We helped a global leader in the risk, benefits, and integrated business solutions industry improve the experience for all of its website visitors.

We’re fueled by the people and companies who look to us to help them move forward, and by the ideas, innovations, environments, and opportunities that surround us.

We helped a leader in distribution get connected to its target employee audience.

We helped Royal Caribbean Cruises make it crystal clear: for them, protecting the ocean is everything.

We took a data-driven look at the first ten years of our conference about the design of everything.

I learned a new word recently. Chaordic. Maybe you’re familiar with that term, but I wasn’t until Natalie Nixon sprung it on us at Cusp Conference 2017.

BizCast produced this executive interview highlighting Dave Mason as he reflects on past lessons and discusses the difference between customer needs and wants.

It’s been more than ten years since we thought maybe we could help inspire the kind of thinking that makes a difference. And what an incredibly optimism-inducing experience it has been.

We developed the brand framework, naming and identity that was applied to everything from business cards and website to the app interface itself, created video assets to help communicate the concept, and worked with Oxbow’s app developers to design features and functionality to help family social media interactions.

Despite the sheer number of ways in which so many of us now make ourselves available to the world — websites, email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, MySpace (believe it or not, people still use MySpace!), SnapChat, and yes, even actual phones — it has become increasingly difficult to connect with anyone.

We helped a biosimilars pharmaceutical company communicate scientific rigor and unique perspective on the biologic medicine industry with a new identity and website.

Innovation is rooted in knowing and not knowing. It's about being able to look at something that exists (in some cases that existing something might actually be ‘nothing’—an unmet need) and then combining expertise with creativity to conceive and develop previously unknown ‘things’ that solve problems, create value or generate opportunities. We do a lot of work with people who simultaneously know and don’t know. And we love it, because that’s the way we approach what we do.

DesignApplause and Dave Mason agree to meet right after his 2016 Cusp Conference – after Dave takes a few days off to do whatever one does after a ninth annual iron man of sorts.

I once had the incredible good fortune to spend a few hours with Gord Downie. The enigmatic front man I’d ‘known’ from afar, was at first almost shy, but also incredibly warm and funny and engaging, a guy like any other guy you’d be happy to hang out and watch a game with. I can’t think of any greater quality than that.

While it may be true that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, for members of the world’s population who are cursed with abnormally sharp critical thinking skills, the simple frustrations of everyday life can be a source of inspiration.

Traveling muralist and artist Lauren Asta made a stop by Multiple Chicago to create a hand-painted mural in our office.

I know there are people out there who like to pretend they’re ‘self-made.’ Who claim that it’s their own hard work, smarts, and guts alone that made them successful, and whose lesson for those who aren’t quite as successful is, “well you’re just not hard-working, smart or gutsy enough”. I call bullshit on that.

I mean, why would someone who wants to throw a monkey wrench into everything that drives his industry—everything that represents the status quo he deals with every day—want to do anything ‘standard’?