Itay Dreyfus

Really unpopular opinion for designers: it's easier, more joyful and beneficial to do free work for someone you like, than design and release your perfect portfolio with case studies. The only rule for free work is that you should be the one to offer it, and not asked to do it.

It's a simple way to sustain an ongoing always-on outreach to nurture your network. This is the lifeblood of generating consulting work.

There’s an activity that the Barrel partners have been doing for a while: reaching out to a couple of contacts per week. These have typically been former clients, industry acquaintances, other agency operators, investor types, old friends and classmates, etc. It’s been a practice we’ve kept up weekly since 2017.

We are shifting from the mode of “surging” on Tumblr with tons of people to get it to exciting growth, to working on how we can run Tumblr in the most smooth and efficient manner. Pretty amazing things in the social and messaging space have been accomplished with small teams, so I’m actually quite curious to see a smaller and more focused Tumblr’s ... See more

Along those lines, I believe that mechanics design is a distinct discipline separate from both interface design and product management. I believe it deserves its own terminology, principles, processes, deliverables, and bodies of knowledge.

Crypto is a subculture. A self-contained universe, and a relatively small one.

Online, we need to make the big feel smaller, in the right ways. The challenge to start small from something that is currently controlled by Facebook and Google, is very hard. But people are doing it. Look at The Correspondent, or Open Culture, or Brain Pickings, or thousands of other small projects that have good communities around them. We need m... See more

two ways people grow their online presence: 🔚 assuming your audience a priori and building it 🔜 being authentic online and finding out who your audience is mechanical/engineering vs. organic/emergent