Our day two overview of the idea-making conference
We concluded last week at The 99% Conference, where the second day of speakers proffered even more sound advice on making ideas happen. Now in our third year in collaboration with Behance, the two-day conference always enlightens us with real stories from the field and bits of wisdom on how to move from idea generation to idea execution. While a slew of inspiring speakers rounded out the last day, below are four that really stood out.
Starlee Kine
Beginning with a riveting explanation of the “thought orphans” that live in her head, radio producer and writer Starlee Kine entertained the 99% audience with her descriptive analogy on abandoned ideas. A regular contributor to the applauded NPR show This American Life, Kine keeps her ideas alive until she finds a home for them in some shape or form. Encouraging the audience to “write your idea down,” Kine stressed the importance of getting your ideas out there and then getting on with it, stating “the hard part isn’t coming up with the idea; it’s getting out of your own way.”
Andrew Zuckerman
Photographer Andrew Zuckerman posited his main motivations for staying productive are curiosity and rigor. Explaining that in the end, it’s “mostly moving all the cases around,” Zuckerman showed a behind-the-scenes photo of the 12 massive cases and camera equipment he hauls around the world to set up shoots. When manual labor outweighs creativity, Zuckerman thinks about this advice he received from Michael Parkinson while shooting his “Wisdom” portrait project—”It’s the aptitude for hard work that separates the ones who reach a different level of stardom.” The prolific lensman also offered a few more beneficial soundbites, saying “Don’t get stuck. There’s always a way to make something great,” “Learn from the subject of your work,” and finally “The most important thing when dealing with people is to be honest.”
Aaron Dignan
Claiming “most people are bored,” author and digital strategist Aaron Dignan talked about this “epidemic” plaguing the nation in his speech about how games can help shape creative skills. Explaining “play is nature’s learning engine,” Dignan pulled from his book “Game Frame” to show how games induce a state of flow by increasing volition and faculty. Dignan summed up his merited take improving production through recreation with “Real life isn’t that satisfying, games are almost always satisfying.”
Dr. Michael B. Johnson
Leading the Moving Pictures Group at Pixar Animation Studios, Dr. Michael B. Johnson is a veteran designer and master at making ideas happen. Johnson jolted the audience saying “One-third of our movies have taken seven years to make,” as he led listeners through the extensive extensive process it takes to make just one animated feature film. Using digital tools that “make people breathe a little better and creative life easier,” Johnson explained how Pixar uses Pitch Doctor to create over 100,000 storyboards for each movie and leading him to quote former Pixar colleague Joe Ranft in saying “Story boarding is the art of story re-boarding.” Johnson suggests working hard to get it right, because after all “pain is temporary but suck is forever.”
Our day one overview of the idea-making conference
Now in our third year, the 99% Conference speakers are a group of hard-workers at the forefronts of their fields, carefully selected by Behance and Cool Hunting for how they manifest Edison’s notion that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
The 2011 line-up features 16 thought-provoking leaders taking the stage over the course of two days, including designer Yves Behar, Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, partner at IDEO Diego Rodriguez, Pixar’s Dr. Michael Johnson and more. In other words, there’s no shortage of information on how to break a creative sweat, and yesterday started things off with some of those great ideas on how to produce ideas, which we’ve recapped below.
Author and leadership expert Simon Sinek spoke to the group of nearly 400 people about the importance of trust, providing several examples on how the concept stems from an authentic set of common values. Sinek explained its significance lies in the fact that trust encourages confidence in experimentation and exploration. Proving the premise that “as a group we’re pretty damn amazing,” Sinek showed the power in numbers and delved into how much more successful an organization can be when they are consistent in their beliefs and authentic in their actions. The professor and communications strategist also touched on how much generosity impacts action. While there’s “no equation” for this selfless sentiment, Sinek left us with the thought, “If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.”
Giving the audience a sigh of sleep-deprived relief, President and CEO of The Energy Project, Tony Schwartz explained the importance of shut-eye. Describing how you should “live life like a sprinter,” Schwartz broke down some common myths about being a workaholic, explaining “human beings are designed to pulse” and that intermittent breaks yield far greater capacity for doing quality work than marathon all-nighters. Also emphasizing the importance of focus, his approach isn’t to be confused with multi-tasking (or shift tasking as he calls it) since the brain actually can’t do more than one task at once. Shift tasking actually disrupts the work flow and, according to Schwartz, you need to skillfully manage technology and focus on one task at hand for an extended amount of time. Summing it up with “sleep is the most important behavior in your life to get right,” he advocates practicing renewal and recovery to align you with a natural rhythm that will give you the capacity to do better work.
Rounding out Schwartz’s pragmatic approach to making ideas happen, Mien Shiang Institute founder Patrician McCarthy demonstrated how analyzing personality types can affect how you work. A professional in the Taoist technique of facial diagnosis, McCarthy gave an array of face shape examples, linking them to behaviors and explaining how to use them to find more a productive balance in the workplace. Understanding a face based on her classifications of Water, Wood, Earth, Metal and Fire helps better collaboration with colleagues by knowing their work habits.
If you weren’t lucky enough to snag one of the now sold-out tickets, make sure to keep up with the action on Cool Hunting’s twitter feed, the official 99 Percent feed or catch it all at the #99conf.
Stationery with a DIY twist for custom pixel graphics
Sending someone special a card may seem gracious enough these days, but Present & Correct’s latest Paper Weaving Card Set really ups the charm with easy tools for constructing a personalized pattern in addition to undoubtedly endearing messages.
The four-pack includes two “Happy Birthday” and one each of “Thank You” and “Congratulations” cards (all blank inside), as well as 40 paper weaving strips and envelopes. Wrapped in instructions, the handy guides show how to make more involved patterns, like an elephant or heart.
THe 5″ x 7″ cards offer plenty of space to get crafty and sell online from Present & Correct for £10 each.
Supermarket Sarah is a interesting concept for a webstore. Sarah and other collaborating artists create walls—large-scale still life arrangements—of products for sale. You click on the item that interests you to purchase. The wall above features work by Manchester-based artist Tasha Whittle.
“Sarah’s “walls” started in her living room but have now spread into public spaces; galleries, shop fronts, bars, receptions and most recently Sarah curated a 30ft high wall at Selfridges London Concept Store.
The walls have taken on collaborative formats and so far Sarah has worked with brilliant designers including Fred Butler, Patternity, Donna Wilson, Tatty Devine and many more, forming a super network of young talent. Supermarket Sarah has become the place to go for inspirational delights and is regularly featured in media across the board from Style Bubble to the BBC news.”
Here’s a really great idea for recent design grads looking for adventure! A design camp hosted by Chicago’s Firebelly Design.
Camp Firebelly offers the next crop of socially-minded designers the chance to use their talent and creativity to make a difference, experiencing what professional life is like Firebelly-style. For 10 days, 10 campers live and work with us to craft a strategic design solution for a non-profit client, from initial research to final implementation.
Nick Adam writes, “Camp is a time where Firebelly stops all client work and closes the studio for 2 weeks. We bring 10 young designers into the studio and connect them with several nonprofits that are in great need of proper design. We house, feed, direct, and teach the designers to solve all the problems, and develop tangible artifacts within ten days. This is Firebelly’s 4th year of camp, we are very excited for our next group of campers.”
View images from last year’s camp on Flickr. Applications are due April 29, click here to download.
From toothpaste to x-rays, typography’s new creative shapes
As common as alphabet soup or as involved as Craig Ward‘s plant-cell letterforms, “The 3D Type Book” proves how exciting syllabary can be when it comes off the page. The book features over 160 designers and 300 projects, all compiled by London multidisciplinary studio FL@33.
Apart from a brief foreword by Andrew Byrom, the reference book relies on strong imagery (over 1,300 photos in total) to show the wildly creative variety of works inspired by the shape of letters. Byrom—whose “Interiors” furniture font is also featured— says of the impressive breadth of ingenious ideas, this is not simply “Helvetica rendered in pebbles, neckties, venetian blinds, socks or cheese.” Stunningly inventive works like “Typeface in Skin” by Dutch designer Thijs Verbeek are a good example of Byrom’s positioning of the phenomenon as really “a reaction to the limitations and constraints of unexpected materials and processes that help shape—or often force—the outcome.”
Other standouts include the transgenic (DNA-mixing) “Typosperma” project (above) from self-proclaimed “typoholic” Oded Ezer; Sean Martindale’s eco-focused “Nature” concept; and the colorful “Medicine Capsule Alphabet” by Simone Stecher.
Many lettering projects are self-initiated, but the publishing industry often taps designers to add visual appeal to otherwise dry text. For their 2009 design issue, Independent Magazine enlisted Australian design group Rinzen, who integrated script into a chair for their cover. HunterGatherer‘s work has graced the front of both New York and The New York Times magazines with sculptural works deceptively constructed from wood.
World-changing creativity from our five favorite speakers at South Africa’s premier design event
A conference promising “a better world through creativity,” South Africa’s Design Indaba summit fills three days with blue-sky thinking on design as an agent of change. The well-organized event, followed by a thriving design expo, this year also featured a performance by the Watoto Children’s Choir, celebrating the 80th birthday of design mainstay Massimo Vignelli, who sagely reminded the crowd, “If you do good work, you get good work in return.”
While Vignelli’s wisdom neatly sums it up, the conference explored more deeply how design improves life, that questions lead to better design, the ways that passion yields success, and collaboration’s potential to open up new ideas and approaches. While all the speakers intelligently presented their views on creativity, below are the five who made the overall biggest impact.
Maarten Baas
Following a retrospective speech by design impresario Alberto Alessi and closing out day two of the conference, award-winning young designer Maarten Baas‘ passionate take on design left the audience many bon mots to consider—”the most beautiful things in life are unexplainable (like love).” Baas started his talk with images of trees in nature, showing the intrinsic elegance of the world. But because our “brains take over common sense,” we end up with “Superman design,” the shiny and overly-styled work that’s dominated recent years. Baas’ highly-regarded Clay Furniture series (above)—each piece sculpted by hand and with tables that can have five legs—embodies this modern-earthy approach.
His aesthetic, like many contemporary designers, fuels those pundits determined to define him as either a fine artist or a designer, a conundrum he compares to a tomato. “Is it a fruit or a vegetable?” Baas asks, then answering his own question, explains it is both. Though bewildered by the categorizations, he understands the media’s fascination with his hybrid process. After debuting his Smoke collection (above) he felt people wondered “who is this guy from Holland with his blow torch?” Explaining the paradoxical leap his work requires, Baas commented on his limited edition series for Established & Sons, stating “the sales were even more limited than the edition.”
Karin Fong
Concerned with “making transitions and connections,” Karin Fong designs the “in between space” that bridges reality and fantasy in her film work. As one of the founding members of Imaginary Forces, Fong specializes in creating title sequences for movies and television. The pragmatic creative sees each project as a puzzle, where she must combine the legal information (the credits) with an imaginative opening sequence to ease the audience into the story. “Dead Man on Campus” (above)—which Fong says was a challenge in and of itself as a comedy about suicide—cleverly substituted information on a college exam with the film’s credits.
Fong explains that when creating these compact stories within a larger picture she “knows it’s right when it can’t go in front of any other story or production.” For the HBO show “Boardwalk Empire,” Fong said their first thought was to make an opening concerned with prohibition and the time period during in which the narrative takes place. Realizing that the focus of the series was the character Nucky—no matter who dies or what changes during the show, he always comes back—they redesigned what has become a widely-lauded introduction around him.
Hat-Trick
For a design duo that “likes to keep busy” London-based Hat-Trick seems to have an immense amount of fun doing it. Founded ten years ago by Jim Sutherland and Gareth Howat, Hat-Trick works with a wide range of clients, creating projects of various scale—from postage stamps to campaigns.
Aptly named Hat-Trick, the small firm applies a clever sensibility, at once playful and diligent, to their work. When commissioned by U.K. commercial property developer Land Securities to create a temporary billboard at residential building Piccadilly Lights, Hat-Trick designed a giant switch that people could physically turn on and off with copy reading “Piccadilly Lights: owned, managed and illuminated by Land Securities.”
An underlying message from their presentation is they don’t see their craft as work, instead they treat each endeavor as an exciting challenge to flex their creative muscle. For instance, on a recent holiday Sutherland decided he “needed more practice with typography” and gave his hand at designing a deck of playing cards. The resulting set not only cleverly toys with words and images, but reflects the subtle humor of their designs.
Robert Wong
Touching on Baas’ down-to-earth approach, Google Labs‘ creative director Robert Wong started his talk with the fact that he is the exact opposite, even offering an equation for artistic success. S! + Em = Cr means “surprise plus empathy equals creativity.” From “don’t be evil” to “do epic shit!”, Wong’s motivational-speaker pitch kept it moving, sprinkling bits of valuable advice among personal anecdotes. Life-affirming statements like, “the best search results don’t really show up on web pages, they show up in people’s lives,” lent his talk an optimism that the former accountant balanced with practical tactics. One of the key factors they keep in mind at Google, he explained, is knowing “our products are only as good as our browser.” Tapping into the conference’s theme, Wong posited that while no one really knows what a “better world” looks like, if people galvanize their talents we are sure to see a more innovative future.
Michael Wolff
Dressed in bright blue Crocs, veteran designer and consultant Michael Wolff opened up the conference with a review of his 46 years in the business. Unsurprisingly, he had an endless flow of scholarly soundbites to compliment his works, which typically include a witty animal in the design. Wolff himself explains he would be a seagull, flying high, having fun and soaring around to scoop up his next meal. The metaphor led to his first bit of advice, “humor is an important part of building relationships.”
Co-founder of the now-massive brand strategy firm Wolff Olins, Wolff is no stranger to creative thinking. His process is to detach the brain from what it already understands—like an engine pulling apart from the train—and begin in the “I don’t know position.” He also warned the audience about hanging on to an idea, saying “Having an idea is a block to having more. If you have an idea, just throw it away. You think you’ll never have another one but you will.”
Wolff explains “sometimes you just have to leave things alone.” Tasked by Lyle’s Golden Syrup to redesign their packaging, Wolff didn’t change a thing. For Shell, he simply bumped up the colors and removed the name—an act that speaks volumes about progress and how our relentless pursuit of it might best play out in coming years.
Half a million people have already seen this video about The Sartorialist (an advertorial by Intel), but I hadn’t seen it until this morning and found it quite interesting. I wish I had the confidence to stop people in the street and tell them how to pose for me! I wish I had the stamina to wander the streets with a heavy camera. I wish I had the time to just observe and record life.
I wish I had more time for the “digital park bench” and for posting to this blog!
“Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds challenges our first impressions: what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means. The sculptural installation is made up of what appear to be millions of sunflower seed husks, apparently identical but actually unique. Although they look realistic, each seed is made out of porcelain. And far from being industrially produced, ‘readymade’ or found objects, they have been intricately hand-crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans.”
Watch another video here and read about the exhibition on the Tate website. {discovered via Magpie and Cake, lots to see over there!}
A SIDE NOTE: I have been back from the Mossy Shed (such an amazing experience, will post more soon. Tif and her clan were such amazing hosts.) for a few days but taken over by boxes. Shipping boxes in and out, boxing orders, receiving the shipment of The Elegant Cockroach from China, notecard box designs, email inboxes… plus we’re painting the walls and laying new floor in our house, so everything is in a state of chaos. Once the dust settles, I’ll be back for a more regular posting schedule.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
