Blog | Blou Designs

October 28, 2026

I’ve Never Had a Job (aka How I Made a Consulting career by Working in the Gaps)

I’ve never had a job. Well, that’s not quite true. Through college and grad school, I had a slew of work study positions and spent summers in a mix of paid internships, paid research positions, and paid TA work. These things covered a range, from cleaning toilets to helping pre-service teachers integrate technology into their curriculums to working on visualization...

Navigating Change

May 22, 2026

When should a business error trigger an operational change? (diagnostic error logs)

So, you F’d up. Or someone on your team did. What’s your next step, the one that helps you figure out if this should trigger an operational change?

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Tech Stack

April 16, 2026

Using Ask Studio to Generate YouTube Content Ideas for Your Business

There’s a timeless question in content marketing: how do you generate new ideas? YouTube’s Ask Studio could help.

Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment/Tech Stack

April 9, 2026

Closing your business? What to do with your website, domain, and email

You need a wind-down plan that includes your website, domain, and email (i.e., parts of your business’ tech stack) so that you don’t remove vital business infrastructure before you’re ready.

Strategic Alignment/Tech Stack

April 1, 2026

Replaced by AI? Workflows, Service Design, and What AI Doesn’t Know

We don’t share everything with AI— and probably never will. In that gap is the boundary you get to set between your service’s value proposition and what folks can reasonably do with AI (instead of you).

Processes & Productivity/Service Design/Strategic Alignment

July 30, 2025

Change Sucks (Even When It’s for the Better)

The process of change comes with chaos and complexity – sometimes more than what you started with. You get through the process by maintaining vision while tolerating the chaos and complexity. (Even when the end result isn’t perfectly defined.)

Navigating Change/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

May 5, 2024

Organize Your Digital Notes: The PARA Method (plus one thing Forte missed)

Are you a digital note taker? Can you easily find – and use – those notes, or are they a jumbled and ever-growing collection of things you promise you’ll organize some day? If that sounds like you, you might want to try the PARA method. If this ends up working for you, go ahead and start sorting your old notes...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Maximize the SEO Value of Your Calls-to-Action

If you’ve used a template to design a landing page or other marketing/sales materials, you’re probably familiar with the format that has you list a catchy sentence that perfectly entices your audience, followed by a button that reads something like “Learn More”, “Download Now”, “Enroll”, or “Buy”. That button is called a Call to Action (CTA), and, when it’s generic...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Asking & Listening: The Problem with Qualitative Data … and what to do about it

When it comes to quantitative data (i.e., number data), we’ve come up with a lot of “scientific” standards for assessing quality of the data and how confident we should feel about the conclusions we draw from that data. At its most basic level, that’s things like having a sufficiently large sample size (i.e., a minimum of 30, but more is...

Data Strategy/Strategic Alignment

June 1, 2023

SOPs Are Like a Dictionary for Your Business

What type of thing is the dictionary? And why does it matter to your SOPs?

Processes & Productivity