And while everything is in beta, we should constantly be thinking of rethinking design and redesigning thinking. But where do we start? Spiekermann proposes a series of strategies:

1. Do nothing. Avoid the work and do anything but IT.
2. Think. The simplest of options but however important.
3. Research. Look at magazines. Go through books. This is another excuse to not do the work.
4. Collect. He chooses print presses and bikes.
5. Draw. Everybody can do it, no excuses.
6. Take it apart. It’s the best way to learn.

And as far Spiekermann’s team’s manifesto?

• Speed and deep are not opposites.
• Cooperation doesn’t mean consensus.
• Idea generation is not idea selection.
• Failure is part of the process.
• And everything restarts as soon as it is finished. Nothing is ever done.

He also sees a paradigm shift from corporate to social. Hierarchical and structured has become social, real-time and collaborative.

Stay lean, eliminate waste and sketch. Spiekermann believes we don’t need leaders, but moderators. We don’t need motivation but we need inspiration to do our best.

Lastly, everybody should be responsible for themselves and for others.

Indians love to design and embellish, from temples to taxis. In India’s early history, art and design were reserved to the upper class who commissioned paintings. By the late 19th century, imagery was more widely produced and accessible to serve commercial purposed. What has changed is the canvas, which is now the city itself. Nostalgia is still highly idealized, and idealism contrasts with the harsher realities of Indian life. The collective fondness for escapism should not be misread as kitsch. Religious expression, also reflecting idealism, is highly present in Indian life. Flamboyance of Indian typography is rampant with a desire for customization – people like to belong yet differentiate. Indians crave both novelty and tradition. Cinema impacts visual communication.

Typography is often still hand-lettered. Indian street signage painters are called “sign-wallahs.” They work from the street for the street, and are respected. They even create vehicular signage which serves as moving signage. The trade is often passed on within a family, children work when they are not in school and some aspire to be sign-wallahs. Like anywhere else, changing technology has been a challenge for the trade.

Meena shared handpaintedtype.com, a project dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of sign-wallahs. With the advent of digital publishing, sign-wallahs are going out of business with people switching to vinyl which is cheaper, quicker but uglier. The project documents the typefaces of sign-wallahs and turns it into digital type to serve as a resource for future generations.

-By Diana Banh @dibanh

-By Diana Banh @dibanh

She sees Makeshift as a clubhouse, a place for activity that’s not just work but also a place that fosters a feeling of belonging. Work is different in today’s world. Makeshift is a place for balancing control and agency.

Agency: capacity to act
Agency: make shi(f)t happen for yourself

Coworking is for independent workers who inhabit shared workspace. The three keywords are inhabit, shared, and work.

1. Inhabit: community. By inhabiting a space, you learn etiquette and according to the book A General Theory of Love, empathy is created when you see someone face-to-face.

2. Shared: economy. Shared economy is a trend now and improves efficiency.

Laying out the goals for his talk (to de-romanticize the notion of inspiration and to empower people who believe they don’t have the ability to be inspired), Vit opened up about what really inspires him: money and fame. Going on to explain how money supports the people he loves and the things he needs, while fame is just “a relevant group of people knowing who you are and what you stand for.” But that those are the things that drive him to work hard; to seek the inspiration to make good work and get better.

Throughout his talk, Vit makes clear that he has no real bursts of inspiration. That he did not get into graphic design because he is particularly creative. In fact, he explains that his creativity comes from doing something longer than everyone else normally would. But, clearly, that sort of creativity has served him well.

Browsing through some of his work and interesting side projects (a quick Google search may show you how many ovens this man has in the fire), Vit clarifies that the “inspiration” for most of his work came from careful research. He acknowledges there are moments of random inspiration (like when his daughter inspired a magazine spread for “Cactus makes perfect”), but that most of his work comes from careful research and absorption. That it’s not a “labor of love.” It’s just labor. Labor that is attainable to anyone willing to put in the hours, not just a select few creative geniuses.

Because, in reality, “We don’t have to wait around to be inspired. We can just look.”

• Watch the video of the talk (for attendees only)

Erik Kessels’ lecture was incredibly visual, incredibly entertaining, and showed us how to blur the lines between the contrasts that occur daily in the design industry.

“Strong ideas allow you to blur.” Starting with a strong idea allows you to cross over into different disciplines. To support this point we had the pleasure of seeing some slides of Erik’s projects including: His print work for various ad campaigns, 3-D type created to promote the city of Amsterdam, commercials, and even art exhibits curated by Erik.

“The blur between high budget and low budget.” Effective and well-designed work can be created on any budget. Case and point: the Citizen M Hotel vs. the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. The Citizen M Hotel is very high end and sophisticated while the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel is just about the exact opposite, playing up the fact that you can’t find a worse hotel. Both designs had strong ideas and strong strategies that helped them succeed no matter what the budget was.

“The blur between online and offline.” Erik printed thousands of images downloaded from Flickr and filled a gallery space with them creating a sea of physical printed images. People could pick up the images, make picture angels in them, walk amongst them, and just interact with them in any way they please.

“The blur between autonomous and commissioned.” Perhaps the most entertaining point of the lecture was viewing the slides of Erik’s self initiated projects. With projects like the rabbit balancing things on its head, the woman who shoots herself, and how to shoot my black dog he showed us that sometimes doing projects for yourself can turn into successful projects that generate interest and commission.

If you get a chance to see Erik Kessels give a lecture, jump on it because it really shows you how having strong ideas gives you the freedom to experiment, cross mediums, and create brilliant work.

Mandy Brown is co-founder and CEO of Editorially, a new platform for collaborative writing and editing  She previously served as communications director and product lead at Typekit. But, if you are reading this you probably already knew that…

Mandy Brown had to follow up Jessi Arrington’s kick-off to Type13 which at the moment seemed like a large undertaking . However, she did not disappoint!

Our industry is changing, it’s moving from the book to the API — from a static, finished artifact, to a living, incomplete, and abstract design. Many designer’s having issues with the idea of sending an incomplete project free into the world but Mandy Brown has a solution for us or rather another way to think of things

“Everything is unfinished. “

Even a printed book that you might have at home isn’t finish. Once a book has been produced and sent out to the masses it’s still a work in progress; by adding annotations, corrections, or even illustrations all enrich the text and add more to it. You can continue to add to it to your hearts content but is it done? Mandy Brown stated that due to the fact that technology doesn’t march in a straight line and it’s constantly changing it means that the content we create is also constantly changing. As designers we need to learn to let go and stop being precious about our work. Everything is unfinished!

The anxiety about things going into the world when it is not ready yet is something that we, as designers, need to learn to let go. Remember that everything is unfinished.

Other topics that the wonderful Mandy Brown touched upon during her talk was how physics relates to graphic design and how as designers we need to be literate vs. being fluent. As designers we are often asked to wear many hats and some times we are expected to be experts in certain fields or topics. Mandy Brown urges us to not

“…look for unicorns; build balanced teams.”

By building balanced teams the rate of success is much higher. Although, we are all not expected to be unicorns Mandy Brown urges us to become literate in topics/programs that pertain to our field and to remember that HTML and CSS are languages and NOT code!

- Claudia Solis

2. I make graphic design. He was Art Director of Design Mind. His graphic design was in the modernist style, unlike his comic book work. He was conflicted by how the way he works, thinks, and make comics is different from graphic design. He wanted a singular voice but instead felt schizophrenia. He decided to undergo design psychoanalysis, “aka grad school,” and enrolled in Yale Master’s Program hoping to understand and articulate his process. Instead of singularity he found multipicity.

With an art history background, Tom loved the hand-made black and white style of William Morris and the constructivist style of El Lissitzk. He decided to shift from style to intent behind the design. While Morris and Lissitzk style were polar opposites, they both shared the intent of supporting the ideals of communism.Tom decided to shift from a single style to finding various ways to communicate a similar subject.

3. I’m a communication designer. Tom decided to decide on the appropriate voice to use to transmit a message. Designers should reject the idea of finding their “voice” and instead learn to speak in tongues.

4. I’m an American. What is American design/communication (compared to Swiss, Japanese, or German). Multiplicity and flexibility are key and inherent in the American way of communicating which you can see in music from country to hip hop, to film (ie Kubric appropriating Diane Arbus or Hitchcock appropriating Edward Hopper). Redirection is important in graphic design to make engagement memorable. The real challenge is to embrace the multiplicity of methods. As author Michael Rock said in The Designer as Author, it is not who made it but what it does and how it does it. Style needs to be paired with solution, or it’s just putting lipstick on a pig. Learn solutions, not styles. Again, learn to speak in tongues.

-By Diana Banh @dibanh

Every project that Kelli takes on, whether it be a popsicle truck or an infographic, is approached with the audience in mind. When they interact with it, the piece is brought to life. The main tool she uses to make people aware of something they might not immediately see happens to be the theme of TYPO13: Contrast. This forces people to see things differently.

Kelli uses the power of contrast to surprise people. She takes your expectations about something and crushes them. There’s always an intrinsic complexity that lies within different projects, Kelli believes, but they only come to life when we look hard enough.

Design relies on a cultural infrastructure that’s always changing. Symbols and associations make it easy for us to walk through our pre-conceived assumptions. For Kelli, it’s all about breaking through those assumptions to force her audience to make a discovery of their own.

But more than anything, Kelli strives to be a glitch in people’s lives. She takes familiar formats and mediums and disrupts it to get viewers to ask questions. She likes to figure out how something works and rearrange it so it does something it wasn’t intended. It’s amazing what a little experimentation can do.

• Watch the video of the talk (for attendees only)

Jeff Veen & Typekit once had three days to solve an eight-week problem. Is that possible? According to Jeff, the answer is yes, yes it is. In his lecture titled “Designing For Disaster” Jeff takes us through his recipe to solve a problem/prepare for future disasters in this chaotic world, and how to recover after the disaster hits.

So what happens when it’s the Friday before the x-mas holiday and disaster strikes? Let’s take a lesson from Jeff who played it cool. The first step was to find who could identify and solve the problem, “lock them away so they can focus.” Identify the moral support; the problem solver can’t do it alone. Identify the business end of the company, and of course, “Stock the fridge with micro brew and soy milk (very San Francisco),” for those late nights & long hours. Then they waited. With a little grace, focus, talent, and time they made magic happen. Jeff learned that this formula is good to lessen the chaos of future disasters. These disasters will happen to the best of us, but knowing how to deal with them, and equally importantly, knowing how to pick up the pieces afterward, will bring a little more clarity to the chaos.

One benefit of dealing with a disaster is that you know how to handle it in the future. Veen spoke a lot about the fundamental attribution error. This is when we always need someone to blame. If there’s a problem, we need a villain. But this doesn’t really deal with the real issue. A better technique is Veen’s Five Whys. When a problem occurs, ask why? Then ask why again. And again, until you’ve asked five times. This will force you to look deeper into the root of the problem so you can find its source, truly fix it, and prevent it from happening again.

Veen’s lecture, designing for disaster, showed us that mistakes happen and chaos will ensue whether we like it or not. He gave us a real life scenario on how he has handled disasters in the past, he gave us his recipe to prevent disasters from happening, and how to handle them once the dust has settled. He challenged us to “trust each other and do great work” and after soaking up a little of his disaster control knowledge today I think we all feel armed and ready to take on that challenge.