Curt Wozniak

Writer/Editor

When we hunted down Curt Wozniak, Writer and Editor, he was a perfectly happy journalist, investigating, interviewing and writing about rock ‘n’ roll, infant care, architecture, history, fresh produce, movers, shakers. Then he fell for a designer/artist, and that cracked open an interesting new world for him. Once he began writing for designers and about design, we had to have him. A little creative storytelling and some light extortion, and soon Woz was writing his beautiful copy for our best clients. We keep telling him how happy he is. And he’s starting to believe it. Don’t ever tell him otherwise, okay? When he’s not writing or tearing up the city’s infrastructure on his bright red Moped, he’s busy making a life with Shelly and Sugar.

Curt is co-author of Brand Identity Essentials, a book about brand and graphic identity.


Posts by Curt Wozniak

Flexible, relevant, social
Like many people who read our blog, I am interested in art as well as design. In fact, I cross back and forth between both worlds on a daily basis. Literally. More
Design research revisited
We spend a lot of time in front of clients. When we get a chance to sit in the audience and let other researchers and designers talk, it's a welcome change of pace. Exposure to new models, new tools, and new ideas is one way we keep our work fresh and our thinking current. More
Empathy, strategy, realization
Our method is how we make a difference.Usually it's illustrated in three concentric circles,  drawn by Kevin or Chris on the whiteboards in our conference room, or in the conference rooms of potential clients.I stumbled upon a different way to illustrate this framework last December, at a local holiday artist market. More
Letting go
The go-to image when you think of "letting go" probably involves parents dropping off their kids on the first day of school. Most of us were part of that experience as kids, some of us as parents. The work we do at Peopledesign sometimes aligns us with the third party in this scenario: the school. More
The democratization of craft
Design is a method for solving problems, not just the act of creating stuff. I'm on board with this definition, and have been for a long time. Lately, however, I've been thinking about the craft side of design—the making of the stuff, if you will—with a touch of what feels like misplaced nostalgia. More
So a writer walks into a design conference...
AIGA has done a great job building a national community of designers. And sometimes they even let writers crash their conferences.Back in October, I tagged along with Adam, Brian, and Michele for AIGA's Make/Think design conference in Memphis, Tenn. More
The value of networking with customers
The Fulton Street Farmer's Market across town from our office in Grand Rapids has been providing a harvest of locally grown food more than 80 years. If those stalls could talk they'd share stories about a time when the local open-air market was the center of commerce in our community. That's no longer the case, of course. More
Talkin' bits with Mark Hurst
Inspired by Mark Hurst's book, Bit Literacy, I tracked down the author and engaged him the way he suggests we all engage the various bit streams that inundate us with information every day: head-on and purposefully. Here's how it went down.. More
Bye-bye, bits
I once worked for a company that installed a new email server every time the volume of messages in the system got too high for the old server to handle. For a small company doing business in the Information Age this way, such an upgrade can become an annual event. At the time, it was encouraging to know that somebody had my back, that my "system" -- in which my inbox doubled as a contacts list, tripled as a photo file, and did quadruple duty as a to-do list -- would not be allowed to crash, no matter how big or unwieldy I allowed it to become. More