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13 April 2025 | Issue #88

In this issue:

• How Are You Challenging Yourself?
• Social Media Ad Design Strategies for 2025
• What is Vibe Coding?
• ChatGPT's Image Generation is Impressive
• The Visual Marketer: Now on Amazon!
• Upcoming Engagements
• Design Quote of the Week

How Are You Challenging Yourself?

This was another stressful week.

Whether it's work, the world at large, family, or something else, I'm going to bet you dealt with some unexpected stress this week. We all did.

In times like this, it's easy to retreat to a more comfortable state. It's human to look for safety and comfort when we're not feeling good.

One of the best things I learned in 2024 was from James Clear's bestseller, Atomic Habits. In there I learned that when we feel discomfort, we will do anything to feel differently. I realized that this is what causes stress eating. When I was feeling stressed, I was eating because I wanted to feel different. I wasn't hungry, but it's easier to change the way my stomach felt than my overall stress level.

This gave me the clarity to realize the actual problem I needed to solve, rather than the distraction I was craving.

Understanding this has helped me focus my energy in the right direction.

During times of stress, I've found that being creative helps clear my head. When I was growing up, drawing always made me feel better. It still does, I'm just not as prolific as I used to be.

Late in the Covid days, I found that I didn't have a creative outlet. My job at the time was primarily emails and meetings, which I enjoyed, but I wasn't challenging myself creatively. So, I started my first newsletter.

I listened to a podcast in which the guest shared a ton of useful information, and I was thinking about how I would tweet out those tidbits. Then, I thought about creating images to accompany each fact. Put a few of those together and I could make an entire infographic out of the stats from the podcast.

Thus, Marketing Podcast Recap was born!

I challenged myself to create a new infographic each week based on a different marketing podcast episode. To make it more challenging, I set a couple of guidelines: The style of the infographic couldn't mimic the speaker's visual brand, and the infographic had to be different than the previous infographics.

I produced 26 infographics in the first six months before starting to take breaks. My little side project was beginning to burn me out, so I slowed down production.

Then, I started to get into AI and its impact on design and marketing, which led to the birth of this newsletter. I revisit that newsletter when I find information I want to share as an infographic, but it's pretty rare these days.

This was how I challenged myself when my job wasn't scratching the right creative itch. It forced me to really go deep on different marketing topics. This gave me information that I brought back to my job, so it benefitted everyone.

If you want to learn a little more about the behind the scenes, I was on a podcast where I talked about my process.

​ NEWS AT THE INTERSECTION OF DESIGN AND MARKETING

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📢 Social Media Ad Design Strategies to Maximize ROI in 2025

DesignRush outlines key strategies for enhancing social media ad performance in 2025, focusing on engaging content and platform-specific optimization.

• Embrace Short-Form Video: With 78% of consumers favoring short videos for product information, leveraging this format can significantly boost engagement and ad recall.

• Leverage UGC and Influencer Collaborations: User-generated content and influencer partnerships are proving more effective than traditional branded content in driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

• My Take: There is a lot in this article. It's a good reminder to fish where the fish are.
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​Keep reading​

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👨🏻‍💻 What Is Vibe Coding?

AI Supremacy explores “vibe coding,” a transformative approach to software development where natural language prompts replace traditional coding.

• Conversational Development: Users describe desired functionalities in plain language, allowing AI to generate and refine code iteratively.

• Empowering Non-Developers: By lowering technical barriers, vibe coding enables individuals without formal programming backgrounds to create functional applications, democratizing software creation.

• My Take: Between "vibe coding" and "vibe marketing," we're going to see a lot of people jumping into new disciplines where they're not properly qualified. If part of your team is qualified, and someone else is just vibing, get ready for conflicts.

​Keep reading​

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🕵 ChatGPT Image Generation

By now this is old news, but I hope you've tried out ChatGPT's new image generation capabilities. You can do so much more than make an action figure of yourself. The text capabilities are almost where we need them to be.

It's really impressive.

Have you created anything interesting with it? If so, reply or leave a comment with your generated image. 👇🏻

​ NEW RESOURCES FOR YOU

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The Visual Marketer

If you were waiting to buy the book on Amazon, now is your chance! https://amzn.to/3FKjCG1 - If you've read it, feel free to drop a review!

But I have to warn you, the hardcover is much more expensive on Amazon than on my site. Amazon takes a big cut.

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UPCOMING ENGAGEMENTS

On June 6th I'll be speaking at EvolveDrupal in Boston.

If you're looking for podcast guests, or want to collaborate on something, shoot me a DM.

Design Quote of the Week

“Design is the application of intent – the opposite of happenstance, and an antidote to accident.”
– Robert L. Peters

My AI disclaimer: I write the main story. I find the news stories, and the summary is by ChatGPT. I write the My Takes bullet. If AI generates the images, I include the prompt so you can see how I got to that image.

Thanks for reading!

–Jim

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14 Grapevine Road, Merrimack, NH 03054
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