He is one of the most influential and at the same time one of the most controversial designers of our time – David Carson. He impressed a whole generation of graphic designers, his talks are well remembered … And of course, his answers on our little Q&A are also unique … short and to the point! We are looking foward to TYPO Berlin where he’ll serve us one hour of cool graphic design, surf images and things we have never seen before!
Arguably the shortest presentation I’ve been to all day, but arguably the one packed with the most passion.
Emory Douglas is a designer for the Black Panther movement, so his illustrations and posters are anything but controversial.
It is hard to sum up the experience that is Aaron James Draplin. Where to start? Draplin commands the attention of the audience with bold slides including an official DDC disclaimer and a fair warning to coders that his presentation will not include any sort of code languages. He establishes his presence on stage with seemingly appropriate vulgarity mixed in with motivational statements. Regardless of what the audience thinks, he explains that he probably shouldn’t be up on stage since he lacks credentials or professional accolades.
As the attendees entered the screening room, chatter began swirling around about what kind of question they would ask David Jonathan Ross. The prompt was based on his recent move from New Hampshire to Los Angeles. The ice is broken with such questions like “What’s the best tanning salon in New Hampshire?” This sets the tone of the funkiness that is about to unfold.
Denise’s inspiration comes from an unlikely place — learning to play drums seems like an unlikely place to base a presentation in design on — but somehow, she has inspired her audience to go with the flow; to look for the beat, and ride their design out.
Elliott Earls is the head of the Graduate Graphic Design Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He’s a graphic designer who blurs the line between graphic design and art. He’s also a performer and artist whose work has been represented in major art museums. This afternoon, at Typo San Francisco 2014, Earls was all of these things — and a dynamic speaker with some very quotable takeaway points.
In this presentation, Elliott Earls breaks down the mechanics of his hybrid design practice.
We began George Zisiadis‘s talk by shouting our favorite font and high-fiving our neighbors. This was a great introduction to Zisiadis and his work, which he summarized in the opening of his talk with the quote: “I like to have fun. I use my work to have fun.”
Yasmin Khan of Counterspace began her presentation with a game of Pong. She explained the similarities between her work and the game, how it all comes down to a back and forth. Khan’s work inhabits a space between the familiar and the unknown. Not quite here, but not quite there. She describes it as “the space for becoming.”
Boris Kochan opened his talk by sharing a personal story about the transformative experience of becoming a father which helped him learn an important lesson—to embrace change. By doing this, he opened himself to new travel opportunities, new cultures and experiences that greatly inspired his work and the development of the GRANSHAN Project.
His first exposure to using design for a cause was a poster in 2005 created for The Hurricane Poster Project, a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina. It made a couple thousand dollars, which was at the time more than he could have contributed from his own pocket. That’s when the potential for design to help the world dawned on him. Working closely with Leif Steiner, the creator the the Hurricane Poster Project, Higgins went on to create a similar projects benefiting San Diego after the fire and more notably Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010.
Before Jan and Randoald took the stage, notecards were handed out to the audience for people to write questions on. “They should be related to animals. It would be better if it had nothing to do with graphic design.”
