Remembering the successes and failures of Steve Jobs

Remembering Steve Jobs

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Rage Against the Hipster Music Blog Machine

Hipster music trend

The Five Languages of Not Screwing Things Up With Your Clients

Lessons on maintaining a good relationship with clients

Keeping clients happy

Craft Punk: Why You Should Do It Yourself

Making something yourself over just buying it

Why you should do it yourself

Who Gives a $%#* About An Oxford Comma? We do.

Using the Oxford Comma

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The Four Most Important People in Marketing

Understanding your customers and clients how to treat them

Different categories of consumers

Celebrating Dos Anos: Time Marches On to the Beat of a Different Drum

Black Sheep celebrates a second anniversary

Second year anniversary

Keeping the TEDx Spirit Alive” 99 Balloons is Nothin’

Keeping the TEDx Spirit Alive

Social media communication through Facebook likes

Communication through social media

A Little Bit of Mystery and a Dash of Strategery: Black Sheep Goes Ninja

Black Sheep goes ninja

Appealing to your audience’s appetite for a story

Storytelling for marketing

Tedx Houston

Publicity and using the unexpected to build your brand

Social media breakfast

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Reaching the untapped marketing potential

The untapped market

Ways to gather and save social media content

Managing social media content

Marketing to customers in a more personal way

Bring the product and relationship to the customer

How marketers can have a brand that isn't boring

Branding with creativity

Four Tips for Launching a Successful Event

Ways marketers can launch a successful event

Launching an successful event

Let Our Powers Combine.. To Make a Website!

Being able to collaborate talents for a better creation

The power in collaboration

There’s a particular kind of project that doesn’t feel like a project.

It feels like something else entirely. Over Black Sheep’s 16 years, we’ve learned to recognize these engagements — the ones where the stakes are real, where the mission is load-bearing, where getting the story right genuinely changes what’s possible for the people an organization serves. We’ve also learned that these are the projects we want to fill our days with.

Right now, our roster is full of them. I want to talk about that — not as a highlight reel, but as a reflection of what we believe this work is for. And if you’re leading one of these organizations right now and it feels heavy or uncertain or like your story isn’t keeping pace with your mission, this is for you too.


Some projects aren’t a single scope — they’re a relationship, built over time, through the kind of trust that only comes from doing hard things together.

Houston Arts Alliance is in one of the most pivotal moments in its history. A new CEO — the first woman and person of color to lead the organization — has stepped into a role that carries both enormous expectation and extraordinary possibility. We are building alongside them from the ground up: immediate messaging and leadership transition tools, a mission and vision refresh, a public education campaign, a community engagement process and a full brand foundation. Long, layered, listening-first work. Some of our favorite kind.

Houston Parks Board is marking its 50th anniversary at the start of an exciting new chapter — bold new leadership, a visionary strategic plan and a future that has been a century in the making. We’re evolving their brand to match the scale of that moment. Being trusted when the foundation is strong and the future is wide open is its own kind of honor.

Good Reason Houston is an organization we know well — we built their original brand in 2018, and they’ve called on us at several points of strategic inflection since. This is one of those moments. The world these leaders are navigating looks almost nothing like it did seven years ago, and our work together right now is about finding language that tells their story with clarity and confidence for where things are today.

Civic Builders finances and develops school facilities across the country, making excellent schools possible in communities where the need is greatest. We completed a full messaging and positioning strategy with them, and we’re now deep into their visual identity system — in genuine collaboration with their extraordinary internal team. This partnership is the kind we aspire to: the work belongs to all of us.

The Greater Houston Partnership is building an AI-powered tool to connect educators, employers and community partners in ways that expand workforce opportunity. We’re building the brand that makes it accessible and credible from day one.

Fervo Energy is redefining what clean energy looks like. We are their strategic design agency — giving visual and creative form to the complexity of what they’re building, because a breakthrough technology deserves a story told with equal craft.

The University of Nevada, Reno trusted us to direct a digital campaign for their Black Youth Mental Health Initiative — designed to reach young people at the right moment, in the right channels and keep them connected to support that can change the trajectory of their lives. This follows our branding and strategy work for their CDC-sponsored Safer Nights opioid overdose prevention campaign last year.

The Center for Civic and Tech Life is now publishing a magazine for local election officials — the people who make democracy function at the ground level. We named and developed the publication’s visual identity, because this community deserves tools that reflect the seriousness of their work.

In collaboration with January Advisors, we’re working with the League of Women Voters Houston on a set of core values and a strategic plan built for what comes next. The League has been doing this work longer than most organizations have existed. Helping them articulate where they’re headed is not something we take lightly.

Much of this work is happening in Houston — the city where Black Sheep was founded, where many of us live and where we feel the stakes of these institutions personally. When you’re a Houstonian working on Houston, it stops being a client list and starts being something else.

It takes something to make this call. The leaders we work with aren’t doing it because things are easy — they’re doing it because they’ve decided that a story that can’t carry the mission is a liability they can’t afford. That takes clarity about what’s actually at stake. It takes a willingness to look honestly at the gap between where you are and how you’re being perceived. And it takes the kind of courage that doesn’t always get named as courage — the quiet decision to invest in something foundational when there are a hundred urgent things competing for the same resources.

But the thread running through all of it — local and national — is the same: find the organizations doing the most necessary work, and make sure their story is strong enough to carry their mission forward.

If your organization is in a moment that demands more clarity, more confidence or a story that finally matches where you’re headed — we’d love to be in that room with you.

A reflection on 16 years of learning which projects are worth our days — and the mission-driven organizations we're building alongside right now.

The Work That Doesn't Feel Like Work | Black Sheep Agency

What it takes to build a story strong enough to carry a mission forward.

A reflection on the partnerships filling our roster right now — and what it takes for mission-driven organizations to build a story strong enough to carry their work forward.

The Black Sheep blog is turning up the volume on community engagement, social media strategy, Houston happenings and what it means to lead a purpose-driven life.

The Black Sheep Agency | Social impact and nonprofit blog

We like to type as much as we like to listen.

We're not shy.

The Work That Doesn’t Feel Like Work

Remembering The Real Steve Jobs

Rage Against the Hipster Music Blog Machine

The Five Languages of Not Screwing Things Up With Your Clients

Craft Punk: Why You Should Do It Yourself

Who Gives a $%#* About An Oxford Comma? We do.

The Case for the Case Study

The Four Most Important People in Marketing

Celebrating Dos Anos: Time Marches On to the Beat of a Different Drum

Keeping the TEDx Spirit Alive” 99 Balloons is Nothin’

We LIKE Like You

A Little Bit of Mystery and a Dash of Strategery: Black Sheep Goes Ninja

Stick to the Story

TEDx Houston: Where Do We Go From Here?

A Black Sheep Stunt-a-thon

It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

To Your Heart’s Content

Taking the Product to the People

Consistency is Futile

Four Tips for Launching a Successful Event

Let Our Powers Combine.. To Make a Website!