The founder of Kansas City’s Willoughby Design shares insights on positioning the company to design for a gender-balanced world, the importance of educating clients about the value of design and what studios must do to retain their best workers in 2015 and beyond.

NEW YORK—June 6, 2013. To help designers and firms leverage new possibilities and address future challenges, AIGA has teamed up with Adobe to ask design leaders to envision how their studios will evolve over the next few years.

The founder and CEO of Brooklyn creative agency Big Spaceship responds to the question: “Dad, what’s design?”

In the summer of 2012, AIGA Nashville paired three groups of design students with professional designers. The teams used design thinking to create short-term deliverables and long-term strategies for nonprofits and then presented the work to the community. This case study features work done with Urban Housing Solutions.

Culture is everything people in a design business do that supports the process of making work happen. Culture can create joy for designers, while improvements in process can facilitate profit.

There’s a video of LL Cool J performing in a gym at Colby College in Maine in 1985. Actually, it’s here. There’s something like 100 people, some sitting on the floor. At one point he says, “Yo, what about those sounds I be making with my mouth?” and goes on to...

Despite the connectedness of the current business world, aspiring design professionals face new challenges in the age-old problem of getting noticed, especially by the elite practitioners. George Nelson’s wit and insights helped me understand design as both a serious profession and a creative adventure. Here are a few of his choice observations and some thoughts on the special relationship we know as mentoring.

If you’re going to run a design-led business, it’s inevitable that you will need to talk strategy with your clients. Here are some of the types of strategies you might create as a design businessperson, plus some thoughts on how these different strategies might support the efforts of your clients.

As a mother of two and a full-time art director at Savage, I regularly battle the ups and downs of being a mom in a designer’s world. Although it can be overwhelming at times, it can also be highly rewarding. As everyone handles the balance in their own way, I’ve assembled some thoughts and advice for creative working mothers.