Design Thought Leader

I don’t know what’s next! It’s kind of a joke, but we’re proudly ‘without business plan’ in our 13th year. We’ve had a lot of things not work, and that’s OK too. If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer—We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome! …

You need to have the stomach for risk and you need to have good ideas. Let’s just assume that those are the givens, that without either one of those nothing else makes a difference.

I know a lot of people who are in our position, who used to work for The Man or whatever, and now are making records or making films or designing clothes or creating products or screening posters or any of a million other things. And all of them, without exception, all say exactly the same thing and they say it in exactly the same words: ‘I should have done it sooner.’

When you think to yourself, ‘In 18 months I’m going to start my crocheted beer coaster company,’ the problem with that sentence is the 18 months. What you’re really saying is, ‘I’m afraid.’ Do it now. If you bankrupt a company before you’re 25, that’s like a badge of honor! Get out there.

Jim Coudal
Founder, Coudal Partners

…creativity isn’t a specific activity; it’s a quality of things we do. You can be creative in anything—in math, science, engineering, philosophy—as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance. And you can certainly be involved in the arts in ways that are especially creative. And so it’s important to emphasize that it’s not about creating some small space in schools where people can be creative, and particularly not if that means just tacking on some art programs on a Friday afternoon. It’s about the way we do things. … We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It’s much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren’t present here and now. You know, to conceive of the past, to anticipate the future, and not just a future but multiple possible futures and many different sorts of pasts.

So this capacity for imagination, to me, is absolutely at the heart of this whole argument. Creativity to me is a step on. Creativity is putting your imagination to work and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. I mean, it is really the foundation of human culture, I believe. And it’s generated multiple ways of looking at the world, multiple ways of seeing it, multiple ways of thinking about it.

Sir Ken Robinson
Thinker and writer on creativity and innovation

We don’t see urban and nature as opposites. We feel that they need each other and coexist. Even in a big city, all you need to do is to take a few minutes to look at your surroundings with a new eye, and you will find nature is right there.

Chao-Hsien Kuo and Eero Hintsanen
Founders, Chao&Eero Jewel

Our clients need to believe in what we are selling and to believe in us. From a graphic design perspective, the onus is on us to make our visual communications clear, impactful and meaningful.

It took much patience and a few years to build trust among my clients, both in the value of good graphic design and in me. I remember one late night standing in front of three 4 x 8-foot presentation boards intended to sell our healthcare services with their charts, graphs and half-completed renderings, when the design leader quipped to me, ‘Graphic design is hard to explain.’ I shot him a glance and replied, ‘It is even harder to believe in.’

In a graphic design studio you are awarded jobs based on your experience, reputation, portfolio and salesmanship. Clients want to trust you because they are paying you, and if they don’t trust you, they will change your design. With in-house design, though, there exists the unique opportunity to dive deeper into the day-to-day business with the clients and upper management and share their insight and experiences. Most of us have a client-facing job where every day we play the designer, account manager and partner. If we are good at it, we are awarded with the holy grail of trust, and the rapport and support that trust brings.

Lisa Gainor
Creative Director, Hello Designers

Design, to me, is the search for efficiency. Efficiency in conveying a message, efficiency of form. In this way I see some of my own work falling into the category of design, while some of my other work falls under the umbrella of illustration. With the more illustrative pieces my primary goal is to create something beautiful or striking in a visceral sense. These goals remain intact when I create a purely design-driven piece, but there is the added goal of minimalism and efficiency which constrains the process and limits the content. It is these constraints that force us as designers to reveal the core of the idea we are trying to express and to seek the most direct route to it. In this way, all of the periphery and excess of illustration and fine art can be shed to expose the roots of visual communication and express them in a concise and instantly understandable form. When I see something that embodies these ideals it is always very moving, these are the things that drive me to create.

Scott Hansen
Artist and Musician

I approach every project systematically, and develop a set of rules that will help me make something consistent and interesting. With a typeface I’m considering all the angles, lines and transitions which will create a kit of guiding principles that direct every decision. The same is true in a logotype or a diagram or a publication, I try to develop a system that is robust and interesting enough to carry all the parts of the design in a successful manner. …

You have to stay busy. If you’ve got a day job and you’re not doing freelance or personal projects at night, you’re not doing enough. If you’re working for yourself, and not working on the weekends, then you’re basically standing still. Experience and a solid body of work takes time to accumulate, and there’s only one way to get there.

Nicholas Felton
Designer, Megafone, Co-founder, Daytum

Working in the entertainment industry is really fun (sometimes it doesn’t even feel like a job), but to get here, you have to put in thousands of hours of hard work, blood and sweat. There are no secrets or ‘magic’ buttons to push. Focus on the fundamentals and don’t get caught up on superficial stuff. The latest versions of Photoshop or the coolest MAC/PC are not going to solve your problems. Put away the excuses and the urge to always have the newest things—instead, just work hard.

Feng Zhu
Designer and Founder, FZD School of Design, Singapore

Creative Good had a difficult time, like a lot of companies did, in 2001 when we laid off almost the entire company and were not doing so well.

I took some time off because I was in need of a sabbatical. When I came back from driving around the country for a few months, I had this germ of an idea, that I wanted to start a conference that was not about customer experience and business, which I knew would remain the consulting focus.

But I wanted a conference that was about good experience. Customer experience is important. I think it’s a good thing to help out companies be more effective and efficient in what they do. But really, customer experience work or user experience work, is a small subset of this much larger, much more diverse and interesting world of thought, ideas and people that I call ‘good experience.’

Again, business is part of it but so is art and so is urban design and so is performance and so is writing. There are any number of ways or places to find good experience in this world.

My idea behind Gel coming back from the road trip was look; if we can get people together who are passionate about good experience—no matter what their job is—then they’ll be able to take those patterns and those ideas back to whatever they do in their work or in their lives.

Of course I was hoping the user experience community would turn out because they would probably understand it immediately, better than most. I was surprised to see that a lot of people outside the user experience world started coming to the events also.

Mark Hurst
Creative Good and Good Experience Live (GEL) Conference