No one wants to be Peter Gibbons. The main character in the widely-loved (and oft-quoted) movie Office Space was open about how much he hated his job at Initech Industries and how that affected his motivation (“I’d say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual, work”). And yet […]

The son of a Midwestern preacher, entrepreneur Seth Grizzle always saw things a little differently. “I remember being bored in church, sketching the people sitting in the pews,” says Grizzle. “Growing up surrounded by cornfields in a small Ohio town, I had to dream up my own world.” While Grizzle still loves drawing, his subjects […]

The key to a successful startup is a driven, hardworking team. Big companies and established corporations lure their employees by touting a slew of benefits, high salaries, company prestige, and free bagels. As a young company, you still need to recruit the best and brightest team to drive your upward trajectory, but you may not […]

A cardboard cutout of Michael Jordan stands in the storefront of Mr. Throwback, a supplier of vintage sportswear and other items in New York’s East Village. It belongs to the shop’s owner, Mike Spitz, and was an important decoration at his bar mitzvah 20 years ago in Bellmore, Long Island. As with most items in […]

For anyone in the entertainment industry, a shiny gold statuette may be the most obvious marker of success, but for costume designer Dana Covarrubias, the real arbiters of a job well done are trick-or-treaters. “People are like, ‘Oh, I want an Academy Award,’ but I think as a costume designer, if something you create becomes […]

When you think of an industrial designer, you might think of Jony Ive, Apple’s British design overlord, or Marc Newson, whose Lockheed Lounge set a new record at auction for the world’s most expensive design object. But most industrial designers spend their days developing a wide range of more mundane things that impact our lives […]

There is something juicy and life affirming about having a startup, a creative calling, or a passion project that you work on regularly. That is, of course, when said venture is not at a conceptual impasse, or losing money, or giving you agita. Thankfully, when working on creatively demanding projects, there is a geographic solution. […]