I just got back from attending the HOW design conference in Atlanta, GA and I’m excited to report back on what it was all about. Many designers consider conferences indispensable opportunities to network, get inspired, recharged and invigorated with new ideas. The HOW conference is one of the largest of its kind, drawing over 3,000 designers from all over the country. It costs a pretty penny: about a thousand bucks for the conference itself, plus the cost of airfare and hotel. But if you can swing it (or get your employer to send you), there is much to be gained. I went down with Scott Chappell and Anjula Duggal to drink in the action. There’s so much to cover from the conference, so get ready for an epic post.

Gazing up at speaker Chip Kidd

The first morning at HOW felt like we were back at the start of a college semester: a sea of colorfully-clad designers making their way to the registration lines and pouring into the opening events. Though staged in massive hotel ballrooms, attendance at some sessions was so high that there were still several of us sitting on the floor, heightening the sense of college nostalgia. The first session we attended was a witty walk through the work process of famed book designer Chip Kidd, who is known for churning out almost one book cover a week in his post at Knopf publishing house. He shared some hilarious stories and visuals of designing everything from comic book treatments to a Paul Simon CD cover, letting all the characters from his life inform his designs.

The design for Paul Simon’s album made Kidd’s young pal Jet a star

Bookended by the conceit of a crossword puzzle clue that has to be viewed in an unexpected way in order to be solved, Kidd’s session showed us how to approach and solve design problems in ways that make the familiar feel new. Kidd’s session set the tone for the highlights of the conference: entertaining visuals with threads that tied the whole presentation together, whether the focus was on artwork, studio management, portfolio building, or creative inspiration. The only problem was that there were so many tempting sessions happening in the same timeslots, it was painful to choose which to attend.

We broke for lunch consisting mainly of gigantic, gooey peanut-butter cookies, a specialty of the south, and then visited the resource center to collect loads of free goodies: samples from design industry vendors, some cool designey-looking T-shirts, and a few edible treats. Then it was on to the next session: “Perfect Imperfection: Lessons of the Handmade in Design.” Presented by Joshua Chen, principal of San Francisco-based Chen Design Associates, it was all about the benefits of returning to basics and integrating handwork into your digital designs. I say “returning” to basics because when I was in school we all learned to work by hand, but for young designers and students today it may be something new. Printing and cutting tools like rubylift and the X-acto knife are relics—images of these old favorites provided comic relief as Mr. Chen showed inspiring examples from his firm’s book, Fingerprint, achieved through adding illustration, hand-printing, lettering, even sewn-collage elements into their designs.

The cover to Fingerprint was hand-painted with watercolors

“We could have taken a cheap and quick all-digital route,” he said, “but making the effort to do the handwork, the effects we got were much more personal and unique.” After his presentation, we saw designers lined up to have their copies of his book signed. Some even persuaded him to pose for photos, illustrating that design talent comes with its own brand of celebrity.

Tuesday started off with an absolute bang. We attended a fascinating session by author and designer William Lidwell called “Universal Principles of Design,” after his book of the same title. An entertaining speaker, Lidwell opened with an explanation that our brains are divided into human, monkey, and reptile functions. He didn’t mean this metaphorically: flash impulses such as sex and aggression come from a part of our brain that exactly mirrors the synapses of reptile brain, whereas our caregiving and emotional impulses are identical to those of our monkey ancestors. Have you ever noticed yourself displaying a visual bias for faces with baby-like proportions? Or giving more weight to type and images that appear below a “horizon line” on a page? The basis of his talk was that ads and images that speak to our baser instincts are much more powerful than those that try to speak to the higher more abstracted functions of the human brain. Lidwell’s before and after images showed striking results of using design principles which help designers do just that.

Danny Gregory, an illustrator and author as well as a successful advertising creative director gave an inspiring session called “The Drawing Habit,” where he described the benefits of drawing every single day. Through his illustrations of the everyday scenes and objects in his life in New York City, including a fantastic video (below) of him drawing the contents of his medicine cabinet, he showed a series of simple steps that would help anyone start a daily drawing habit. In the video it looks like he’s a super-fast and accurate drawer, but he confessed that the video was actually sped up to ten times his actual speed, pointing out that accuracy takes time and real observation.

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Wow, he’s quick! (Danny’s video demo is 10 times the speed of actual drawing)

He showed different sketchbooks and pens he has favored over the years, and described his group “sketch-crawls,” ten-hour drawing binges modeled on the pub crawl that leave participants blissfully “mute with exhaustion” at the end. Danny Gregory’s drawings radiate energy, intelligence, and willingness to let go and just draw without judging. He made us realize that drawing “models” were all around us in our every day lives. When his session ended people practically stampeded to the nearest art store to buy new sketchbooks.

Though overall excellent, if the presentations did have any weak area it was the career development track—some of these sessions were not as substantive or practically applicable as others. Discussions of how to “reinvent yourself” through a career change leaned a bit too far towards the self-help-y cheerleading jargon. A session about building the perfect portfolio yielded a lot of encouragement to “be fearless” and view the portfolio as “a handshake,” but stopped short of giving designers usable hands-on advice. After a career-management session geared towards beginning designers I heard one attendee muttering, “I didn’t need to hear the presenter mention the fact that she has a multimillion dollar company one more time…” These sessions also tended to lack visuals; relying instead on slides with bullet points too small for most of the audience to read.

On the other hand, Armin Vit of Pentagram, UnderConsideration, and its infamous designers’ forum SpeakUp, gave a fantastic career-oriented presentation called “The School of Hard Knocks,” about the benefits of making revisions, learning from mistakes, and having a sense of humor when dealing with clients. He showed “100 failed logos” and played BurnBack’s well-known anthem, “Make The Logo Bigger,” a rocking ode to that most familiar of client requests. Several other business management sessions were also excellent, from Daniel Schultzmith’s sharp and applicable pointers for running a design studio to former Target designer Brian Edlefson’s talk on finding time to do creative work amid the hectic, meeting-packed office setting. It’s easy to get into a routine where you forget that you’re not just a designer but also a businessperson; the best of these sessions gave us useable tools to apply in managing our own working lives.

Nomi and Anjula looking out over the Atlanta skyline

On the closing night of the conference, we attended a rooftop party hosted by design industry communications impresarios Laura DesEnfants and Deb Aldrich of D&A. Through Laura and Deb we were lucky enough to meet the folks at Veer, a Canada-based designer’s resource for extraordinary stock photography, illustration, type, motion graphics, as well as their own well-edited offering of merchandise. We all stood around sipping pretty drinks overlooking the Atlanta skyline, dominated by the warring figures of the CNN headquarters and the Coca-Cola building. We then moved on to the Descenders Ball, the conference’s booze-fueled closing event hosted in the Atlanta Aquarium. Sharks—and the rest of the room—swam before our eyes as we talked with our fellow conference guests about all we gained from the conference. In the three-day whirlwind, there was a ton to take in; we made new friends, learned new tricks, gathered inspiration, and recharged our creativity for the coming year. Check out the HOW blog for more conference photos.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Design Careers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.