfect comps
Hoarding designs and keeping them to myself until they’re “ready”
Over-engineering
Writing handoff documentation
Designing for approvals
Wasting time on design details that don’t matter right now

From what I learned at this workshop, I’m going to start…

Relying more on a front-end workshop environment
Doing more cross-team collaboration sessions
Involving developers earlier in the process
Getting into the browser earlier
Prototyping more
Being a more inclusive design partner
Using Storybook
Working with more placeholders
Carving out time for collaboration
Complaining more about closed-door design reviews
Working at lower fidelity
Sharing ideas earlier
Letting developers prototype and wireframe
Changing the physical space to allow for better collaboration
Iterating faster on design
Making design a team sport
Working at a component level instead of a page level

From what I learned at this workshop, I’m going to continue…

Involving developers in the design process
Sending devs screenshots frequently
Being present throughout the entire process
Asking questions of the dev team
Focusing on shipping to production as fast as possible

Special thanks to Ian Frost for being an excellent teaching assistant, troubleshooter, and all-around good guy.

If you want us to bring this workshop to your company or your city, let us know!

Starting a Design System

Dan Mall — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 13:25:02 +0000

Designer Zack Aronson asks an interesting question:

There are a lot of great articles about design systems, but I’m not sure I’ve seen much written about how to start one.

When SuperFriendly works with clients to create design systems, the first thing we’ll do is an audit of the existing digital landscape. Do you have a public-facing website? A native mobile app? Some microsites? An intranet?

Of all of those, what are some interface elements that all of them have? Some common answers tend to include:

Navigation
Buttons
Headings
Lists
Paragraphs
Forms
Tables

It’s tempting to add everything that you think might go in a design system or should go into a design system, but try to resist that urge for now. Only include the components that already exist in all of the sites and apps. A good design system should be a collection of your organization’s best institutional knowledge.

If you don’t use buttons a lot in those products, don’t include them! Front-end designer Brad Frost is fond of saying, “A design system is the story of how your organization makes products.” If your products don’t have lots of buttons in them, including buttons as a prominent element tells the wrong story about what you do and make. This focus is key to making sure your design system remains distinct.

Zack: if I were advising your 3-person design team, I’d suggest that each of you pick a component that’s already used frequently in your products. Looking at your site, those 3 components might be:

Navigation
Primary Heading
Footer

Pick the best version of each of these. That might be the footer from an intranet and a navigation and footer from main website. And “best” might mean from a UI design perspective, or that the markup is top-notch, or that it’s built modularly… you decide.

Next step: put those 3 components somewhere. That could be a custom website you build, like Material Design or Polaris. But it could also be a wiki somewhere within your firewall. Or a Github repository. The important thing is that it contains:

At least some front-end code you need to implement this component (because a Sketch library is not a design system)
Some guidelines on how (and how not) to use this component
A URL that you can send to someone

Congratulations on launching v1 of your design system! That’s right: v1 of a design system can just be 3 components. Heck, it can be only 1 component! If that 1 component saves you some time on your next project and makes everything that much more consistent from both a design and code standpoint, you’re experiencing the full benefits of a design system.

2018 Year in Review

Dan Mall — Wed, 02 Jan 2019 11:00:00 +0000

I didn’t think I was one for year-end round-ups, but reading Dave Rupert’s made me want to do one of my own.

I’m generally a “glass half full” kind-of-guy, so while 2018 had both ups and downs, it was a pretty good year overall. In no particular order, some observations about my year and what I’m looking forward to for 2019.

Ten

Em and I celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary in 2018! We wanted to do a big celebration bash, but alas: we’re both pretty terrible at follow-through for this kind of thing, so it never happened. We’ve hired some help this time around, so hopefully we’ll celebrate our 11th anniversary in 2019 with the Ma11 Ba11 (I know, I know… my logo designer is showing).

Kids

Parenting 2 daughters is more fun than it’s ever been. I’ll admit: as much as I tried to be a present and active dad, I wasn’t really sure how to have fun and play with them as babies. That was really difficult for me. Now that they’re older, I love so many more of the things we can do together! We've been playing a lot of board games like Clue, Battleship, and Taboo.

Sidda reads books and comics in her bed as a way to fall asleep every night. (She’s currently into the Raina Telgemeier series.) She started ice skating lessons too and is loving that. We're talking about taking a trip together soon, just the two of us.

Charlie’s asked me to give her piano lessons and practices on her own without prompting. She's frustrated that she can’t read like big sis, which I think is the exact motivation that’s going to get her to read. She draws letters constantly.

They both learned to swim this summer; Sidda’s pretty fearless in the water now, while Char is still a bit hesitant. I bet one more summer of swimming will build that full confidence.

They’re also in the same school again after a year of being in different schools. It's a little weird as Seventh-day Adventists to have them in a Catholic school, but the school is great and it gives us the opportunity to talk about things like confirmation and baptism and whether or not they want to take part, which we leave up to them. It's also interesting to see them figure out how their relationship as sisters compares to their relationship to their friends.

Also, I think they both have boyfriends now.

I’m looking forward to more adventures with them in 2019.

Taking care of my body

I did some better things for my mind and body this past year.

I love soda and I really don’t like drinking water. That’s not a great combo, so I changed some of that around in 2018. First, I realized that I much prefer cold water to room temp, so I got a HydroFlask bottle that’s always filled with ice water. I also realized that some flavor in my water goes a long way, so my bottle is always filled with lemon, lime, oranges, strawberries, mint, cantaloupe, watermelon, or some combination of those. Those factors increased my water intake from virtually none to some. I also think that means that I drink soda less, but that might just be an unsubstantiated feeling. I quit soda in 2013 for about a year but am back on the sauce; perhaps 2019 is the year I quit again, or at least reduce my soda intake some.

I played basketball just about every Monday night. It’s a competitively friendly full court run for 2 hours. Looking forward to continuing that again in 2019.

I also made more of a concerted effort to lift or do some form of calisthenics a few times a week. I’m less regular during busy work weeks, but I was going at least once or twice a week for a good stretch. Rather than do an intense program, Octavius Newman turned me on to Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 workout, which is more about a slow and methodical way to build strength over a long term. This is much more my speed and pace, as I tend to get discouraged over workout programs if I lose my regularity about them.

I’m getting tired of contacts every day like I’ve had for the last 20 years, so I’d like to investigate laser eye surgery for 2019.

I’ve also had the idea for a few years to get the same or similar tattoo as my grandfather had from his time in the Filipino navy. After a conversation about tattoos with Trent Walton earlier this year, I think 2019 is the year that I make this happen.

Good for the sole

I really indulged my sneaker fetish this year.

I added these to my collection:

Jordan 1 Mid University Gold
Jordan 1 Retro High OG Top 3
Air Max 97 JDI
Nike Acronym x Air Presto Mid Racer Pink
Nike Acronym x Air Presto Mid Dynamic Yellow
Nike Acronym x Air Presto Mid Cool Grey
Jordan 1 “Homage to Home”
Jordan 1 Mid Royal Splatter
Puma Roma
Nike Air Safari OG 2018
Jordan 1 Black/White RE2PECT
Nike SF Air Force 1
Jordan 1 Ret Hi NYC
Air Jordan 1 Retro High.

I’ve got a side project or two that I'd like to do around my sneaker collection. Maybe 2019 will be the year. Probably not though.

Travel

As one who didn’t travel much as a kid, I feel very fortunate every year I get to visit other places in the world. In 2018, I took both work and non-work trips to:

Cambridge, MA
Chicago, IL
Greensboro, NC
Salt Lake City, UT
Las Vegas, NV
Faroe Islands
New York, NY
Seattle, WA
Toronto, Ontario
Marin County, CA
Cayman Islands
Washington DC
Strathmere, NJ
Mayfield, OH
Brooklyn, NY
Paris, France
Zurich, Switzerland
Orlando, FL
Houston, TX

I’m looking forward to visiting more amazing places in 2019. So far, I’ve got trips lined up to:

Chicago, IL
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
Boston, MA
Toronto, Ontario

And likely adding to the list:

Scotland
Los Angeles
New Zealand
Japan
China

Conferences, workshops, and training

In 2018, I spoke at 11 conferences, both virtually and in-person:

UXPin Design Systems Virtual Summit 2018
LoopConf
UIE All You Can Learn Library
Generate Conference NYC
Smashing Conference Toronto
Smashing Conference New York City
An Event Apart Washington DC
An Event Apart Orlando
Frontend Conference
Awwwards Digital Thinkers Conference
Clarity

In 2019, I’ll be speaking at Owner Summit; An Event Apart in Seattle and Boston; and Smashing Conference Toronto. I’ll be adding to that list as the year progresses, so watch this space.

I’m excited to add more training to my repertoire in 2019. Brad Frost and I are excited to help designers an developers collaborate better, starting with a workshop in Philly! We'll be doing a few more of these public workshops throughout the year; more details on that soon. If you’re interested in us doing a private workshop for your organization, drop me a line and let’s talk.

I’m also putting some plans together for some specialized training. I haven’t seen a lot of resources to help mid-level designers at startups and agencies get over the hump to being art directors and design directors, so I’m developing a curriculum specifically for this. It’ll likely be about a week-long, intensive workshop. It won’t be cheap, but we’ll work hard, eat well, and build a strong support network. More on that soon.

Video will be a format I lean into much more for 2019. I'm so inspired by watching my friends Coral Rosado and Josh Luciano grow their skills and audience on their Instagram and YouTube channels, and I already got a decent taste with the Design Systems: Mastering Design at Scale series Josh Clark, Brad Frost, and I produced with InVision, as well as my Skillshare class on Design Systems. I’ve officially caught the video bug.

Concerts

I’ve been a musician since I was 3, but I haven’t historically gone to many concerts. In 2018, Em and I changed that by going to see Lauryn Hill, Jennifer Lopez, Kendrick Lamar, Kenny Chesney, Beyoncé & Jay-Z. We were also going to see Justin Timberlake, but he bruised his vocal chords. Feel better soon, JT.

Books

I did a decent amount of reading in 2018. I read or started to read:

Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Batman: Nightwalker by Marie Lu
The Art of Screen Time by Anya Kamenetz
I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson; Batman Vol 1–7 by Tom King
Artemis by Andy Weir
The Snowball System by Mo Bunnell
The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucett
and To Sell is Human by Daniel H. Pink.

That feels pretty inadequate compared to Em’s goal of 100 books every year, but I’ll settle for about one per month.

Miscellany

We got 2 orange tabby kittens: Nala and Simba. They’re annoying, but the kids love them.
We’ve been inviting friends over semi-regularly for board games and/or karaoke. They’re a ton of fun and laughs; more of this in 2019.
I attended more funerals and viewings than I cared to this year (or ever), including one for my uncle who was the patriarch of our large extended family, as well as for my former college roommate who passed away from Hodgkin's lymphoma. Fuck cancer.
I was randomly selected for screening at airports 4 times in 2018.
I wrote 11 blog posts in 2018. That’s up from 5 in 2017, down from 12 in 2016, and on par with 11 in 2015.

Clearing my plate for 2019

Work-wise, I’d like to change things a bit in 2019. I’ve spent the last few years learning and practicing how to direct projects. That means largely being in charge of the vision for what SuperFriendly teams would make, and how. That also means that while I was involved in many projects, I was rarely directly responsible for the main output myself.

For 2019 projects, I’m going to try to be responsible for more output myself. That means I’ll be working in design tools and code a lot more. I know I typically tend to be in this mode all by myself, so I’m going to challenge myself to continue to work with the same amount of people, but more as a collaborator than a director.

To do this, I know I’ll need more familiarity with tools and technologies. I spent some time during the holidays learning the fundamentals of both Rails and Laravel and building a few “hello world” examples. I’m beefing up my React chops in preparation for a few upcoming projects. I have a post drafted about design tooling. I’m learning Swift so I can design and build an iPhone app end-to-end myself.

That’s a lot. In order to do all of that, I have to clear my plate a bit of things that I think I’m done with, either for now or forever.

For the last 6 months or so, I’ve had the feeling that certain chapters of my life are closing, while others are opening. But I’m not sure which ones are which. So, I’ve been taking inventory of all the things in my life, both personally and professionally, to see what things have run their course. This has included everything from taking a sabbatical to moving to a different state to shutting down SuperFriendly and taking a full-time job somewhere to being a full-time stay-at-home dad, and everything in-between. I’m not quite ready to share any conclusions from this meditation—not even sure I have any quite yet—but there are a few things that are a bit clearer than others.

I’ve passed the baton for SuperBooked to my partner, Phil Zaengle. I’ll still be involved with this product that I love, but in more less frequent capacity.
Unintentionally, I opened a small design and development apprenticeship in 2012. After almost 7 years, I’ve realized that I’ve had almost 20 apprentices. That’s a lot! I think I’ve given all I have to offer here; I no longer have the desire to scratch this particular itch. So, as of 2019, I’m closing the apprenticeship.

I’m looking forward to the opportunities this new year can bring that I have some space for. Bring it on, 2019!

Clients by Brand Color

Dan Mall — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 09:47:00 +0000

As I’m getting ready to close up shop for the year and recharge for 2019, I’m in a reflective mood. Every year, I’m incredibly privileged to work with clients that pay me to do something I enjoy, and this year was no exception.

After SuperFriendly’s first year of business in 2012, I published an annual report that looked at workload, clients, and tasks at a high level. Visualizing data in aggregate like this has always helped me be intentional what I’m currently doing and what I might want to change moving forward.

2019 will mark year seven for SuperFriendly. As a Seventh-day Adventist, I’m a big believer in the value of cycles of seven, which often bring completeness and wholeness. It seems like an appropriate time for some more reflection.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the distribution of work per year. Clients are represented by their main brand color (at the time of working with them) and roughly sequenced by where the work occurred during the year.

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

A few things I noticed when doing this exercise:

I’ve long followed the mantra that no single client should be responsible for 50% of revenue, but I also apply that in terms of attention. I’m pleased to say that that’s held through since day 1. The closest we’ve gotten (in terms of attention, not revenue) are a 38% client in 2012, a 32% clients in 2013, and a 37% client in 2015.
The number of clients per year is slowly dwindling, which I’m happy about. We’re able to do better work for a smaller number of clients with revenue and profit still increasing. We had 17 clients in 2012, while 2018 wrapped up with 11 clients.
Attention seems to be normalizing over the years. In 2012, we had a lot of little projects and one gigantic project. This past year, the distribution seems much more even.
Though you wouldn’t be able to tell by the scale of these graphs, we’re spending less time overall on work. The number of hours we’ve put in this past year is about 8% lower than we did in 2012, which makes sense if you compare that with the fact that we worked with 6 less clients. But that also means we’re spending a little more time with each client.
Revenue is up 51% from 2012, while profit is down 32%. Hmm, that’s definitely something to fix for 2019.

What did you learn about your business over the last year? What more can I tell you about mine?

Happy holidays, superfriends, and see you all in 2019!

Passing the SuperBooked Baton

Dan Mall — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 11:45:00 +0000

In 2013, I shared an idea I had for better referring work around with my friend Philip Zaengle. Six months later, he came back to me with a prototype of how it might work. Without Phil, SuperBooked would still be an idea floating around in my head. We worked on it for two years and then launched SuperBooked to a small audience of friends and testers in August 2016.

But then we slowed down. Alongside making SuperBooked, I run SuperFriendly and Phil runs Zaengle Corp—and running our own shops is part of the reason we use SuperBooked ourselves. Our teams run successfully but differently, and mashing them together isn’t exactly a recipe for smooth sailing. Phil has staff that move on and off of projects based on production schedules, while my teams expand and contracts on a per project and per pipeline basis. These are neither strengths or weaknesses but operational differences that create logistical challenges when making a product together. Combine that with being (thankfully) busy with client work, and we knew we had to change something.

Instead of trying to make due with a process that’s half mine and half Phil’s, it makes more sense for one of us to step up and the other to talk a step back. As of today, Phil will become SuperBooked’s new CEO. He’s the one who’s really gotten it to this place so far, and he’s the perfect person to take it to the next level.

My role will be more of an advisor to the team. We’ll still check in frequently about the ways I think SuperBooked can get ahead of where the industry is headed. I believe in SuperBooked more than ever. I really want to see it come to fruition, and that can best happen if I get out of the way.

Thanks to all of our beta testers for the fantastic feedback and sticking with us while we figure this thing out. And if you’re keen on a better way to get and give amazing work, keep your eyes peeled for where SuperBooked goes next.

Design Systems: Mastering Design at Scale

Dan Mall — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000

For the last few years, the majority of my work has been with organizations that either need help creating a design system or need help evolving one. I've been fortunate to do that with with my superfriends and colleagues Josh Clark and Brad Frost. We've worked both individually and collectively with organizations like ExxonMobil, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, athenahealth, Target, IQVIA, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Progressive Insurance, Rescue.org, and more. Now, we’ve partnered with our superfriends at InVision to share some of our learnings with the world. We’re proud to to announce Design Systems: Mastering Design at Scale!

We’ll be releasing a few more episodes over the coming months on topics like getting buy-in, collaboration, governance, and more. Enjoy!

Work With Me to Redesign the Shop Talk Show Website

Dan Mall — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 10:38:00 +0000

On Episode 329 of Shop Talk Show, I joined Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert to talk about the role portfolios have in getting a ful-time job, and how you can increase your odds of getting a job. We talked about many things, one of which was the all-time popular objection: “But I don’t have anything good to put in my portfolio!” So, we’re putting our money where our mouth is and looking for an up-and-coming new designer to work with me to redesign the Shop Talk Show website!

Here’s the deal: I’ll creative direct it, you design it. That means I’ll be providing oversight, ideas, inspiration, and guidance while you do the actual pixel-pushing in Sketch/Photoshop/Figma/whatever to make the screens we’ll all need. Chris and Dave act as clients, but will also be coding what we come up with.

We want this to be an opportunity for a designer who might have have something like it otherwise. If you have lots of portfolio pieces, this probably isn’t the gig for you. If you work full-time as a designer somewhere, this probably isn’t the gig for you.

Some criteria for our ideal designer:

You’re in an underrepresented group in this field.
You’re looking to change careers from whatever you’re currently doing into becoming a full-time designer.
You need an opportunity like this project to break into the field, because you’ve had a difficult time getting someone to hire you to do design work for them.
You have some tolerance for hard work and transparency. Chris, Dave, and I all have an affinity for working in public, so that’ll likely be some part of this. Be prepared for some amount of live-streaming conversations, posting work before it’s done, and being able to publicly track the progress of this work.
You’re a Shop Talk Show listener (at have least listened to an episode or two).

Still here? Great! We’re taking applications for this opportunity until about October 1, at which time we’ll sort through the applications to see if there’s a good fit. Without further ado…

Apply here!

Chris, Dave, and I would love any comments or feedback you have about how we can make this better for everyone involved (including those sitting on the sidelines, watching all this unfold). If you have any questions, tweet at me, either publicly or privately.

Let’s make something great!

A Portfolio Hiring Managers Can’t Deny

Dan Mall — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 17:32:00 +0000

For designers and developers, one thing stands high above résumés, cover letters, and university degrees: the esteemed portfolio. A great portfolio can get you a high-paying, life-restoring job, even if you don’t have much or any schooling. The converse is also true: you may have many degrees and lots of experience listed on a résumé, but unless you can demonstrate it through a portfolio, that great job opportunity may still pass you by.

What makes for a good portfolio? In a sentence, a portfolio that has the highest likelihood of landing a job indicates you already have the skills to do what you’ll be hired to do. Will you be expected to design inventive user interfaces for senior citizens? That’s what should be in your portfolio. Is that potential job expecting that you’ll build React apps using Redux and LotusNotes? Time to break out that “Domino for Dummies” book.

Many designers and developers think of a portfolio as a simple way to collect the things they’ve worked on over the last few years of their careers. While that might make your mama proud, it’s a distraction from the fact that a portfolio has a job to do—namely, to get you a job.

If you do want to collect your work somewhere, call it a “time capsule” or “archive.” And while those might help to get you a job, there are much better ways to land your dream gig than by just putting a random smattering of work in a place.

Therefore, the first step in crafting a great portfolio is identifying what job you’re actually trying to get. Half of that is identifying the company you’d like to work for; the other half is identifying the specific job you want at that company. Once you know those things, you can create a specific message that addresses why you’d be a great fit for that job at that company.

You might already see the conundrum with that approach: even with the same title, every job is at least slightly different from company to company. A Senior Product Designer job at online medical care appointment booking service Zocdoc is different than a Senior Product Designer job at meal kit service Plated. There’s certainly overlap in the details: both companies are in New York, involve interdisciplinary collaboration, and require facilitation as well as execution skills. But the big stuff couldn’t be more different. Plated is looking for a designer to “help them craft beautiful and engaging experiences that help people transform dinnertime.” Zocdoc is looking for a designer to help create “the next generation of patient and provider experiences to help us transform healthcare.”

How could one portfolio possibly communicate both messages clearly? There probably aren’t many designers out there that already have the skills and experience to rethink meals and transform healthcare. Hiring managers know this. At best, a singular portfolio would probably only be able to abstract the messages to say, “I’m good at creating experiences.” See how much more watered down that is? By generalizing, you put the onus on the person evaluating your portfolio to draw their own conceptual line between your experience and their needs. A good portfolio would do that work for them.

Remember, most managers don’t have training in being managers. No one ever taught them how to interview designers or developers. The easier you make their jobs—finding and landing qualified candidates—by presenting yourself as the person they’ve been looking for, the better the outcome for you.

Which brings us to this potentially unpopular guideline for portfolios: every job you apply for should have its own portfolio. That’s right: if you’re applying for 4 jobs, you should have 4 different portfolios. A great portfolio shows the hiring manager why you’re perfect for that job, and perhaps that job only. That means it may be a bad fit if you tried to reuse the same portfolio for another another job without at least significant modifications.

Whenever I mention this Multiple Portfolio Strategy™ to designers and developers looking for new jobs, they scoff. It’s difficult enough to create one portfolio; tripling or quadrupling that effort seems virtually impossible. But let’s appropriately qualify expectations: you’re looking for a hiring manager to agree to pay you tens—or even hundreds—of thousands of dollars a year, based on something you whip together in a weekend? A good portfolio is an investment: the larger initial loss you can take in terms of how much effort you can put it, the larger the potential for gain at the end of that process.

How easily can I already see this person working here? A great portfolio answers that question as clearly possible before any in-person interviews.

My favorite recent example of these guidelines in action is the site Francine Tamakloe put together to apply at Spotify. This site speaks directly to the role music has played in her life. She uses Spotify’s typographic style and gradient color palette. She frames her work style via song lyrics and embeds a Spotify player of each song nearby. I don’t know the details, but her Twitter bio says she’s now “hustlin’ at Spotify,” and I can imagine this site played a big part in that.

Imagine if she wanted to work at Apple too. A simple “Find & Replace” from “Spotify” to “Apple” wouldn’t really do the trick. This is a “go big or go home” approach. So many designers and developers think of their portfolios as “one size fits all,” and then are baffled as to why they can’t land any job, much less their dream one.

That’s not to say that you have to completely reinvent everything from scratch for every company you want to apply to. There’s some overlap to take advantage of (which we’ll discuss shortly). But each portfolio should speak directly to a hiring manager about a specific position and how well you fit it.

A template for a great portfolio #

In evaluating potential candidates, many hiring managers have criteria that looks something like this:

Does the candidate have the skills to succeed at this job? For example, can they already write Rails code for apps that millions of people use simultaneously? Or, can they take a concept from a whiteboard sketch to a polished interface design without much help from others?
Can the candidate prove that they have the skills to succeed at this job?
If they don’t already have the skills, how long would it take to learn them? Each organization has its own tolerance for this. Organizations under stakeholder and/or shareholder pressure may want you to get up to speed in a few weeks, while others may be willing to give you up to a year to get your bearings. Beware: this tolerance is rarely discussed internally or even acknowledged. It’s often “just a feeling” that the hiring manager may have.
How well would the candidate fit in here? Are they like everyone else on the team? If not, is the difference one that will make everyone here better or make everyone here feel awkward?

Though the specific criteria will likely vary, it can often be summarized like this: how easily can I already see this person working here? A great portfolio answers that question as clearly as possible before any in-person interviews.

What could that portfolio look like?

Let’s say I wanted to apply for this Senior Designer, North America Retail Experience Design position at Nike. First, I’d find the person or people who may be reviewing this, and I’d address it to them. For this job, I might address it to Junichi Otake, Experience Design Director Retail Innovation at Nike. I don’t know him personally, but I have 50 mutual connections with him on LinkedIn, so perhaps I could have someone who knows us both introduce us.

As far as the content of that portfolio goes, here’s a rough wireframe of what that might be on there:

The important bits:

An opening statement, addressed to a particular person, introducing myself and stating clearly why I’d be a great fit for the position.
A collection of my work, specifically tailored to speak to this particular job description. For example, this job description uses specific phrases like “product presentation“ and “retail business targets,” so I used those same phrases in talking about my work.
Something special about me professionally or personally that sets me above everyone else applying for this job. I’m not just another designer; I’m a designer that’s also a sneakerhead.

Remember: this is a love letter to your dream job, so pour as much of yourself into it as you can! As you can probably tell, I used the most vanilla layout I could for this example, but the finished version is another opportunity to show you’re right for the company. Bonus points for:

Using the same/similar typefaces and color scheme as the company
Referencing some extra research you did, like info from a podcast or a trade magazine
Pictures of you attending that company’s events, evidence of you being a longtime customer, or other things that may distinguish you from other candidates

The intention here is to answer some of the questions the hiring manager might have before they even ask it. For example, they may think, “How would Dan would handle working on Nike+, which has both digital and physical components?“ I answer that—in advance, in my portfolio, before they actually ask me—in my portfolio piece for Crayola, which has both digital and physical components. They might wonder, “Would Dan work well on a large team like ours?” Which I answer in portfolio pieces about working with different team sizes. They might be curious as to whether or not I’d even like working there, to which my sneaker fetish callouts would answer that it’d be a slice of heaven for me. You get the idea.

Reframing portfolios (even if only in your own mind) #

This section was added on September 7, 2018, five days after the article’s initial publishing.

In response to this article, design Fedor Shkliarau pointed out that this may be more of a cover letter than a portfolio. Through that discussion, we arrived at the best term for something like this is a proposal. After I prequalify clients for SuperFriendly projects, I’ll often put together a collection—whether that’s a short email of links or a 100-page, beautifully-designed PDF—of past work that’s contextualized to the particular problem they’re asking us to help them solve.

For the pedants among us, you’re right that the definition of “portfolio” is literally “a collection of past work, used to demonstrate ability.” However, for designers and developers, the connotation of the word has been elevated to often be the sole determinant in whether or not one is awarded a job. Though I believe we could use a new word to represent this idea, “portfolio” is the word our industry currently uses, so it seems more pragmatic in the short-term to clarify its intent as opposed to getting people to change what word they use.

A good portfolio is no different. In fact, it may even be easier to put together than a services inquiry. With a services inquiry, I sometimes know very little about the company, and all I have to rely on for my response is a short conversation I may have had with a client. With a portfolio for an agency, you have all of their past work to look at to determine what’s important to them. With a portfolio for a startup or product shop, you can look at the product(s) they make to understand what kind of company they are. For both, you can also research some of the people who work there to find out what qualities and skills they posses that landed them their jobs.

Thinking of this as a proposal instead of a portfolio can justify why it should be custom every time and help free you from the standard thinking that they way to get a job is to send a link to your online junk drawer or past projects.

While none of this is a plug-and-play template, I hope this gives you a starting point for how to spruce up your portfolio proposal to say the appropriate things in appropriate ways to the people you want to hire you. Happy job hunting!

Though I don’t necessarily agree with everything in these articles, there’s lots of good stuff to think about:

The Most Important Page on Your Portfolio, by Tobias van Schneider
How to Get the Work You Want, by Dan Mall
How to Build an Impressive Portfolio When You’re New to Tech, by Randle Browning on Skillcrush’s The Hard Refresh
The dos and don’ts of perfect portfolios, by Tobias van Schneider on Creative Bloq
How to create a web design portfolio on Creative Bloq
My (Simple) Workflow To Design And Develop A Portfolio Website, by Adham Dannaway on Smashing Magazine
Designer Matthew Smith writes about his experience in trying to get a job at esteemed graphic design studio Louise Fili.
The First Five Years: What Should be in your Portfolio?, by Mitch Goldstein on 99u
Why Your Portfolio’s Not Getting You The Job You Want, by Tobias van Schneider

Designer + Developer Workflow

Dan Mall — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 22:31:00 +0000

The way designers and developers work together today is broken. It’s too siloed and separate; “collaboration” is a fantasy that few enjoy.

The state of advertising in the 1940s was similar. The all-powerful copywriter took what the clients wanted to say—usually simply the features of their product—and turned it into a headline and body copy. Then, they’d hand that copy to an account executive who would run it to another floor and literally slide that paper under a door to the art department to “visualize” the final ad. Artists simply followed the copywriter’s orders. It was very rare that the copywriter and the artist would actually know each other.

All of that changed when copywriter Bill Bernbach met art director Paul Rand. Rand once remarked about working with Bernbach, “This was my first encounter with a copywriter who understood visual ideas and who didn’t come in with a yellow copy pad and a preconceived notion of what the layout should look like.” Contrary to the siloed dynamic at the time, they’d take lunch breaks together to visit art museums and galleries; they became good friends.

Their collaborative working style led to the birth of the idea of “the creative team,” the mutual respect and partnership between art director and copywriter that tended to yield unique results. Bob Gage, an art director that worked for DDB, the agency Bernbach co-founded, described it like this:

Two people who respect each other sit in the same room for a length of time and arrive at a state of… free association, where the mention of one idea will lead to another idea, then to another. The art director might suggest a headline, the writer a visual. The entire ad is conceived as a whole, in a kind of ping pong between disciplines.

Isn’t that what we all strive for in our jobs True collaboration with equals and partners? Ideas that build off one another? Why does this seem so far away for some of us?

A new workflow in action #

I’m fortunate to work fairly often with my good friend Brad Frost, and one of the things I love most about working with him is that we both actively pursue that ping pong momentum within our collective work.

Brad and I both do our fair share of workshops with designers and developers that would love to have a more collaborative dynamic with their co-workers. While they’re all typically on-board with the theory of collaborating more, they also seemed a bit stumped as to what that actually looks like from minute to minute.

So, Brad and I decided to record an almost-two-hour-long video of us working together:

There’s a lot that we cover in here, and we barely scratch the surface. Here’s a quick list of concepts we cover in this walkthrough:

Working quickly and roughly with element collages
The importance of workshop and storefront environments
Stealing from and remixing existing interfaces to create something original
The folly of relying too heavily on static design tools
A reminder that development is design

And lots more! In fact, we barely even finish the page we’re working on, mostly because we’re talking through what we’re doing rather than solely doing the work. If there’s enough interest, we may do a few more of these so you can see it all come to fruition.

For more info, please check out Brad’s thoughts about all of this in his post, Designer + Developer Workflow.

We’d love to hear any feedback you might have about all this. Is this a new kind of workflow for you? Is this how you’ve worked for years? Interested in working this way at your company but not sure where to start? Let us know what questions you have, and thanks for reading and watching!

Smashing Conference Toronto 2018

Dan Mall — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 15:06:00 +0000

Over a year ago, Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine asked me if I’d be game to do a conference talk without slides, something more about showing work in action.

I was immediately excited to do it, as I could immediately think of how I’d do that, since I do that almost daily with my apprentices. (I previously wrote down the details of that framework in Stealing Your Way to Original Designs.)

I normally don’t stress too much about talks nowadays as I’ve given my fair share of them, but this one was a bit different. Trying to do final prep the night before was difficult, because I didn’t have slides to review. Also, because of the format of the talk, I didn’t want to prep extensively. Too much prep might dilute the whole concept of showing how I make decisions while designing.

So I decided the best prep would probably to get the best night’s sleep I could get.

Yesterday, I gave that talk.

I planned to redesign the RAICES site on stage. In my rough rehearsals, I designed a fair bit of the site. On stage, all I got to was buttons. 😶

I walked off stage uneasy about the talk, and felt uneasy about it all day. One thing I’m most proud of is my talks is feeling like like share a lot. With this one, I don’t think I shared enough. The feedback I got from attendees was all nice, but I also know that people who hated it probably wouldn’t come up to me to say so.

After sleeping on it though, now I feel great about the talk. Two pieces of feedback I got that stand out:

A few designers felt validated in their processes by seeing mine.
A few developers said design felt less intimidating now, both to understand as well as to try.

As a speaker, that’s more than a great outcome. Upon reflection, getting an outcome like that without spending weeks and months laboring over crafting the “perfect” narrative for just the right sequence and quantity of slides is wonderful!

I tend to view my talks as a performance. And I think there’s merit to that. But I hadn’t considered much that there’s another format that can achieve similar outcomes. In the language of Blair Enns’ Win Without Pitching Manifesto, I could “replace presentations with conversations.” I do that almost completely in client work but not for conferences.

I didn’t expect this, but I’m now seriously considering this format as a way I do talks at other conferences. (I’d love feedback about that from other conference organizers, if you have opinions.)

All this is to say: thanks to Vitaly and the Smashing Magazine and Smashing Conference crew for challenging the typical format. I learned a lot about how I can be a better speaker.

Distinct Design Systems

Dan Mall — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 03:04:36 +0000

Do we have too many design systems?

Clearly, I’m biased: most of SuperFriendly’s work nowadays involves either creating a design system or modifying one as part of a larger effort for a client. But why even go through any of that effort in the first place?

When I started researching design systems for Unity, the design system we made for ExxonMobil, my biggest observation was that the digital design systems out at the time were extremely generic. There’s a lot of benefit to that: part of the job of a design system is to take care of the boring stuff to free you up to tackle the more exciting and challenging bits, so some amount of convention is expected and encouraged. That genericness is what allows designers and developers to create quickly, not to overthink our interfaces and unnecessarily reinvent the wheel. It’s no surprise that Bootstrap is as popular as it is: you can build something significant with even a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JS without a lot of fuss. And a quick search on UpLabs shows how much can be done with Google’s Material Design.

Sometimes, though, we need better tools. In fact, a lot of our design system work has used “better than Bootstrap” or “more meaningful than Material” as a creative brief or rallying cry of sorts. But what does it mean to be better? Every client I work with has at least one problem or challenge that Bootstrap or Material Design didn’t anticipate. That’s not to disparage those tools; it was never their job to do in the first place. This is where a distinct design system can be helpful: to solve your organization’s unique problems in a way a generic tool isn’t designed to help with.

Relying on Principles

Web developer and author Jeremy Keith shares some great wisdom about design systems:

It’s not very useful to create a library of patterns without providing any framework for using those patterns.

Often times, that framework comes in the form of principles, which is likely why most design systems have them. Design Principles FTW describes two types of principles: universal and specific. The problem is that most design systems stop at universal principles. For example, SAP Fiori’s design principles are all universal. While “delightful” and “simple” apply to Fiori, they also apply to, well, every other design system too. I’m not implying malice or ignorance here; I think that’s a result of 1) the difficulty of writing great, specific principles and 2) the fact that having only universal principles are better than having nothing at all.

In contrast, TiVo has specific design principles like:

It’s entertainment, stupid.
It’s TV, stupid.
It’s video, dammit.

Very brand! Such tone! Those wouldn’t work for a car manufacturer or a tech company. Specific design principles should fit your organization perfectly and look awkward on everyone else.

I’d love to see every design system strive for an only-ness, some unique angle or aspect that other design systems don’t cater to. Your product or organization probably has a specific perspective on the problem it’s trying to solve in the world; your design system should reflect, refract, and reverberate that position. (If your organization doesn’t have that differentiation, you’ve got some foundational identity work to do.)

That only-ness doesn’t have only to be principle-driven; it could come directly from the mission of your company. In Vox Media senior design director Yesenia Perez-Cruz’s talk, Building Flexible Design Systems, she nails what Vox’s design system is built for: telling better stories, faster. That clear purpose drives what components they need, what scenarios to design for, and what they can work toward together.

Reverse-engineering principles from components

One workflow tip I’ve tried to put to good use is that you don’t have to define principles before you create components; it’s not a one-way street. Many times, you can derive your principles from how the work gets done. Designer Mark Boulton shares his experience with this flexibility around design principles:

…a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work.

A team can do this because the general public can too. Here’s a quick inventory of a handful of design systems and the components they contain:

	Carbon Design System	Lightning Design System	U.S. Web Design System	Atlassian Design	Quickbooks Design System	FutureLearn	Polaris by Shopify
Accordion	•	•	•		•
Action List							•
Activity Timeline		•
Alert/Flag Messages		•	•	•
App Launcher		•
Arrow Toggle						•
Avatar		•		•		•
Badges		•		•	•	•
Banners				•			•
Billboard						•
Boombox						•
Brand Band		•
Breadcrumb	•	•		•
Builder Header		•
Button Groups		•			•		•
Button Icons		•
Buttons	•	•	•	•	•	•	•
Callout Cards							•
Caption							•
Cards		•			•		•
Carousel		•
Chat		•
Checkbox	•	•		•	•	•	•
Checkbox Buttons Group		•
Checkbox Toggle		•
Checkbox		•
Code Snippet	•
Color Picker		•			•		•
Combobox		•
Context Switcher	•
Data table	•	•					•
Data vis	•
Date Picker	•	•		•	•		•
Datetime Picker		•		•
Description List							•
Dividers						•
Docked Composer		•
Docked Form Footer		•
Docked Utility Bar		•
Drawers					•
Dropdown			•	•
Drop Zone							•
Dueling Picklist		•
Dynamic Icons		•
Dynamic Menu		•
Empty State							•
End of Flow Confirmation					•
Expandable Section		•
Exception List
Explanation						•
Featurebox						•
Feeds		•
File Selector/Uploader	•	•
Files		•
Flag						•
Flyout					•
Footers			•	•
Form	•	•	•		•	•	•
Global Header		•	•		•
Global Navigation		•
Grids			•
Headings						•	•
Icons		•					•
Illustration		•
Info Link					•
Labels			•
Link	•				•		•
List	•				•		•
List Builder		•
Loading/Spinners	•	•		•	•		•
Logos in Product				•
Lookups		•
Lozenges		•
Map		•
Menus		•		•
Modal	•	•		•	•		•
Multi-select				•
Notification	•	•			•
Overflow Menu	•
Page Headers		•
Pagination	•			•			•
Panels		•
Path		•
Picklist		•
Pills		•
Popovers		•			•		•
Progress Bar		•		•	•		•
Progress Indicator		•		•
Progress Ring		•				•
Progress Toggle		•				•
Promo Banner						•
Prompt		•
Publishers		•
Quiz Progress Nav						•
Range Slider							•
Radio button/Choice List	•			•	•	•	•
Resource List
Ribbons						•
Rich Text Editor		•
Scoped Notifications		•
Scoped Tabs		•
Search	•		•
Select	•	•		•			•
Setup Assistant		•
Signpost						•
Slider	•	•
Split View		•
Spotlight						•
Step Number						•
Structured List	•
Summary Detail		•
Tabs	•	•		•	•		•
Tables			•	•	•	•
Tag	•			•			•
Testimonial					•
Textarea		•			•		•
Text Input	•		•	•	•		•
Thumbnail							•
Tile	•	•
Timestamp						•
Timepicker		•
Toast					•
Toggle/Switch	•			•		•	•
Tooltip	•	•		•	•		•
Trees		•
Trial Bar		•
Trowser					•
Typeahead		•			•
Vertical Navigation/Side Navigation		•	•
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By looking across components in aggregate, we can very clearly see what the boring stuff is, because most of these design systems have them. That’s stuff like buttons and form elements, as just about all of these design systems seem to contain them.

More interesting, however, are the components that only appear in one of these design systems. (Ignore the ones that look isolated but are actually just a result of non-standard taxonomies for components.) They start to give you a clue as to the unique value proposition of each design system. For example, FutureLearn’s Quiz Progress Nav only seems appropriate in environments where one is being tested online, which already starts to give you a clue as to what FutureLearn does.

Emmet Connolly, director of product design for Intercom, calls this a full stack design system. He suggests building everything around the core objects of your brand or organization. Here are some examples of what that might be for some well-known companies:

Facebook: Friend, Post, Message, Event, Page, Group.
Airbnb: Listing, Host, Guest, Trip, Experience.
Slack: Team, Member, Channel, Message, Reaction, Thread.
Intercom: Customer, Teammate, Message, Conversation, Article.

By focusing on this kind of specificity, I think we’ll see a lot more innovative and interesting design systems pop up in the near future. I sure hope so!

Special thanks to Stephanie Rewis for her eagle-eye QA skills.

The Only-ness Statement

Dan Mall — Wed, 02 May 2018 05:55:00 +0000

Creating an Only-ness Statement is one of my favorite exercises to do with new clients. I first came across it in my friend Jän Paul Ostendorf’s Brand Formation Workbook, who found it in Marty Neumeier’s book Zag.

It’s a simple premise: every brand on the planet should be able to say what it’s the only one of. Marty suggests this simple format:

What:
How:
Who:
Where:
Why:
When:

Here’s an example. Harley-Davidson is:

What	The only motorcycle manufacturer
How	that makes big, loud motorcycles
Who	for macho guys (and macho wannabes)
Where	mostly in the United States
Why	who want to join a gang of cowboys
When	in an era of decreasing personal freedom.

A great test of the only-ness statement is to put a competitor’s name in place and see if it still fits. Slotting in Triumph Motorcycles or Suzuki or Yamaha makes this statement awkward at best and inaccurate at worst; therefore, it’s a worthy statement for Harley-Davidson.

Jan suggests a slightly different framing—a sort-of mad libs style—which I find a little easier to use:

I’ll often use this exercise in workshops with large groups. The format is similar to a design studio setup. I’ll start by giving each person 2 worksheets to fill out over 8 minutes. Once the 8 minutes are up, I’ll pair people together and ask them to create one worksheet between the two of them. That could mean using whichever one version is best, or maybe the pair creates a brand new one with the best of each of their ideas. Groups of two get combined into groups of four people, then eight… you get the idea. The ultimate output is two or three versions that conceivably reflect the best or most rallying ideas in the room. For example, when we worked with Dotdash to create new home and lifestyle site The Spruce, here were the three final only-ness statements that we used to drive our creative direction for the whole project:

This is the only home and food website that simplifies and empowers DIYers and aspiring superheroes who want to conquer their to-do list and feel proud during a time of perceived and unachievable perfection.

This is the only immersive home life site that gives you what you came for and more for people like you who want to feel good about what you come home to during a time of increasing choice and decreasing bandwidth.

This is the only lifestyle brand that gives practical, real-world advice and ideas for the roll-up-your-sleeves crowd and those looking for inspiration who want to reinvigorate their home life with small victories during a time when food and home trends feel unattainable.

You can simultaneously see different themes emerging in each, but there are also more than a few common threads among them too. This type of clarity and insight can lead to unique strategy for any brand.

Next time you start work with a new client—or heck, maybe you use your own business or employer as a test—feel free to give this a shot to see if it gives you a new perspective. Good luck!

How to Scope Work

Dan Mall — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 08:31:00 +0000

After four days of working together, she finally admitted, “No one ever taught me how to scope.” I was working with one of my clients’ senior developers to map out exactly how we were going to get all of the work done that we needed, but a few frustrating hours of going in circles finally revealed the culprit. It’s a problem I’ve seen from very junior to some of the most senior employees I’ve worked with.

Simply put, I like to define scope as:

A description of all the work that needs to get done, and
The time needed to do said work.

That can be as simple as building a website in 5 days or as complex as organizing an entire ad campaign. Regardless, the formula remains intact.

Good scoping is often a case of simple arithmetic; by the time you were 8 or 9 years old, you’ve had the skills to scope well. So why is it so difficult? You’re mostly fighting the psychology of it all.

If I asked you if you could build a website (of any given complexity) in 6 months, I’d bet your answer would be, “Probably.” That’s the valence effect at play: your tendency to think that more good will happen to you than bad. Throw a little Parkinson’s law in there (the adage that work expands to fill the time available for its completion) and that explains why you’ve taken way longer on every project than you should have—and felt good about it to boot. The reality is closer to Hofstadter’s law: it always takes longer than you expect (even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law). Rather than relying on gut feelings, we can use math to figure out if you’ll meet your deadlines.

Budgeting time #

If you’re like most people (and like me), it’s difficult to save money. Let’s say you’re trying to save $6,000 for a vacation next year. That’s a daunting task at first glance, but it becomes easier when you break it down. Instead of looking at it as $6k, look at it as $500/month ($6,000 ÷ 12 months). Or maybe it’s $125/week ($500 ÷ 4 weeks). Or $25/day ($125 ÷ 5 days). When you look at it that way, for every day you go to work, skip your Starbucks coffee, pack a lunch, throw that $25 in a jar, and watch that vacation happen in no time. By breaking it down into digestible chunks, it’s much more manageable!

If it helps, think of scoping like a budget for your time.

Building a website in 5 days #

Let’s take the simple example from earlier: building a website in 5 days. If it’s a 5-page website, our basic math skills (5 pages ÷ 5 days) tell us that we need to average building about 1 page per day. So far, our workload would look like this:

	Workload
Monday	1 page
Tuesday	1 page
Wednesday	1 page
Thursday	1 page
Friday	1 page

But we can break that down even further, because building a page has three components to it: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So, let’s divide a typical 9am–5pm workday into four parts (because lunch is incredibly important too, kids):

Monday	Page 1
	HTML	9:00am–11:00am
	CSS	11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch	1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript	2:00pm–5:00pm
Tuesday	Page 2
	HTML	9:00am–11:00am
	CSS	11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch	1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript	2:00pm–5:00pm
Wednesday	Page 3
	HTML	9:00am–11:00am
	CSS	11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch	1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript	2:00pm–5:00pm
Thursday	Page 4
	HTML	9:00am–11:00am
	CSS	11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch	1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript	2:00pm–5:00pm
Friday	Page 5
	HTML	9:00am–11:00am
	CSS	11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch	1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript	2:00pm–5:00pm

This is much better! The specificity here can help to assess if this is a realistic plan. But we can break it down even further.

Let’s say the first page has 4 different sections. We can average the time to write the markup for each section, for example:

Monday	Page 1
	HTML	Section 1	9:00am–9:30am
		Section 2	9:30am–10:00am
		Section 3	10:00am–10:30am
		Section 4	10:30am–11:00am
	CSS		11:00am–1:00pm
	Lunch		1:00pm–2:00pm
	JavaScript		2:00pm–5:00pm

You can continue to break down each task further if it’s useful to do so, but, even at this level, you can realistically assess the work. Can you write a section of HTML in 30 minutes? If yes, great! You’re on schedule and will make your timeline. If not, what can you adjust or reorder to make it work?

Herein lies the real beauty of this technique: you’ll know when you’re in danger of missing a deadline days, weeks, or even months in advance. For example, if you haven’t completed Section 3 of Page 1’s HTML by Monday at 10:30am, you’re going to miss your deadline. Sure, it’s possible that you may make up the time later on, but if you’ve estimated realistically and remember Hofstadter’s law, now—4 days in advance—is a good time to ask your client or manager for an extra day, just in case.

Scoping is about appropriately setting expectations for yourself, your team, and your clients and managers. It’s a rare skill that separates the amateurs from the professionals. Which one are you?

Stealing Your Way to Original Designs

Dan Mall — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 06:01:00 +0000

I have a framework that I find very helpful in teaching my apprentices how to design. It’s 3 steps:

Here are the details.

1. Imitate

The first step to being just a competent designer—or a competent anything, for that matter—is doing what someone else can do. It’s a test: can you follow directions? Except, instead of following directions you read or hear, you follow directions that you see.

It’s no coincidence that junior designers often get trained up by doing production work after an art director has set an art direction. If the art director makes the main headline 48px bold Helvetica with 16px of margin on each side, do you do the same on every screen you design? Sounds simple, but many junior designers struggle to even get this down. Why? Many want to be chefs but aren’t willing to be line cooks first. It’s not glamorous work, but it builds design muscles, muscles that you’ll need in order to get better and advance to the next step.

Think of it like learning to draw by tracing. In fact, it’s literally the same thing. The first few assignments of my designers’ apprenticeships are taking screenshots of existing websites, pasting them into Sketch or Photoshop, dropping the opacity and locking the layer, and tracing over it to produce the same layout, colors, illustrations, typography, and everything else needed to reproduce the site pixel for pixel.

In his article Copy If You Can: Improving Your UI Design Skills With Copywork, Erik Kennedy extols the virtues of copywork as a great way to practice and hone UI design skills. Even more, it gets you out of going to your usual bag of tricks and instead gives you new ones to add.

Done right, copywork exposes you to design decisions you simply wouldn’t have made on your own.

Erik Kennedy

Whether new to design or a seasoned creative director, this simple exercise will get you warmed up, like stretching before a long run.

2. Remix

Once you can confidently imitate any style you come across, you can start to tweak the elements to feel more custom to the way you need to use it. This step has the least parameters and needs the least guidelines, because it’s up to your imagination and the amount of changes you’re willing to try.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun. Said differently, everything is a remix. Freed from the pressure that all things designers do need to be original works of art, I can instead focus my efforts on what sources to combine in a unique way that my audience is less accustomed to.

3. Invent

Pablo Picasso is well known for his original Cubist work, but most people don’t know that he was an excellent classical artist first. He could draw and paint photorealism as well as any of the great masters, but it wasn’t until he got that down that he ventured into his own unknown stylistic territory.

In his Wall Street Journal article, The Genius of the Tinkerer, author Steven Johnson describes a concept he calls the adjacent possible. He tells the story of a young orthopedic surgeon who, while diving in the Great Barrier Reef, observes a species of coral that seem to be able to heal itself as it breaks. Years later, while operating on a patient, he recalls this coral and its amazing bonding powers. Several years and patents later, his method is the leading way that orthopedic surgeons around the world help their patients mend their broken bones.

The adjacent possible is about taking two seemingly unconnected ideas and metaphorically placing them next to each other to see how they might work together. Clients often hire me to invent unique and original art directions for them. I can deliver on this by using the adjacent possible to steal my way to something original.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.

Steven Johnson

Let’s look at how this works in practice.

Say SpaceZzzz™ hired me to create a site to advertise a new service they’re offering: rental properties on different planets. They’d get you there, you stay as long as you’d like, and they’ll get you back. Think Uber meets Airbnb meets Interstellar.

The first thing I’ll do is make a list of all of the types of content I’ll need on the homepage. After talking to stakeholders and potential users in the target market, perhaps I’d arrive at 5 different sections:

An elevator pitch about the new service
A featured destination (or a few features)
Some details about what people may be anxious about, like long travel or planetary accommodations
Price
Contact details

To start, I’ll block out these main sections with a few gray boxes.

Next, I’ll start to choose a few reference sources to imitate. This is key: be sure to choose sources far away from what you’re designing. If you’re designing a bank site, don’t choose another bank site as reference, especially within the same competitive set. Since we may be modeling this after Airbnb, using Airbnb as a reference is probably too close to feel original. One trick I often use is to start smaller. Rather than try to use a whole page as a reference, I’ll pick a few different designs to source different elements from.

I’ll stub out each section by simply copying and pasting from my source material into my gray box document. (I’m using Photoshop for this example because it’s where I’m fastest, but you can use any design app you prefer.) This sets me up with something to imitate and remix.

Next, I’ll trace over my stubbed-out version with simple shapes to get a feel for how it could work together. I’ll also start to remix a bit by choosing some new colors. I own this Nike Witness shirt and thought these colors would work well for this subject matter.

Now I’ll fill in some text content by tracing over the text of the original stubs, but trying to unify them by remixing them with the same typeface. I decide on PT Sans and PT Mono and use this stage to start working out some sizing of headlines and body copy to rough out my typographic hierarchy.

Now that I have a good approximation of all my content, I’ll start to draw a grid so I can organize that content appropriately. My approach to grids has always been to start with content and use the least amount of columns possible. Looking at the Locations section, that’s a pretty good candidate for 4 equal-width columns, so I’ll start there.

However, as I look at the top hero and FAQ areas, I realize that some of those headings need to start in the middle of a column, so I’ll split the 4-column grid into 8 columns instead.

I’ve written about using an 8-point grid before—which I’m using increasingly more in my own work—so all my spacings and type sizes here are a multiple of 8.

A 4-column grid

An 8-column grid

That 8-column grid is looking pretty good everywhere except for the Pricing table. That section contains 5 specific areas:

Features
Basic
Pro
Teams
Corporate

5 sections over 8 columns doesn’t divide evenly, so I’ll need another split. By subdividing into 16 columns, that’ll let me do a 4-column feature listing and 3 columns for each of the plans. 16 columns it is.

A 16-column grid

All content realigned to the new 16-column grid

I’m ready to start inserting more of my content into this shell, specifically my own copy and artwork 1 . The key to stealing in a way that leads to something original is that your result needs to be unrecognizable from the source material as much as possible. Take the hero unit for example.

It’s easy to compare this to the original source and tell where it came from. Flipping the orientation of elements is a really useful way to to get around that. Let’s move the main headline and the call to action to the opposite side of the screen.

Let’s add our own artwork.

The artwork goes a long way into making this feel original, but there’s still one more thing we need to do. That notched-out call to action is such a unique piece that it’s become signature to the original source. It still feels like someone could identify the source from that element.

Instead of notching it out, let’s do a colorblocked overlap call-to-action. Once I do that, I realize the opportunity to mirror that visual language on the top left with the logo. Given that the original source is so flat, I’ll add a subtle drop shadow to give those elements some depth.

You can see that, with just a few moves, I’ve moved this away from an interface I’ve stolen to something that feels way more original.

If I take that approach to each element of this page—just a few moves each to distinguish it from its original source—I can easily go from a design I’ve stolen to an original version I’ve invented on my own.

And lastly, a side-by-side comparison for effect.

I hope this was a useful primer in showing you how to steal you way to an original design. In the words of English philosopher C.E.M. Joad, “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” The more obscure your references, the more sources you combine, the more moves away from the original you can take, the more original your design will become.

For those that want to dissect the final source file in more detail, you can download the PSD (51.2MB) here.

Good luck with your stealing!

The wonderful artwork in this comp was graciously borrowed from artists publishing their work on the web. Credits: NASA STS-122 Rollout, Space/The Beast Below, Kasai by JosephBiwald, BOXXX-3W by beeple, Pioneers Again by Morris Scott Dollens, and Waterfall Stations by Christian Schumann.2.
Designer Ross Floate wrote Pretty URLs Make Graves, a rebuttal to this article.
Developer Mark Huot used these files as an exercise to learn more about React. Follow along on the interplanetary Github repo.

Design Systems: Pilots & Scorecards

Dan Mall — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 04:05:52 +0000

Pilots are one of the best ways to put your design system through its paces, especially before the design system even gets to a v1. Like television pilots help test audience reactions to a series concept without investing significant resources to create the whole thing, application pilots are a good foundation for ensuring your design system’s design and code are battle-tested.

Here is how my teams and I identify great pilot candidates.

First, we want to know what kinds of digital products a design system should help our client to make. We’ll ask them to tee up as many product presentations as they can muster. They’ll usually do this by either generating a list of product owners that tend to be early adopters/risk takers, or they’ll issue an open call for willing participants.

We review anywhere from dozens to hundreds of existing products to get a good lay of the land for what the organization makes regularly and supports. This might be walking through products in person or on a screenshare with a product owner, asking questions and exploring as many of the hidden crevasses as possible. It also could be clicking through public or private apps ourselves, inventorying what’s common.

Simultaneously, we’ll also do an interface inventory, taking note of the frequency of usage of common components.

We’ll then try and reverse-engineer where our Pareto principle comes into play: what 20% can we design and build that can assuage 80% of the wheel reinvention pain?

There’s a sweet spot for great pilot candidates after planning for the pilot has begun but before it gets designed or built. If a product isn’t far enough along in planning, we likely don’t know enough about it to say whether it’ll make for a good pilot or not. But if it’s already in the process of being created or recreated, it’s probably too far along to be able to integrate parts—read: component design, patterns, and/or working code—from the design system without some amount of refactor, which teams in need of a design system often can’t afford.

I’m talking specifically about products that are being built from scratch or reimagined. However, it’s entirely possible that you may have a product already built that’s clearly a good foundation for a design system. If that’s the case, no need to pilot; instead, extract and abstract the appropriate components and patterns you need. Mobile designer Josh Clark describes this in more detail in his article, “The Most Exciting Design Systems are Boring.”

Once we find a some good potential candidates in that sweet spot, there’s a set of criteria we use to determine a pilot’s potential efficacy:

Potential for common components. Does this pilot have many components that can be reused in other products?
Potential for common patterns. Does this pilot have many patterns that can be reused in other products?
High-value elements. Even if uncommon, is there a component or pattern with high-business value that is the heart of this project? We’re talking elements that are integral to a flow or audience that has unusually high value for the organization.
Technical feasibility. How simple is a technical implementation of the design system? Is a large refactor required?
Available champion. Will someone working on this product see it through and celebrate/evangelize using the design system (and even contributing back to it)?
Scope. Is this work accomplishable in our pilot timeframe of [3–4 weeks] (insert your timing here)?
Technical independence. Is the work decoupled enough from other legacy design and code that there are clear start and end points?
Marketing potential. Will this work excite others to use the design system?

You might already see where we could go with this. Using a simple point system where 1 indicates a low match and 10 indicates high efficacy, you could create a Pilot Scorecard that shows you which products to tackle in priority order:

	Product #1	Product #2	Product #3
Common components potential	10	3	5
Common patterns potential	2	4	4
High-value elements	8	3	2
Technical feasibility	3	1	5
Available champion	5	4	8
Scope	8	3	8
Technical independence	10	7	7
Marketing potential	4	6	2
Totals	50	31	41
Averages	6.25	3.88	5.13

Starting with pilots before you have anything in your design system allows invention to happen in the products. In the next pass of using your design system, you can cook with your new ingredients to make sure you have the right pieces in place.

Have you used pilots in your design systems journeys? How have they helped you?

Thanks to Brad Frost and Josh Clark for helping inspire this insight and reviewing this article.

Bad News. Good News. So What?

Dan Mall — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 06:06:00 +0000

My father-in-law (a retired pastor) shared with me a simple framework he crafted from many years of preaching sermons week after week. Every good story has these three components:

Bad news.
Good news.
So what?

Most people don’t know how to tell a good story, but that’s easily solved with this simple trick. You’ll soon have your listeners hanging on your every word!

(See how I just used that framework? 😉 )

Cooking with Design Systems

Dan Mall — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 16:06:01 +0000

A great design system should equip you to quickly and confidently create delicious user experiences. Creating a great design system is a lot like stocking a very specific kind of kitchen.

Let’s say I run a food truck. I have a small kitchen in said truck, so I need to be judicious in what ingredients I stock. To determine the right ingredients to bring along, I can ask myself a few simple questions:

What dishes will I definitely make? What ingredients do I need to make those dishes?
What dishes might I make? What ingredients do I need to make those dishes?

What’s on my menu? If I run a Mexican street food truck, I’ll have main dishes like tacos, burritos, and quesadillas. I’ll have a few appetizers and sides like street corn, empanadas, and chips & salsa. But, I’ll also need the ingredients that make those mains and sides, even if they’re not specifically listed on my menu—lettuce, tomatoes, cabbage, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, paprika, avocado, rice, jalapeño peppers, tortillas, tomatilos, oregano, cilantro, cheese, etc. These are all the things I’ll need to bring with me onto the truck.

Part of what’s important in what I’m bringing is also what I’m not bringing. Dill and cinnamon are great spices in general, but I don’t plan on making anything with them, so I can leave out for now. (And I can always change my mind later.)

If I’ve been running my food truck for a while, I know that some dishes will almost always get ordered, so I can prep them in advance. I can start cooking rice. I can chop lettuce and cabbage. I can set up my mise en place so that it’s ready for use when customers start ordering.

I can get some headstarts too. I can throw a cup of salsa and a handful of chips into a bag and seal it; no more assembly required. I can also pre-cook beef with onions, spices, and marinade to be ready to throw into a taco or burrito. This one needs to be finished with a tortilla and some veggies, but I don’t need to start from scratch everytime someone orders a beef dish.

It’s helpful for me to think about these things in categories:

Raw ingredients
- Lettuce
- Tomatoes
- Cilantro
- …
Headstarts
- Chips & Salsa
- Beef & Onions
- …
Dishes
- Mains
  - Tacos
    - Chicken
    - Beef
  - Burritos
    - Chicken
    - Beef
  - …
- Sides
  - Street Corn
  - Empanadas
  - …

Turns out this is also a pretty good model for organizing a design system.

Even though many have been using these phrases for years, you can tell it’s still early days regarding things like “design systems,” “component libraries,” and “style guides” because we can’t yet get the words right. Everyone insists that they’re different, but we still use them interchangeably. Canonical definitions for each have yet to emerge. Until they do, I’ll use the ones that best fit for and most appeal to me.

Graphics editors like Photoshop and Sketch allow you—but also force you—to create everything from scratch. A strict component library might encourage you to only use the components as they come without any customization; a good example was Flash’s component library (Bueller?). Design systems fit somewhere in between. A design system is the smallest set of tools to help me effectively create what I need.

It’s worth mentioning that graphics editors and component libraries aren’t mutually exclusive. Most examples in the wild aren’t purely one or the other, or at least easily convert closer to the certain. Add a UI Kit to Sketch and it gets closer to a design system. Add some spacing and sizing tokens to a component library and it gets closer to a design system.

Testing a design system’s efficacy is easy on paper: can you easily create what you intend to? Back to our metaphor, can I quickly make a delicious burrito? Like a well-stocked but limited kitchen, a good design system is a combination of raw ingredients and headstarts to make delicious dishes. It’s as many of these things as you need, and no more.

I wanted to create and maintain this site primarily with a design system—not a graphics editor or a component library—so I brought along a limited pantry:

Raw ingredients (utilities and mixins)
- Text sizes
- Text cases
- Alignments
- Margins
- Paddings
- Displays
- Positions
- Movements
- …
Headstarts
- Headings
- Text passages
- List patterns
- Content boxes
Dishes
- Mains
  - Landing Templates
    - Small list
    - Large list
  - Forms
  - Homepage
  - …
- Sides
  - Headers
  - Footers
  - Navigations
  - Comment Blocks
  - Recirculation Areas
  - …

How did I decide what’s what? I’m glad you asked.

Prolific designer Milton Glaser said, “I move things around until they look right,” Because that’s most of what I do in Photoshop and Sketch, I need a way to do that in code.

First, I need to make the “things” that need to be moved around. That means writing the HTML I need as semantically as possible.

Then, I started to build some “move around” tools. I’m a big fan of how Harry Roberts suggests organizing CSS for maximum maintainability, and I just wrapped a project with Brad Frost and Ian Frost where we used with a similar CSS architecture. I also wanted to try out the 8-point grid that all the kids are raving about.

I created some variables so that I can change spacing globally if the 8-pt thing doesn’t work out.

$spacing: 8;

$xs: $spacing;
$s: $spacing * 2;
$m: $spacing * 3;
$l: $spacing * 4;
$xl: $spacing * 5;
$xxl: $spacing * 6;

Next, some spacing mixins:

@mixin sf-u-margin--0 {
  margin: 0;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--xs {
  margin: $xs + px;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--s {
  margin: $s + px;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--m {
  margin: $m + px;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--l {
  margin: $l + px;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--xl {
  margin: $xl + px;
}

@mixin sf-u-margin--xxl {
  margin: $xxl + px;
}

A few notes about that:

sf- is my namespace for the site. (Stands for “SuperFriendly.”)
u- stands for “utility.” More on this later.
I made a lot of individual mixins for margins (top, right, bottom, left) and padding. Seems like overkill, but comes in really handy.

I also duplicated those mixins in a utilities.scss file so that I could use them in both HTML and CSS:

.sf-u-margin--0 {
  @include sf-u-margin--0;
}

.sf-u-margin--xs {
  @include sf-u-margin--xs;
}

.sf-u-margin--s {
  @include sf-u-margin--s;
}

.sf-u-margin--m {
  @include sf-u-margin--m;
}

.sf-u-margin--l {
  @include sf-u-margin--l;
}

.sf-u-margin--xl {
  @include sf-u-margin--xl;
}

.sf-u-margin--xxl {
  @include sf-u-margin--xxl;
}

It’s not as DRY as I’d like it to be, but I’m happy to trade principle for the pragmatism of moving quickly in code.

Once I feel like I have a thorough enough set of raw ingredients, my goal is to create as much of the site as I can without opening my stylesheet again. If I can do this, I’m using my design system, as opposed to creating patterns on the fly.

Let’s do an example: a basic article page. I’ll start by creating the title of the page:

<h1>Cooking up Design Systems</h1>

I’d like to style this headline to be somewhat large, have a little space on the left, and have some room below. Without a design system, I might create a new class and write some new styles, but remember: I want to use my design system and not add anything new to my stylesheet. So, I’ll use some rules that I’ve already created:

<h1 class="sf-u-padding--l sf-u-margin--xl sf-u-font--l">
  Cooking up Design Systems
</h1>

This style of coding certainly isn’t new; many frameworks like Tachyons, Atomic CSS, or Expressive CSS have suggested this for a long time. The biggest criticism of this approach is that it isn’t much better than writing inline styles, and you lose a lot of the benefits of the cascade that made CSS so powerful in the first place. True, at first glance, it doesn’t look much different than:

<h1 style="font-size: 40px; padding-left: 24px; margin-bottom: 32px;">
  Cooking up Design Systems
</h1>

But I’d argue that there are still a few benefits:

Visual consistency. If you’re using class names instead of inline styles and are using something like the 8-pt grid, you know you won’t ever have a situation where one headline has 16px of padding and another has 17px. You’re using your design system!
A limited pantry. The beauty and the curse that comes with a graphics editor is that the world is your oyster. Want to nudge that particular piece of text over half a pixel? Go for it. Make your developers go crazy and set your OCD users ablaze. Using your already established conventions through class names gives you a beneficial constraint. Part of Sketch’s fast adoption with designers is no-doubt due to the fact that it’s limited toolbar is a welcome constraint from the hundreds of tools at your fingertips in Photoshop. Take that same restrained approach to deciding in the browser.

You get an even bigger benefit if you take this a step further. Let’s say you create 3 more of these headlines. Congrats! You’re on your way to a bona fide pattern! This is where I’d crack back open my stylesheet, not to write more styles but to codify the pattern.

First question: is it a content pattern or a display pattern? It’s a bit too specific to apply to a particular type of content; calling this a articleTitle may make me think twice about using this on the Contact page. Display pattern it is! We’ll call this our bigTitle. I’ll use a dp- prefix to mark it as such. So, the HTML turns into:

<h1 class="sf-dp-bigTitle">Cooking up Design Systems</h1>

In my stylesheet, I’ll create a new rule for my new display pattern, but instead of writing custom declarations, I’ll instead use my existing mixins, cut-and-pasted directly from my markup. Again, I want to use what’s already in my design system, keeping things as DRY as I can. That rule would look like this:

.sf-dp-bigTitle {
  @include sf-u-text--xl;
  @include sf-u-paddingLeft--m;
  @include sf-u-marginBottom--l;
}

That way, I’ll almost always know at a glance as I skim my stylesheet what parts use the design system I’ve established and what parts deviate.

Last thing: I like to leave some space at the bottom of every rule for “seasoning.” In cooking, there’s this phrase called “season to taste,” which means that you can continue to add spices and herbs if a dish doesn’t taste perfect when it’s done cooking. It might not be part of the recipe, but you need it in this specific instance. In the case of code, that might be applying a background color to an element or adding a particular animation:

.sf-dp-bigTitle {
  @include sf-u-text--xl;
  @include sf-u-paddingLeft--m;
  @include sf-u-marginBottom--l;

  // seasoning
  background-color: gold;
}

Again, you can quickly visually identify what parts of this block are part of the design system, and which is some extra seasoning. After noticing that you’re writing background-color: gold; 4 or 5 different times, then you can consider adding it permanently to your design system as a utility and/or mixin.

Hopefully, this example showed how you can bring some of the UI decision-making process you previously did in a graphics editor into the browser, as long as you have the right code approach to support it.

Now you’re cooking!

Investments

Dan Mall — Sun, 04 Dec 2016 21:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about investment, especially as it relates to time priorities. While many definitions exist, I’ve arrived at my own that has proven really useful for me:

A [good] investment is a small, short-term loss I take in order to achieve a large, long-term gain.

In evaluating what’s important to me at any given moment, I ask myself what kind of investment I'd be making, if any. I ask questions about investments a lot when I’m coaching and mentoring. For agency owners, I often ask if they’re willing to take the short-term loss of doing thankless but lucrative work—banner ads and site maintenance come to mind—for the long-term gain of funding more desirable work that doesn’t pay as well. When I’m mentoring senior designers, I often ask if they’re willing to take the short-term loss of feeling like a beginner again for the long-term gain of being more proficient in code.

Thinking about what investments I’m making has been a useful framework to help me make decisions, and I share it in hopes it can do the same for you.

Voting for Trump is Unbiblical

Dan Mall — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 17:30:00 +0000

…appoint elders^* in every city as I commanded you—if a man is blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of dissipation or insubordination. For a bishop^** must be blameless, as a steward of God, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for money, but hospitable, a lover of what is good, sober-minded, just, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and convict those who contradict (Titus 1:5–9, NKJV).

* “Elders,” from the Greek presbyteros, meaning “older man and older woman, who may or may not be official leaders of the church.”

** “Bishop,” from the Greek episkopos, meaning “overseer or supervisor.” This word was often used to refer to official titles in civil life.

This is the Bible’s directive for any leader. Donald Trump fulfills very little (if any) of this criteria. Let’s tally:

Not self-willed. “Trump: I consult myself on foreign policy.”
Not quick-tempered. 600,000 search results for “Donald Trump temper”
Not violent. “The Time Donald Trump’s Ex-Wife Accused Him of Brutally Raping Her.”
Not greedy for money. “Donald Trump – ‘I Like Money. I’m Very Greedy. I’m A Greedy Person’.”
Hospitable. “Donald Trump: Ban all Muslim travel to U.S..”

The list goes on.

How any Bible-believing Christian can consider voting for Trump is baffling to me.

And please don’t conflate a denouncement of Trump for an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. I don’t know much about her policies—something I’ll correct between now and Election Day—but she at least scores higher on this list than he does.

Accountability

Dan Mall — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 20:25:00 +0000

One of the best talks I’ve ever seen was a short one by Senator Cory Booker at Brooklyn Beta in 2012. In the Q&A section, someone asked how he keeps his team accountable. His answer stuck with me, and I use it often when I’m working with apprentices or coaching design teams and agency owners.

Senator Booker shared his simple formula for creating accountability between two or more parties. There are three levels:

Stated standards. Having stated standards is the foundation of accountability. One can only be held accountable if both parties agree to the same standard.
A system of measurements. Both parties need to agree on a way to measure if they’ve met said standards.
Effects: either positive, negative, or both. Both parties need to agree on what will happen after those standards are met and/or those standards are not met.

Without those three things, you can’t have accountability.

I once coached a creative director—let’s call him Tom—and his three designers. Tom was unhappy with the quality of the designers’ work and thought he needed to spend more hands-on time with them. The designers all agreed that they’d value more of Tom’s time but were skeptical about that actually happening since Tom was often pulled in many different directions.

“I want you all to hold me accountable to spending more time with you,” Tom said confidently. Then he moved on to another topic.

“Hang on a sec,” I interjected. “How can they hold you accountable for that? What are you actually committing to?”

“Well, I’ll set up reviews with each of them twice a week.”

“When will you do that by?” I asked.

A bit taken aback by being put on the spot, Tom thought for a few seconds, then replied, “By the end of next week, I’ll put review times on everyone’s calendars.” (Standards that can be measured.)

“Awesome!” I said. “What should happen if you don’t send those calendar invitations out by the end of the week?”

“Oh, I’ll definitely do it,” Tom quickly retorted.

“That’s great,” I replied, “but what happens if you don’t?”

A designer quickly jumped in. “Then we get to carry on what we do as usual, but Tom doesn’t get to complain about it.” (Effects.)

“Sounds fair to me,” I offered. “Tom, what do you think?”

Quiet for a moment, Tom reluctantly conceded. “ Yeah, that sounds fair. I guess I gotta put up or shut up, right?”

Accountability is about motivating each party to do what they commit to. It’s a bit awkward to get used to at first, but with practice, you’ll find it more natural to implement with your colleagues, bosses, clients, and even friends and family.

SuperBooked

Dan Mall — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 13:09:00 +0000

A year after I started SuperFriendly, I published an annual report that featured some data about the business. My favorite stat from that: of the 35 projects we did that year, 17 of them (49%) came through word of mouth from friends.

Fast forward to now: 63 of SuperFriendly’s 82 projects (76%) over the last 5 years have come through friends. For 2016, 9 out of the 10 SuperFriendly projects (90%) have come through friends.

When I ask the people running the agencies and shops I think are incredibly well-positioned, they generally confirm that a good portion of their work comes from word of mouth.

Every freelancer and agency Slack channel and Basecamp account I’m in has a #jobs channel or section where people can pass around great work to the people they trust.

When you need a good web designer—or plumber or place to eat—you might ask a friend who they’d recommend.

A few years ago, I shared this premise with my friend Phil, and we decided to build something that helped people better do what they already do: ask friends for recommendations and pass work around to people they already trust.

Today, we’re announcing SuperBooked, a service that helps you find work with a little help from your friends. I’m so grateful to Phil Zaengle, Jesse Schutt, Derek Nelson, Mary van Ogtrop, and Jacob Zaengle for all of their incredible work to get us to this point.

If you’re interested in kicking the tires, join the waiting list and we’ll get you in as soon as we’re sure the engine is purring.

Researching Design Systems

Dan Mall — Sat, 06 Aug 2016 23:46:56 +0000

A few weeks ago, I kicked off the biggest design system project I’ve ever worked on. I’m incredibly lucky to be working with an organization in the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list to help create a design system that will govern all of the apps and sites they create internally. I’m also incredibly fortunate that they value doing this work well, which means our team has the proper leeway to do what we feel will produce a great outcome.

To ensure I’m as informed as possible, I took the opportunity to spend the first few days of the project to study like I (never) did in college. Physical and digital highlighter in hand and pixels, I pored over some of more popular design systems out there to see what insights I could glean. Here are my notes from those study sessions.

My research style leans heavily toward capturing phrases that stand out to me. I’ve been a long-time admirer of how Susan J. Robertson records passages in her book reviews, so I’ve taken a similar approach in these notes.

New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual

Massimo [Vignelli] used to speak of entropy, that inescapable scientific principle that dictates that systems fall apart, that extremes revert to the mean, that every rare instance of excellence is doomed to succumb to the average… Yet something amazing happened. The system endured. It endured, I think, for one reason… This manual, with all its exhaustive detail and maniacal comprehensiveness, is the reason.

The graphics are markedly consistent, with just enough oddities to make the whole thing interesting.

A slim white band across the top of nearly every sign demarcates… something.

Deferred maintenance meant borrowing against the future.

…a larger brief: a truly unified signage system, to cover the entire subway. It would specify guidelines for not only the look of the graphics but also where they belonged and why, system-wide.

More important than these little visual refinements, though, are the efforts toward comprehensibility. The true goal of the Graphics Standards Manual is not just to pretty things up but to direct people intelligently and swiftly.

A logical system required graphics that had been thoroughly thought through like this—so much so that they became simple again.

…it was a clear [solution] that any tourist could understand. It also never got done.

“…everything in the Unimark system is based on a one-foot-by-one-foot-grid. But in a lot of places, there’s not enough clearance to hang a one-foot-high sign from the ceiling. So what do you do then? The book doesn’t tell you anything.”

An essential part of fixing the New York City subway involved making it comprehensible.

As good as the graphics are, plenty of people still get on the wrong train every day.

The passenger will be given the information or direction only at the point of decision. Never before. Never after.

(I’m impressed at how strong the recommendations in this manual are. We don’t often see that level of assertiveness.)

Whenever new graphics standards are developed or existing standards are revised, new manual pages will be issued.

It is vital that all signs be read easily and understood quickly. This demands the consistent use of a distinctive type face (sic) throughout the entire system.

(Love the strong language!)

iOS Human Interface Guidelines

One thing that strikes me most about the iOS Human Interface Guidelines over other design systems is that it feels as much like a marketing site as it does documentation. The other systems I’ve reviewed feel more like specifications; though well-written, they do feel a bit dry. Perhaps, in true Apple fashion, the housing for the guidelines feels like it’s selling me a bit, enticing me to use it the way a good SaaS site does. It occurs to me that any design system that needs to do some amount of evangelizing—i.e. all of them—should have a bit of sales pitch in them.

As an app designer, you have the opportunity to deliver a killer product that rises to the top of the App Store charts. To do so, you’ll need to meet high expectations for quality and functionality.

(Such powerful language!)

Salesforce Lightning Design System

When I hear and talk about design systems, the quintessential one that immediately comes to mind is Lightning Design System. The Salesforce team has done a fantastic job documenting and sharing how they’ve made this work so well for them. The first pictures in my head about what I’d make for this project certainly resembled the Lightning Design System.

Once I got into it at a granular level, I realized how general and generic everything is. For example, take this passage about tables from the Displaying Data guidelines page:

A table is the most basic format for displaying a list. Each record is represented by a single row of data that begins with the record’s primary field and shows additional fields in subsequent columns. The data is labeled using column headers that can be interactive. This display type is appropriate for large numbers of records because you can easily scan it and navigate the list using sorting, filtering, or scrolling.

That’s a great guideline, but there’s nothing about it that’s specific to Salesforce developers. It’s useful for anyone making a table, anywhere, ever.

The whole site is full of great general knowledge like this. So why does this stand out as a great example of a design system for me? I eventually realized that what’s so special to me about the Lightning Design System isn’t the system itself as I originally thought, but how effectively the team has evangelized it. Between the talks I’ve seen, tweets I’ve read, and Slack channel discussions I’ve observed, everyone is talking about Lightning. Any good design system needs people to use it, and that means it also needs people to extol its virtues so that others use it too. Lightning is likely the best example I’ve seen of that philosophy executed well.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Graphics Standards Manual

[The logo] was accepted by the arts commission, though reluctantly, with a note about its “limited sculptural possibilities.”

…a graphics identity program had the potential to do for government agencies what it had done for corporations: convey modernity rather than stodginess, and forward-looking and efficient practices rather than hidebound ones.

“…if government publications—from tax returns to road signs—were attractive and easy to read, people would read them and respect them… the morale and the productivity of our public servants would rise dramatically if they could work in a decent environment.”

…the problem was not just one of type sizes and white space but of administration.

A good graphics program could unify the 11 NASA centers, at least visually, and at the same time systematize all the documents, signs, and other materials they produced, which at the time varied from crude to nondescript.

“In order to succeed, a program which departs from the accustomed must have the full support of every NASA employee. Top-level management must take the lead, our experts in the field of graphic design must follow, and all of us must see that the specifics are diligently monitored to insure that standards of excellence are maintained.”

(The important of good governance from the start!)

Perhaps because [top executives had] been left out of the process, they were irritated, and their disdain found a focus right away, because some of them flat-out hated the new logo.

(The importance of involving stakeholders)

“Why wasn’t [the process] handled this way from the start? I don’t have to like it, but I can see it’s a real program, and I’m okay with it now.”

Material Design

I didn’t quite get the hype about Material Design when it first launched, largely because of the way it was announced. (I still don’t really get it, which is why I asked.) I actually thought the launch video was a parody. The language the designers used might as well have been announcing major scientific breakthrough, not the way a few shapes and colors have been arranged on a screen. That’s not to knock anyone, but, as a fairly pragmatic designer, that type of pontificating doesn’t resonate with me. It seems like a lot of sizzle without the steak. Perhaps that’s because the designers I learned from often had incredible foundations and concepts for all of their work. (Seriously, read the amazing comment thread on this Designologue, kids.)

I’ll also admit that there’s a bit of envy there too. I’ve instructed many a design intern or apprentice to consider consistent light sources for their interfaces by shining a spotlight of physical elements on their desks and paying specific attention to the changes in perspectives, shadows, and more. It always gets my goat when something I’ve been doing for a long time gets branded as new. Props to the Google Design team for recognizing the power of wrapping an impactful narrative around common practice.

It wasn’t until I watched the video about color theory that I heard a little gem I finally could connect with. As the opening line, the narrator says:

There are no wrong colors.

It dawned on me: the beauty of Material Design is that it’s nearly impossible to make a bad design, even—or especially—if you’re not a designer. I realized that it’s the opposite paradigm of the type of design I admire. Take, for instance, the sites you’d come across in a gallery like The FWA or Awwwards. Many of those are beautifully art-directed and have a very strong and unique aesthetic sense. But I’ve had the privilege of knowing and talking to some of the designers whose sites regularly get featured there. Many of them design based on intuition and what feels right to them from their vast experience, but struggle to articulate why it works. That’s not replicable or transferable to anyone else, which is perhaps the most desired quality of a design system. That kind of work is often about a strong aesthetic with little rationale, but the key to Material Design seems to be very strong opinions about a very ordinary style.

While I could do without the high-falutin’ pomp and circumstance, I can certainly appreciate how a very high level of philosophy and principles can be a compelling rallying cry for adoption.

Airbnb Design Language System

Though I appreciate the great writing the Airbnb team has done about their new design system, it's hard to get much more than surface insights without being able to test drive Airshots. But even without seeing the tactical output, this nugget from VP of Design Alex Schleifer’s post really resonated with me:

You can’t innovate on products without first innovating the way you build them

I love that they’re addressing the important fact that good tools for working with design systems don’t exist yet.

IBM Design Language

There are 2 specific things I really appreciate about the IBM Design Language:

First, they make it clear right up front that the purpose of their design system is to foster a consistency that supports their brand:

The IBM Design Language is a set of living guidelines that communicates our brand promise through our products’ experiences.

That brand promise is then reinforced by asking the design system user if what they’re making looks, sounds, thinks, and performs like IBM. A question like, “Does the visual design enhance people’s understanding of how the world works?” has a strong point of view; it states the job design has to do, which also means it implies what the design does not have to do. I love that!

The other thing I love about the IBM Design Language is that the site looks like some put thought into the job of the site itself. It eschews what is becoming the standard “design system look” of left-side (and sometimes fixed) navigation and content to the right. It feels more like a marketing site than a piece of documentation, which I’m leaning more and more toward as the right idea for my client.

I’ve reviewed a few more design systems like the Harmony Design System from Intuit, the Microsoft Design Language, the U.S. Web Design Standards, Origami by the Financial Times, and a few others, and I’m definitely finding more similarities than discrepancies.

The biggest observation I’ve had is that almost every one includes principles and guidelines that are extremely general. That’s totally understandable; I mean, at some point, a good tabset is just a good tabset. But, while it’s useful for any reader to understand how to make a better website in general, I think these are a missed opportunity. The job of the Microsoft Design Language is not only to help a designer or developer to create a great app, but to help them create a great Microsoft app. What makes a great Microsoft app? How is a great Microsoft app different than a great Google app? This is the kind of thing a design system should have guidelines for: perspective, point of view, extending creative direction to everyone that decides to build something with the design system. That stuff should be baked in. Otherwise, we all might as well use Material Design and call it a day.

I think that’ll be my first metric for success. If the design system I create for my client can be specific about what makes a great site or app specifically for them and why it’s better in-context than any one of the systems listed above, I’d say we’re headed in the right direction.

I realize that’s a tall order and I’m a short guy, but that’s never stopped me before.