Ingredients make all the difference.

Tomato Mozzarella Salad
> Tomatoes — several varieties fresh from the garden
> Fresh mozzarella
> Fresh basil leaves
> Extra virgin olive oil
> Balsamic vinegar
> Salt (optional)

Recently, I have been preparing training for our design and production staff and I asked Hailey (my wife and silent partner in Dialect) if she had any ideas on how to convey our design philosophy to the staff. She suggested using food as an analogy. This tomato-mozzarella salad is a perfect example. Good design and writing are best when they are very simple and pack a lot of flavor. They must also be on strategy, of course, but I will leave the strategy discussion for another day.

In contrast, ingredients like stock photos, sloppy typography, and generic-overused-salesy language are like cooking with tomatoes from the produce isle or canned ingredients. They have no flavor and there is nothing special about them.

Don't get me wrong, we cook with stock photos often and there is a time and place for them. But when you want to serve a meal that someone really remembers, the quality of the photos, the writing, the paper, and the typography make all the difference.