Category: <span>Blog</span>

Design Through Chaos: Headspace Strategies for Hard Times

Some days, the mess isn’t just on your desk, it’s in your head. Maybe it’s the critique that didn’t land the way you had hoped, the endless stream of notifications, or something entirely unrelated to work, like a sleepless night or something personal weighing heavy on your mind. Whatever it is, we’ve all been there: Sitting down to design something great while carrying the weight of everything else, trying to push through and make something meaningful when it feels like your creativity is buried under the chaos.

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Bring Your Best Self to Your Work

Bringing your best self to work isn’t just about the outcomes of beautiful design, or knocking projects out of the park. It’s about showing up as the best version of yourself. It’s about being the energized, creative, and focused version of you that you know is there. Some days, it feels like that version is there and ready to do work. Some days, it feels like that person has decided to take the day or week off. Here are some strategies to feel in better control of this, and help you bring your best self to work, if not every day, at least most of the days.

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Customizing the Canvas LMS Rich Content Editor

In my current role at Webster University as Director of Instructional and Creative Design Services, we’ve created a design system that informs styleguides across the University’s online courses, which are taught in Canvas. We’ve also created reusable interactive objects such as tabbed interfaces, accordions, and slideshows. Much of this requires custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript. We’ve built a few tools to help create these experiences. The Canvas LMS Rich Content WYSIWYG editor is used to place in the content and edit them. The challenge is that customized, and in our case highly customized, CSS and Javascript isn’t viewable through the editor. At least, not in it’s default state.

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Mobilizing Creativity, Innovation, and Productivity

Creativity, innovation, and productivity all have value. Creativity is the ability to generate original and unique thoughts and ideas. Innovation can be described as the ability to produce *useful* thoughts, ideas, and products that provide value. Productivity is a measure of performance related the work being done and the output of that work. How might we invest in each of these three ideas to encourage sustainable success & growth?

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Understanding & Managing Your Impostor Syndrome

As a professional, it can be easy to slip into a place where you start to experience impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome, or the impostor phenomenon is a term that labels the experience of believing that others think you’re better than what you believe yourself to be. You fear being evaluated, because if you are, you’ll be exposed as a “fraud.” You’re afraid that you won’t be able to replicate previous success despite evidence of your previous success. You’re highly critical of yourself. You discount praise that you’re given. You may experience burnout, anxiety, guilt, and even depression. You probably attribute your achievements and success to things like luck, being in the right place at the right time, or somebody else giving you a chance, rather than believing your own knowledge, skills, and abilities have anything to do with your success.

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Balanced weights

Designing for Impact: The Usability/Aesthetics Balance

There are two elements that deserve focus when we consider design – usability and aesthetics. While distinct, these two elements are also intertwined. Together, they create engaging experiences. Usability focuses on functionality and practicality, while aesthetics adds elements that serve to capture and keep our attention. Both elements affect our emotions in different ways. Understanding the two, how they are different, and where they intersect can help to achieve your creative vision.

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Strategy-Independent Objectives

Embracing Independent Objectives to Design Better Strategies

Setting goals is a fundamental practice in the pursuit of success. Goals provide us with a sense of direction and purpose. This is true in our personal lives and within our organizations. Objectives serve as markers of progress towards our goals. It is crucial for us to establish objectives that are independent of strategies. In this blog post, we will explore the alignment between goals, objectives, and strategies and discuss the significance of setting independent objectives.

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Unlocking Creativity and Innovation Through a Design-Driven Culture

Design-driven leadership is a culture based on design thinking that encourages creativity, innovation, and problem-solving. It is based on the idea that the best way to create a successful organization is to involve employees in the process. While there is a generally accepted framework and process for design thinking, many frameworks follow a similar pattern, with slight variations as needed. Let’s compare two common frameworks – The Design Thinking Framework and ADDIE to find commonalities between them, and see how different frameworks can be implemented to unlock creativity, innovation, and success.

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Strategic Application of Divergence & Convergence

With the rise of remote work and the benefits of teams and organizations becoming increasingly agile, purposeful leadership of teams is becoming increasingly more important. Teams and organizations must respond to both the challenges and opportunities of the moment and the future. Purposeful collaboration that both respects the time and talents of individuals and brings individuals together in productive ways is essential. The intentional application of the concepts of divergence and convergence makes teams and organizations more creative, innovative, and productive.

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