If last year’s Design Thinkers conference underlying focus was on the revival print, this years the common thread was self-reflection, story-telling, personal philosophies and the like. Among the speakers some thoughts and ideas that stood out for me:
Tosh Hall spoke about how his design work might not be great, but he told a beautiful story in the process.
Ayse Birsel [go to https://www.inc.com/author/ayse-birsel for her articles] spoke about deconstruction and reconstruction in the design process and how our lives are built upon our values and they map who we are. The dots connect our values depending on how clear and important it is to us.
Ken Attwood spoke about how our interactions speak louder than any words and Anthony Burrill had a similar idea when he said that ‘work hard and be nice to people’.
He also shared another interesting perspective that posters were like social media of their times as when they were put up they elicited and demanded a response and a reaction. [http://anthonyburrill.com/project/look-see/]
Erin Sarofsky spoke about making documentation a part of your design process and how design is about having an opinion and not about knowing a software [have to love this guy for saying this]
The final keynote speaker Jessica Hische, a lettering artist, said ‘design is about finding yourself over and over again, she spoke about her gorgeous Penguin drop cap series, which probably deserves a separate blog post altogether but heres trhe link to more https://www.penguin.com/static/pages/classics/penguindropcaps.php
The highlight of the conference for me was my all-time favourite designer Michael Beirut. I love his work of course but more so his thoughts and his ideas on design are what draws me to follow him. He spoke about the relationship of graphic design to truth and a sense of responsibility. He ended his talk with some ideas on design education and said ‘why would you want to go to crap overpriced American universities when you have fantastic universities here at home and they are so well priced too … and there, there is Trump!’
