I received 177 responses from senior designers and content designers. But the best response came from Joyce, a self-proclaimed non-designer.

Are you unsure which Google SEO ranking factors will actually matter in 2026? Want to focus your efforts on the signals that genuinely influence visibility rather than outdated tactics?  

Members of the Creative Boom community explore when it’s okay to accept an advance payment for future work and offer some tips to make it work.  

One of the most formative experiences in my career was working for a leader who did the hard work to shape a couple of workstreams, assign owners, and, most importantly, push us hard to build good habits and tempo. It wasn’t easy, by any means. We operated this way for a full year, and the results were incredible (and personally very rewarding).

On the other hand, no one has your back when things go wrong. There are no team members to ensure that you’re treated fairly or paid for your work. Raise your hand if a client ever skipped town without paying their bill. Yes, we see you!

One of the most formative experiences in my career was working for a leader who did the hard work to shape a couple of workstreams, assign owners, and, most importantly, push us hard to build good habits and tempo. It wasn’t easy, by any means. We operated this way for a full year, and the results were incredible (and personally very rewarding).

All of us are fighting a war on three fronts (thanks to AI). Customer product expectations are higher than ever. Distribution channels are collapsing. And everyone – big incumbents, new startups, even your own customers with vibecoding – are coming for your value prop.

I am generally curious about the concept of legibility of work. Look around in your workplace. You can find documents, messages, presentations, design files. Evidence of people’s work. While it may look like a lot, there is a whole other type of work that is very hard to see. The invisible work.

For portfolios of assets, we use the terms liquidity and fungibility to describe how easily assets can be converted into cash without materially affecting their price, and how easily investments can be exchanged for one another or rebalanced across the portfolio.  

We’ve all heard the promises. Empowered teams make better products. They’re more engaged, more innovative, and they ship faster. According to Marty Cagan’s definition in his book Empowered, truly empowered product teams are “given problems to solve rather than features to build” and have “the authority to decide the best way to solve those problems.” They’re accountable for outcomes, not outputs.