2009 Conference Recap
Speakers
We invite the world's leading creative visionaries to share pragmatic, real-world insights on how you can put your ideas into action.!
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Michael Bierut
Partner
Pentagram
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Speaker Bio Michael Bierut
Partner
Pentagram
Michael Bierut joined Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm's New York office. His clients have included The New York Times, Harley-Davidson, the New York Jets, Princeton University, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. He has served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1988 to 1990, as president emeritus of AIGA National, and was awarded the profession's highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art, and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management. He writes frequently about design.
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Clients
Michael Bierut: 5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks
Pulling from his collected notes and sketches from over three decades, renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut shares five simple secrets for doing great creative work.
- Links:
- Pentagram
- Wikipedia Page
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Jill Greenberg
President
Jill Greenberg Studio
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Speaker Bio Jill Greenberg
President
Jill Greenberg Studio
Since the age of 10, Jill Greenberg has staged photographs and created characters using the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, film, and photography. She is known worldwide for her uniquely human animal portraits, as well as the End Times series, which combine beautiful, poignant imagery with both political and personal relevance. Jill's images are sharp, saturated, stunning, and quirky, her work is soaked with realism and imagination, which hits a national nerve.
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Innovation
Jill Greenberg: How Much Should You Push the Envelope?
“What’s interesting about controversy is that it gets your pictures out there.” Photographer Jill Greenberg on the value of pushing the envelope.
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Robert Hammond
Co-Founder & President
Friends of the High Line
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Speaker Bio Robert Hammond
Co-Founder & President
Friends of the High Line
Robert Hammond is a Co-Founder and President of Friends of the High Line. His organization bought the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long disused elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side, from the brink of demolition, in 1999, to the start of construction, in 2006, on its conversion to a public park. Robert has worked as a consultant for a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors and non-profits, including the Times Square Alliance, Alliance for the Arts and National Cooperative Bank (NCB).
As a founding team member and then as a board member, he helped to launch thebody.com, the largest online HIV/AIDS information resource in 1996. Robert is also a self-taught artist. With work in private and corporate collections, his work can be seen publicly in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton Battery Park, CraftSteak New York and Craft Dallas. From 2002 to 2005 he served as an Ex-Officio Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Collaboration
Robert Hammond: Building the High Line
Robert Hammond, co-founder of Friends of the High Line, shares insights on executing large-scale community projects, culled from his 10-year battle to transform a disused rail structure into an iconic public park.
- Links:
- The High Line
- Crain's Profile
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Scott Thomas
Design Director of New Media
Obama for America
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Speaker Bio Scott Thomas
Design Director of New Media
Obama for America
Scott Thomas is constantly seeking the simplest answer to complex problems. Scott began his design pursuits studying architecture before bouncing to graphic design and web development.
Prior to moving to Chicago, where he set his sights on user-experience design, Scott called London's Shoreditch home. From products to websites, Scott works to simplify the experience of use.
In 2006, he and five other creative types began a design collective, lovingly known as The Post Family. The group is devoted to supporting "family" member's design habits-from silkscreen to letterpress, from illustration to blogging-in an effort to "get back to the hand."
In 2007, Scott's career took a dramatic leap when he was invited to join the New Media team at Obama for America. The chance encounter led Scott to becoming the Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign. He is currently writing a book that explains how an obscure senator rose to the highest office in the land and celebrity status with the aid of branding and design.
Scott plans to continue designing for social causes that might just someday change the world.
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Collaboration
Scott Thomas: Designing the Obama Campaign
Obama’s successful 2008 campaign marked the first time that branding and design played a pivotal role in a presidential bid. Design Director Scott Thomas talks about how it unfolded behind the scenes.
- Links:
- BarackObama.com
- The Post Family
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Seth Godin
Author & Entrepreneur
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Speaker Bio Seth Godin
Author & Entrepreneur
Seth Godin is the author of 17 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and Purple Cow. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth is founder of squidoo.com, a fast growing, easy to use website. His blog (which you can find by typing "seth" into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. Before his work as a writer and blogger, Godin was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, a job he got after selling them his pioneering 1990s online startup, Yoyodyne. In 2013, Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this honor.
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Innovation
Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain
Bestselling author Seth Godin argues that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.
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Ji Lee
Creative Director
Google Creative Lab
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Speaker Bio Ji Lee
Creative Director
Google Creative Lab
Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Ji Lee studied design at Parsons School of Design. He currently works as the Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York and teaches design at School of Visual Arts. In the past, Ji has worked as the branding director at Droga5 and art director at Saatchi & Saatchi.
Ji is the founder of the widely publicized Bubble Project and the author of two books: Talk Back: The Bubble Project and Univers Revolved: a 3-Dimensional Alphabet. He has given numerous lectures including Harvard University, MIT and MoMA. Lee's work has appeared in ABC World News, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, Wired among others.
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Career Development
Ji Lee: The Transformative Power of Personal Projects
How can personal projects feed our professional development? Ji Lee changed his career trajectory with 30,000 stickers and a guerrilla art approach.
- Links:
- Please Enjoy
- The Bubble Project
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Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Chief Creative Officer
Threadless
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Speaker Bio Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Chief Creative Officer
Threadless
Jeffrey Kalmikoff is a partner and chief creative officer for the Chicago-based, community-business-centric skinnyCorp, overseeing design and strategy for their numerous community-based web projects. These projects range in scale from Threadless, a multi-million dollar t-shirt business selling more than 100,000 shirts per month, to YayHooray, an invite-only, just-for-fun design and technology community. Jeffrey's work has been published numerous times, and he has spoken all over the world from MIT to the University of Copenhagen to CNN and NPR.
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Failure
Threadless: The Do-First Work Ethic
Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell, co-founders of Threadless, talk about how they transformed a fun side project into a multimillion dollar company.
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Jake Nickell
Chief Strategy Officer
Threadless
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Speaker Bio Jake Nickell
Chief Strategy Officer
Threadless
Jake Nickell is a young, entrepreneurial mad man that programs community websites non-stop. He is the founder and CSO of skinnyCorp and Threadless.com, along with countless other side projects.
Jake dreamed up the Threadless concept in 2000 after winning a tee shirt design contest on a short-lived online design forum. The idea of sharing designs and opening them up for fellow artists' critiques appealed to him; he thought Threadless would be a way to give back to the community by creating actual goods out of the submitted designs.
He lead the growth of Threadless, which has culminated in more than 900,000 online users and two physical retail stores in Chicago, and has a number of other projects in the works.
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Failure
Threadless: The Do-First Work Ethic
Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell, co-founders of Threadless, talk about how they transformed a fun side project into a multimillion dollar company.
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Jason Randal
Theorist on Developing Expertise
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Speaker Bio Jason Randal
Theorist on Developing Expertise
Jason Randal is a renowned entertainer and speaker to Fortune 500 companies who has developed strategies to accomplish extraordinary results in shockingly record time. He holds a PhD in social psychology, is a member of MENSA (the high IQ society), plays and writes for five musical instruments, and has recorded six original CDs. He works in three languages, has published numerous magazine articles and three books including Magic For Professionals and The Psychology of Deception. Randal is a board certified master hypnotherapist, a licensed locksmith, a NAUI master scuba instructor, a licensed special effects technician, and a master certified flight instructor for both airplanes and helicopters. He flies his own turbo twin Aerostar and Enstrom helicopter.
Jason, a seventh degree black belt master in karate instructed six years for the Chuck Norris karate schools, and 3 years as a drill sergeant and hand to hand combat instructor for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. For ten years, Jason was a technical advisor and stuntman in Hollywood working on projects such as the CHiPS television series, and in 11 films including Officer and a Gentleman, Tequila Sunrise, and Pretty Woman. He extensively trained such stars as Richard Gere, Lou Gossette, Tom Cruise, William Shatner and Mel Gibson. A licensed general contractor, he designed and built his own unique granite home. He lives on a 200-acre ranch outside of Yosemite National Park in California.
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Collaboration
Jason Randal: Learn How to "Stretch" Your Memory & Focus
Expertise theorist Jason Randal talks about how to supercharge your ability to focus and expand your memory for speedy results when learning new tasks and skills.
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Cheryl Dorsey
President
Echoing Green
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Speaker Bio Cheryl Dorsey
President
Echoing Green
An accomplished social entrepreneur with expertise in health care, labor issues, and public policy, Cheryl Dorsey was named President of Echoing Green in May 2002. She is the first Echoing Green Fellow to lead this global nonprofit, which has awarded more than $27 million in start-up capital to over 450 social entrepreneurs worldwide since 1987. As a public policy innovator, Cheryl served as a White House Fellow from 1997-1998, serving as Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, advising the Clinton Administration on health care and other issues. She was later named Special Assistant to the Director of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department, where she helped develop family-friendly workplace policies and spearheaded the labor secretary's pay equity initiative.
Cheryl has received numerous awards and honors for her commitment to public service, including the Pfizer Roerig History of Medicine Award, the Robert Kennedy Distinguished Public Service Award and the Manuel C. Carballo Memorial Prize.
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focus
Cheryl Dorsey: Social Entrepreneurial Intelligence
What traits define a particularly successful social entrepreneur? Echoing Green president Cheryl Dorsey breaks down the concept of SEQ.