Hasta La Ideas

We couldn’t contain ourselves with delicately rendered glee when it was announced that graphic artist Marian Bantjes would be among the speakers at TED2010, the annual conference that began as a technology, entertainment, and design (hence, TED) confab and 25 years later has become a World Economic Forum of the mind. The theme of this year’s conference was “What the world needs now”—not so much love, sweet love, as “core ideas that will drive our quest for a better future.” Bantjes was recruited to have her say during the session on Imagination (between livestock whisperer Temple Grandin and philosophy professor Denis Dutton), and TED has just released this video of her inspirational talk. In it she explains how after making the decision to transition from graphic designer to graphic artist, she became “bizarrely popular.” Her secret? Take things personally. Says Bantjes, “The more I deal with the work as something of my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is as something that’s compelling, interesting, and sustaining.”

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