You can't please everyone . . .

But golly, that doesn’t stop folks from trying to make their products as unobjectionable and unexceptional as possible. If you average everything out, across trends, industry norms, committee opinion, and research results, you’ll end up with something sickeningly normal.

The thing is, the authentic, the meaningful, the personal is the specific. The general, by definition, is generic. Who wants generic? We want remarkable.

We can have conversations with our audience and fans. But it’s a boring conversation if you’re not actually saying anything. It requires having an opinion, a point of view.

My job as a designer is often to provide some amount of differentiation. This is easy, if folks are willing to tell their story.