Throughout our 45 years in business, we’ve helped countless organizations brand new companies, initiatives, and products. But we’ve never branded a city. Now, with the help of our fellow design colleagues in the Grapevine Collective—and with participation from the Pittsburgh Foundation—we’ve set out to do just that. To define the brand of Pittsburgh for the city’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

For every organization who wants to activate their audience the NFL Draft offers a blueprint for building more profitable customer relationships.

Every organization has an innovation process. Or should we say, an “innovation process.” Because while every team would tell you they have one, get them all in a room together and ask them to explain it to you, and you’ll see a lot more disagreeing than innovating.

It doesn’t take an advanced design degree to turn a dense, forgettable presentation into an open door. Just a few fundamental principles, applied with intention.

The most sustainable way to motivate your teams isn’t a burning platform or a burning ambition: it’s a burning responsibility. The takes team motivation out of leadership’s exclusive hands and gives it to the teams themselves.

Crystallizing a unique selling proposition (USP) is hard. When you’re immersed in your own brand, your own work, your own history, the signal can get blurry. What feels obvious internally often isn’t what resonates externally.

You can’t understand anything about your business if you don’t listen to your customers—what they think about you, what they know about you, what they want in the marketplace. Everything about running your business well begins with the customer. Unfortunately, most organizations these days simply don’t work that way.

When trying to maintain operations, the chain of command keeps things running smoothly. But when you’re trying to design an innovative change, there’s no greater impediment than the org chart.

If you really want to wow your customers, guess-and-check won’t cut it. The most powerful customer experiences today are not merely created for customers—they’re created with them.