Hippo Blog

Snow is on the ground. The wind is cold enough to turn your face into a chapped, dry mess. Your neighbor’s snowblower woke you up an hour early. Winter’s here again. Despite what the endless Christmas commercials might imply, it’s n...

By the time you finish reading this sentence, Google will have conducted more than 85,000 searches. And by the time you finish reading this one, there will be an additional 70,000 more. From old ladies looking up cross-stitching patterns to young men...

Rock bands know how to do branding right. Think about how kids in middle school and high school show devotion to bands in unique ways: they write the names of the bands they like on binders, notebooks and backpacks. They buy t-shirts to flaunt in the...

Ready for the most obvious statement of the day? OK, here it is: Unless you run a factory where you make nothing but hugs and sunshine, you’re in business to make money. Everything else you do is a matter of maximizing your cash intake. Plain a...

As I look up from my computer and glance around the office, I notice that about half the office has their headphones on or earbuds in while they’re plugging away at designing, coding or writing. And, assuredly, everyone’s listening to music and w...

What was life like before the printing press? Pretty lame. Let’s say you lost your pet cat in 14th century Europe and wanted to make some flyers to help people find it. You had to hand-write your message down hundreds of times. By the 50th flye...

“Micro,” in the most clinical of definitions, means one-one-millionth of something. But in the most practical, it just means “small.” But small doesn’t mean “unimportant” or “bad.” A beer from a m...

Everyone has a few heroes in their life. As of recently, anyone who creates Creative Commons artwork has become a hero in my book. Seriously, they’re heroes. All of them. While everyone can take a picture and upload it to Flickr, it takes a sp...

Email was the Wild West before 2003. Tumbleweeds, saloons, gunfights – the whole shebang. Companies could send as much email as they wanted, whenever they wanted and to whomever they pleased. Might made right in pretty much every case, and the lit...

Consider the relationship between designers and developers in the context of building websites. Your site’s design might be stellar, but if the page’s code smells, the whole experience might end up a wash. Conversely, you can have beaut...

Ah, fall. The leaves are changing, the air is cold and crisp and Christmas decorations are prematurely set out at Younkers. It’s also the time for playoff baseball, when Chicago and Milwaukee fans’ hopes are dashed for yet another year,...

Responsive web design is hard. Really, really hard. There are an impossible amount of variables on every page that can trip designers up, not to mention content. It’s enough to make anyone feel like they should just give up on it, even before t...