Chad Thompson

Pixels, paper, rock n' roll.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Imagine trying to keep your job and be productive in an actual #war zone. Check out these #creatives in #Ukraine shinning a light on their absurd reality, Bathtub Creative: https://t.co/99tmgxeGmY

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

"The clearer it is (your vision), the harder to talk you out of it"

[Dan Mall @danmall]

All the people talking about “taste” are too scared to say the real word.

Think about all the people the world has considered to have taste.

Steve Jobs. Grace Jones. Pharrell Williams. Masaharu Morimoto. Joan Didion. Issey Miyake. Ava Duvernay. Jony Ive. Virgil Abloh. Rick Rubin. Anna Wintour. Spike Lee. Toni Morrison. Prince. Wes Anderson. Björk. And so many more.

What do they have in common?

An opinion.

The people we think of as having the best taste are actually the people who have a strong and unique opinion.

What was Steve Jobs’ taste? That‘s hard to answer.

What was Steve Jobs’ opinion? That one’s way easier: that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

If I was training a junior designer—or an agency owner—today, I’d tell them to forget about working on taste and instead show them how to develop an opinion. Here are the steps:

1️⃣ Live some life. You can’t have an opinion about the world without experiencing it. Travel. Work with people who don’t look like you or think like you. Eat unfamiliar food. Sit in rooms you weren’t invited to. Read outside your discipline.

2️⃣ Find the thing you believe that the world disagrees with. Jobs believed simplicity was worth more than features. Morrison believed Black readers didn’t need white translation. Abloh believed streetwear and couture could coexist.

3️⃣ Dream about what the world would look like if more people agreed with you. What you picture is your vision. The clearer it is, the harder to talk you out of it.

4️⃣ Make all your decisions based on that picture. An opinion creates a crossroad. Commit to the path less traveled.

5️⃣ Say your opinion out loud to as many people as you can, as many times as you can. Many will ignore you. Others will call it arrogant and stupid. Until enough people agree. Then they���ll call it “taste.”

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@agusegui @paper Thanks! I’ll dive into YouTube and go from there

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@agusegui @paper This is sick-I’m so excited to see tools getting better and to see them built by so many different orgs! Where can we find more info like tutorials and getting started docs?

[Bobby from Dupe.com @ghoshal]

our AI spend is accelerating so fast that i think im going to go back to hiring humans. we're hiring.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@63Visual Dude I need to pick up that Petes Bar Powell shirt next time I'm in town!
...also, Sea 43 is so classy

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Striking the right balance between quick legibility and unique abstract flavor: N27, an avant-grotesk font from @atipostudio. https://t.co/rkTcp9AiJF

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Metaphors be with you.
#starwarsday

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

I like @snipd_app, but someone in UX is pranking my man @tferriss!

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@HusseinYahfoufi Dude, your last @eventshiphq email has me seeing @theclippy animation again!! 👀
#haunted

[Joshua Ariza @Joshua_Ariza]

bad designers rebranding as AI artist

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

BOREDOM IS A GIFT.

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

we replaced daydreaming with doomscrolling and have the audacity to wonder why things got weird

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Making deviled eggs, the fam looking at me like I'm crazy for releasing hard boiled eggs in the blow-gun style that @tferriss taught us so long ago https://t.co/VPabILSpj9

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Is it talent or reps? Does it even matter?

[Joshua Ariza @Joshua_Ariza]

CREATIVITY IS JUST REPS

“You either have it or you don’t.”

I’ve heard this from plenty of creative professionals. The idea is that some people are gifted, and others are just bumbling goofballs who can’t draw a stick figure.

I completely disagree.

As a student, I rarely got A’s in drawing classes. For whatever reason, I was never the star art student.

Now, I draw for a living.

Sure, some people have a stronger natural knack. It’s harder for me to dunk a basketball than LeBron James. He’s King James—I’m Short King Josh.

But if you spent 40 hours a week doing anything, you would see massive improvement over time.

Creativity is surprisingly simple. It’s just an idea and its execution.

The more you practice executing—in this case, drawing—the better your results.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@Joshua_Ariza Thank you for saying this.

I got better at drawing because I liked it, did a lot of it, and didn’t stop when something sucked. Don’t ask me to draw a horse.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Procrastination is a vice for productivity but a virtue for creativity. Maybe we should call it 'incubation' instead

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

"Design System era is dead" Liquid glass shattered it

[Andy Allen @asallen]

The Design System era is dead. Top-down design is forever broken. Having a consistent aesthetic may have been nice in the past, but today there are too many players and too many creative possibilities to dictate a single aesthetic for the entire world. The future belongs to those who embrace the broad multitude of creative expression rather than those attempting to tame it.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

#NoteToSelf A Ford factory shut down, no one could fix the generator. Charles Steinmetz came in, studied the machine, made a small mark, tapped it with a hammer & fixed it. The bill was $10k for a few minutes of work: $1 for tapping the hammer, $9,999 for knowing where to tap.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

@unusual_whales Oooo wonder what it will be distracting us from

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

VIBE CODER 4 EVA!!

[Gregory Kennedy @gregorykennedy]

SaaS is dead. It's over.

I just cancelled my free Gmail subscription and vibe coded my own.

There is no spam filtering, no support for attachments, and the storage costs me $150/mo, but worth it. This is the future.

[Chad Thompson @ChadThompson]

Hilarious mental picture. And now I’m planning my productivity playlist:
Spoon, I turn my camera on
The vaccines, I always knew
Royel Otis, Nack Nostalgia
Radical Face, welcome home
Beck, black tambourine

[EMILY SUNDBERG @Emily_Sundberg]

Zuck shared a playlist of songs he played on repeat while building Facebook in 2004. It's so funny that these are the five songs are the part of Facebook's dna