Our Thoughts: Bryan Taylor


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Designing Digital Experiences that Feel More Human with Porter

Design thinking has helped us to build technology that enhances human experiences, rather than dissolving them.

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Ugly Mugs: How Flawed Prototypes Lead to Good Design

The design process isn't always so linear, and perfection is rarely the initial outcome — especially when true customization is the goal.

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Why Authenticity Matters Part 2 | For Business

Authenticity is a smart business move — it earns trust and leads to efficiency and, in turn, profits.

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Why Authenticity Matters Part 1 | For Brands

Authenticity is more than just a buzz word. It’s a business strategy.

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12 Tips for CPG Startups

What we’ve learned from years of starting, building, and growing CPG brands.

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A Place to Gather at PublicHouse

How Drawn helped convert a 100-year-old church into a contemporary food hall designed to invite eating, drinking, and — above all — connecting with friends and neighbors.

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Drawn U | Interdisciplinary Design

When appreciation for the philosophy of design meets authentic, instinctive design thinking, good things happen. We believe that the best design is second nature and comes from truly embracing interdisciplinary thinking.

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Drawn U | Tutoring Design

Learning something new — whether it’s how to speak Spanish or the language of design thinking — can be tough. You can think of us as a tutor to help you with the latter.

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Human-Centered Design is Just Good Design

Human-centered design — a wholistic approach to problem-solving and design that allows room for empathic understanding and iterative prototyping — is really just good design. Period.

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The Value of the Back Porch

Asking the right questions in the right setting can have a huge impact on the quality of information that you collect.

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Why Experience Matters

A good user experience leaves customers feeling content, but it's the exceptional experiences — the ones in which all of the details fall right into place — that generate immediate buzz and long-term loyalty.

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Why You Should Allow Room for Tacit Decisions

Hunches happen. They can be used as a valuable decision-making tool and, at the very least, they're worth a quick assessment.

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Think Big — Think Wholistically

Engagement's about more than taps on a screen. Ideally, it's synonymous with meaningful experience(s) and human connection. Shifting perspective. Leaving an impression. And it's worth doing it right.

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Good Design Evolves

If you want to create a product or service or brand that people are drawn to, you have to give it room to mature. Because chasing for attention doesn't look good on anyone.

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Designing Pubs + Design Thinking = Design of a New Digital Product

How an architectural design project led to another architectural design project that became a service design project and, eventually, a whole new product.

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At the Heart of Design Thinking

True design thinking asks us to consult the heart as well as the brain.

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Show, Don't Tell

Brands are made up of far more than "About Us" statements. It's their actions, their visual choices, the stories they tell that really tell us who a brand is.

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Sympathy for Empathy

It doesn't really matter whether you're employing sympathy or true empathy in your search for innovative solutions; it's the commitment to real context that is fundamental to the design thinking process.

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Developing Brands for the Experience Economy

Developing brands for a public that prizes experiences requires an internal culture that's committed to design thinking, which helps keep an empathetic finger on the pulse of those on the street.

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Thinking About Design Thinking 5: From Macro to Micro

There are three levels of design thinking and you’ve got to work through them in the right order, or the whole process will be flawed.

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Thinking About Design Thinking 4: Sticky Notes Do Not a Design Thinker Make

Sticky notes alone won’t truly solve your problems — that takes a willingness to follow through on the complete design thinking process.

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Thinking About Design Thinking 3: We’re All Designing Some Kind of Solutions

While I’m wary of the term “designer” becoming diluted, there are many in other (non-design) fields who practice design thinking and, maybe, should be considered designers, as well.

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Thinking About Design Thinking 2: “Designers” are Everywhere These Days

There are more and more people out there with “designer” in their job titles, but does this change the way we define design?

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Thinking About Design Thinking 1: We're Basically Philosophers

Aristotle's academy aimed to explore and expand our understanding of how things worked, to find connections and solve problems. That's not so different than what we do as practitioners of design thinking.

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Good Design is Timeless

Timeless design is something that we're forever chasing and very rarely capturing. It doesn't succumb to passing trends. It feels accessible and elegant at the same time. It's simple, but not simplistic. Perhaps most importantly, it honors the fundamentals of our craft.

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Pantone Color of the Year 2019: Drawn’s Pick

Last year, Drawn accented its new building with Pantone Ultra Violet 18-3838 just months before it was named Color of the Year. We think we might be on a roll, so our creative director, Bryan Taylor, wrote a letter to Pantone expressing his choice for Color of the Year 2019.

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The Farce that is Human-Centered Design (HCD)

The very nature of design demands that we consider an end user and his or her experience with our work. If you haven't been practicing human-centered design all along, you've been doing it wrong.

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The Bard, Part 3: Ideate, Make, Shoot, Post, Engage

How the Bard meets our needs as a dynamic agency (and helps us to meet those of our clients) in an ever-changing creative landscape.

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The Bard, Part 2: A Salvaged History

Ninety percent of the materials used in the Bard’s construction were salvaged from other forgotten stories, which means that Drawn's new space is steeped in history and rich with texture. Just like the agency itself and each of our clients, our building has a story.

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The Bard, Part 1: Casting the Dream

Shakespeare's Juliet once asked, "What's in a name?" In our building's case, quite a lot. Here's the story (and philosophy) behind Drawn's new HQ, told in three parts.

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Symmetry: Sophisticated or Simplistic?

While symmetry has its merits, it can also prove a restriction when it comes to design. Here, we explore both sides of the symmetry debate — where do you stand?

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Uniquely the Same

Our team members' backgrounds are literally all over the map, but our values are tightly aligned and the result is smooth collaboration bolstered by a vast diversity of experience.

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Authenticity in the (Re) Making: A Sociological Timeline

The cultural shift that gave rise to truth in marketing and why honesty is good for your brand.

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3 Ingredients of a Great Promise

Know how to make smart promises to your audience and deliver services that exceed their expectations.

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Thankful for Good Design

Quick and easy can be appealing, but when it comes to branding, it pays to invest in good design.

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Faux Efficiency

Why expending more time and energy up front is a better route to true efficiency than seeking simple (and rapid) solutions.

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Stealing Originality

There may be no such thing as a truly original idea, but inspiration can spark evolution, leading to fresh designs and concepts. Just be wary of theft — it's lazy and won't pay off in the long run.

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