While most people were likely sleeping in this past Saturday, I woke up bright and early, put my moxie pants on and headed over to MoxieCon, where eleven speakers taught the crowd dozens of ways to build a better design business. Totally worth it.

The five fantastic women that make up Chicago-based design collective, Quite Strong, put on an incredible debut design conference on Saturday. I got my hands on a last-minute ticket to this sold-out event, and took some notes for sharing. After all, sharing is caring.

Local designer and illustrator, Mike McQuade, shared with all of us at today’s Creative Mornings the beauty that comes from pouring all you’ve got into work you love.

Every month, I volunteer to help my buddy Mig Reyes a little with Creative Mornings Chicago, a monthly breakfast lecture series. And every month I leave feeling more driven and inspired to keep doing this work that I love and to work really hard at it. This month’s source of inspiration came from Mike McQuade’s presentation hosted in the incredible workspace of Gensler, a global design, architecture and planning firm, while Artisan made sure our bellies were happily full of delicious coffee and morning treats.

“Work hard. Stay humble. And get your work out there, because you never know who’s watching.”

Those are the awesome words Mike left us with for the day, and he is living proof that if you want to be successful doing what you love, that’s the way to do it. Mike’s work has been featured in tons of publications including Communication Arts, Gestalten Publications, HOW, Print, We Love Typography, GQ Style Blog, Design Taxi, Smashing Magazine, The One Show, Chicago Creative Club and Cannes. He is also a recipient of the Young Guns 9 Award.

Three Agile Exercises to Demystify Your Discovery Process

It’s an age-old problem for creative agencies or even freelancers trying to build simple sites…

Interested in learning more about agile but not sure if it's right for your company? Maybe our scrum series can help.

We have talked about and experimented with integrating agile methods into our process for a while now. A number of workshops, a few lunch-n-learns, several books, a project or two, and many discussions later, our approach, like the process itself, has been iterative. Not every client project is appropriate for agile workflows and many of our internal projects don’t translate well to an agile approach. Successfully implementing these methodologies into an existing process is no small feat, which is why we decided to devote not one, but a series of blog posts to exploring various aspects of this approach to executing projects.

Some take-aways from my first DrupalCon experience in Denver. What a week!

Bryan and I recently attended DrupalCon Denver for nearly a week of immersion in all things Drupal. The conference is divided into eight tracks: Business & Strategy, Coding & Development, Commerce, Core Conversations, Design & UX, Drupal Community, Mobile, Government and Education and Site Building. Most of the sessions I attended fell into either the Business & Strategy or Design & UX tracks and here’s what I learned. Links to session videos are provided where possible.