Hippo Blog

I found a funny website the other day: HackerTyper.com. With the stroke of any key automatically generates a string of complex code. Randomly hitting keys makes you look like you’re hacking away at some wildly elaborate piece of code. Whil...

I lost my wallet recently. It was a total bummer. And the problem wasn’t so much that I lost my credit cards (I could cancel and replace them) or the cash (only $15), but dang I really liked that wallet. After years of wearing through crummyÂ...

I was waxing nostalgic the other day, looking at some old college pictures and I couldn’t help but laugh at what I saw. Staring back at me, some decades later, was an embarrassing picture of me with a mustache, feathered hair and a pair of sweet b...

I hated science. I can still remember hitting the snooze button in Mr. Mantle’s science class in middle school. But I did look forward to the rare occasion that he would bust out the LaserDisc and play the latest Bill Nye the Science Guy episode f...

Art direction is incredibly important. Graphics are crucial. But copy sells everything you do. Copywriting is a tricky craft. Distilling what you’re intending to say into a concise statement — and making it catchy enough to catch the eyes of ...

Though you won’t find his name in any history books, Ron Popeil is undoubtedly the best inventor and salesman of the 20th century. Sure, there were some other important inventions in the past 100 years or so: nuclear power, the personal compute...

I’m writing this sentence on a $1,000 iMac computer, and I’m listening to music on some pricy headphones. My smartphone, also spiffy and new, beeps whenever I get an email or instant message. And, with IFTTT, my Fitbit reminds me to get u...

A while back, I was driving to a business meeting to discuss the power of inbound marketing. Driving along that Iowa highway, I passed family farm after family farm — complete with fields of corn and silos for storing the harvest. Silos are a cruci...

Have you ever been set up on a blind date? It’s a complete gamble. You could get the love of your life, or you could net some dopey sloth with ugly hair who talks about Pokemon the whole time. It’s hard to tell until you do it – and you...

While the past couple decades have offered an enormous shift in the way marketing (and business in general, really) is done, they haven’t been too kind to the environment. Between the Great Pacific garbage patch, the Deepwater Horizon debacleÂ...

Kids are bottomless fonts of knowledge (when they're not yelling at you). You can learn a lot of branding lessons from them if you're paying attention....

The design world changes fast. It seems like there’s always new tools, approaches and tactics to be used on websites. Keeping up with it all is imperative to being a good designer. Practice makes perfect for sure, but in order to practice well, you...