So you’ve launched your own creative business, and you’re starting to grow. That’s great! But good growth won’t just happen. Just as a junior designer starts with small projects and slowly builds her skills, a new business needs time to mature, test new ideas, and prepare itself, too. If you want to grow in a sustainable, satisfying way, then you need to pay attention to how you’re growing, not just how much. Jason Blumer looks at four common pitfalls of growth in the design industry, and how to avoid them.
Hack Your Maps
Web maps have come a long way. A ubiquitous and critical component of many apps, they’ve also become one of the mobile space’s most successful transplants. The core web map UI paradigm itself—a continuous, pannable, zoomable surface—has even spread beyond mapping to interfaces everywhere. Yet nearly five years since Paul Smith’s landmark article, “Take Control of Your Maps,” web maps are still a blind spot for most web designers. It’s time to integrate maps into our designs in powerful, creative, progressively enhanced new ways. Young Hahn starts us on the journey to map mastery.