Writing “Creative grief” helped me feel free for the first time in a very long time.

Like all legitimate forms of marketing, dating requires you to be real about who you are, your intentions and your ideal “customers.”

As life events force us to slow down and turn our attention inward, our jobs compel us to keep producing inspired ideas — no matter how uncreative we feel.

Nothing enhances design more than concise, clear, complete, consistent and correct copy. And nothing detracts from design more than sloppy text.

I began 2011 in earnest with a secret resolution: to blog for my business every week of the year. Here are 52 ideas to get me there.

At an earlier phase in my career, I was doing a lot of magazine ads for clients that I didn’t interact with personally. “Make my phone number larger” was the No. 1 request I received via their account reps to complete the ad design.

…from The Zen of Proposal Writing. This one comes from John Steinbeck: “Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person — and write to that one.”

“To hold your reader’s attention, keep it brief, make it spare. Pare it down to the essentials needed to sell your idea.” — Kitta Reeds, The Zen of Proposal Writing: An Expert’s Stress-Free Path to Winning Proposals

In The Elements of Style, one of the finest books on writing in the English language, E.B. White and William Strunk Jr. caution writers to avoid useless and redundant phrases.

I knew a guy in college who, in mid-sentence, used the acronym “DTCFDM” as if it were common parlance. From the moment he said it, I immediately set to decode this Rubic’s cube of abbreviation. What could he be trying to tell me?