Sean Adams is a partner at AdamsMorioka, and professor at Art Center College of Design. He is an AIGA Medalist and AIGA Fellow. Adams has been cited as one of the forty most important people shaping design internationally, and one of the top ten influential American designers. He has been recognized by every major competition and publication including; Step, Communication Arts, Graphis, AIGA, The Type Directors Club, The British Art Director’s Club, and the New York Art Director’s Club. AdamsMorioka has been exhibited often, including a solo exhibition at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Sean is the current national AIGA President, serving his second term, past AIGA national board member, and past AIGA Los Angeles President. He is a Fellow of the Aspen Design Conference, frequent lecturer and competition judge internationally, and author of several books. AdamsMorioka’s clients include The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cedars-Sinai, Disney, Mohawk Fine Papers, The Metropolitan Opera, Natural History Museum, Richard Meier & Partners, Sundance, UCLA, and the University of Southern California.

Changing Lanes

How do we change and adapt professionally, personally? When do you know it’s time to make a change from one job to another, starting your own firm, changing your clients, closing the doors to an office, spending your days making macramé and playing golf?

Lawrence Azerrad founded the independent graphic design studio LADdesign in 2001. Creating graphic design and comprehensive visual identity systems for clients such as The Clinton Foundation, The Beach Boys, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Heal The Bay, and over a Sixteen-year client relationship, spanning seven album packages for award-winning American alternative rock band, Wilco. Prior to opening LADdesign, he worked as an art director at Warner Bros Records, creating packaging and artwork for artists such as Miles Davis, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers. He has taught Graphic Design at Art Center College of Design, The Academy of Art University, San Francisco, He is the author of a personal project, a design history of the supersonic luxury airliner, Concorde.

Design + Music

Two art forms, one message: design that represents music.

This workshop is about the experience of listening to music played live and translating what we hear into a design language that effectively represents the art of music visually. The session will call on participants to question how one form of art in design, is adapted to be the visual articulation of a different form of art in music. Through the workshop, we will experience the challenges in aiming to have these two art forms overlap into a single artistic and cultural message. During the musical performance, we will design to the music in live time. Through collage, using materials provided, the limited time frame will require an immediate translation of what we hear into a visual treatment, calling on us to draw on our most direct artistic response to the musician’s art and performance.

By designing in the presence of our musical guest, we will explore the sensitivity of developing visual solutions for the songwriter and performer’s art, and the understanding that this music is their heartfelt creation and how we channel the most effective translation of this. Following the performance and design session, we’ll have a group review of our work, also including the comments and thoughts of our musical guest, and select the design solutions that most effectively embody the sound, spirit, and content of the music.

Nick is a designer, entrepreneur, Founder and Creative Director of the San Francisco design studio Branch. Prior to co-founding Branch in 2013, Cronan was the Design Director for Dr. Dre’s Beats at Ammunition. Before that he was at Fuseproject directing creative for clients such as Herman Miller, Samsung, OLPC, CocaCola, Johnson & Johnson, Barnes & Noble and Puma.

You Gotta Pay to Play

Investing in the work you are passionate about, to attract the clients you want.

Step Inside Design magazine once called Marc English “the Johnny Cash of AIGA”, referring to him as “teacher, preacher, shaman, showman.” The 20th anniversary issue of HOW magazine listed him as one of “20 Designers We’d Like to Have a Beer With.” He suggests the sentence should read “ . . . With Whom We’d Like to Have a Beer.”

According to the Austin Chronicle, “You might want to wear a welder’s visor and some chain mail just to be on the safe side; in his hands, “design theory” is a radical, insurrectionist weapon. Joe Strummer would’ve dug this cat, but good. His identity both as a human being and an artist is XXL life. Austin filmmaker/writer Cary Roberts has rightly called him ‘the Stanley Kubrick of design.’ He fairly burns with passion for his life and work, and he wants you to burn, too. No sparks or embers here. English is a conflagration of design theory, overwhelming talent, and experimentalism, and his work meets at the dirty crossroads of the artistic truth of what has been entrusted to him and the bottom line, the movement of “product,” the allure of the dream made true, at midnight, beneath a full moon, with pistols and blood well spent. His aim is truest. . .” Yes, that is hyperbole at it’s finest.

English studied design at Massachusetts College of Art, after a stint at the Berklee College of Music, where he studied composing, harmony and arranging. He began his career in Boston working for a number of studios on projects in communication design for Fortune 500 clients, broadcast design for ABC-TV’s Boston affiliate, and creating museum exhibits for national and international clients, before opening his own studio in 1993, and later moving to Austin, Texas. His work can also be found in the collections of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany, the Merrill C. Berman Collection, New York, and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitano, México City.

English has served as a director of the AIGA, and as president of both the Boston and Austin chapters. He has served as a member of the Massachusetts College of Art National Alumni Council and sat on the board of directors of the Austin Film Society. Author of Designing Identity: Graphic Design As A Business Strategy.

English has taught at the university level for more than two decades, in the U.S. and Mexico, and currently teaches graduate studies at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco. He’s ridden camels in the Sahara, almost died on the North Shore of Oahu, been chased through the jungles of the Yucatan after midnight, has slept in the rain under only a serape in Utopia, Texas, and the longest day he’s spent on a motorcycle was 18 hours in the saddle. He continues to travel and lecture frequently and likes to read Homer in the original Greek.

As they say in Texas, it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true. Most of the above is true

Papa Was A Rolling Stone (or, You Can’t Always Get What You Want): The Career I Never Wanted

Description coming.

I’ve been exploring how to improve lives through design and ingenuity for 30 years.

I love helping people create ingenious solutions to challenges—big and small—facing organizations, communities, society, and our planet.

I’ve collaborated on design, brand, and business books including The Brand Gap: How To Bridge The Distance Between Business Strategy and Design by Marty Neumeier, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide by Brian Fugere, and Mass Career Customization: Aligning The Workplace with Today’s Nontraditional Workforce and The Corporate Lattice: Achieving High Performance in the Changing World of Work by Cathleen Benko and Molly Anderson.

To further positive change I am an advisor to Fuse Corps and Project M and a board member of Not For Sale, the campaign to end slavery and human trafficking.

I was shocked, but made my mom, wife, and daughters proud, by being recognized in The 2014 GOOD 100.

Born Ingenious

How to unlock our natural born ability to create clever, original, and practical solutions with the resources available to us.

April Greiman is a thinker, designer, and artist whose transmedia projects, which address all areas and scales of design from communications to textiles and from architecture to new media, together with her innovative use of advanced digital technology, have made her a leader in the design world.

Greiman actively challenges interdisciplinary boundaries, investigating the parallels and intersections between art and design in all aspects of her work, which has appeared in print in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and USA Today, among others; on television networks including CNN, PBS, and ESPN; in the monographs April Greiman: Floating Ideas into Time and Space and It’snotwhatAprilyouthinkitGreimanis, Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Arts, and Something from Nothing, among others.

April’s work has long had a relationship to architecture and she has collaborated with such renowned architects as Frank Gehry and RoTo architects to produce signage, exhibitions, and color palettes for both interiors and entire building complexes. Recently, collaborating with landscape architect, Ken Smith, a 1400 acre park, Orange County Great Park, has begun implementation of the color, signage-wayfinding system and other 3-dimensional interventions into the built environment.

Featured currently at the Museum of Modern Art, Designing Modern Women 1890-1990 exhibition, interest in both print and virtual space has led to projects for furniture manufacturer Vitra’s Workspirit Magazine, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, Southern California Institute of Architecture and fashion label Dosa, among others.

There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

Adaptation to/of color and light, spatializing information and then some.

Jay Jurisich is the founder and Creative Director of Zinzin, a brand naming agency. He has been a professional namer for over sixteen years, and has led name development projects for Participant Media, Nokia, eCornell, ABC Television, GE, MTV, DuPont, MGM Resorts, Camelbak, Raytheon, Nike, TalorMade, Canon, Honeywell, SonyMusic, GAP, Hasbro, Turner Networks, EA Sports, Seagate, Shaw Communications, TCF Bank, and DirecTV among many others.

Zinzin creates powerful product and company names that differentiate and propel brands beyond their competition. It is a unique agency committed to helping companies rise above the generic branding chatter that clogs cultural discourse. Jay believes that doing naming right is part science, and for that Zinzin has a rigorous, battle-tested process in place. But he also firmly believes that naming is an art, and it is art, poetry, depth of meaning, stories and mythology that separates great brands from the pack of competitors who fail to understand the value of evocative, metaphorical names.

Jay has an MFA in painting and drawing from UCLA and BA degrees in Literature and Art Studio from UC Santa Barbara. Before naming took over his life completely, Jay has been a web developer, editor, writer and visual artist. He is always thinking about names and naming, and is happy to guide anyone willing to listen through the process of creating a killer brand name.

Bacteria, Brands and Ballyhoo

The language of brands is the new avant garde, the rapidly evolving bacteria of culture. How the meanings of words and brand names mutate, adapt and evolve over time, and how chance, layering, distraction, humor, misunderstanding and chaos contribute to the mutation of language and the creation of transient poetry in the moment. Adaptation will be put into action as we discuss how adaptation has been put into action.

Everett is a tinkerer, storyteller, and hacker of physical objects. As Pinterest’s Brand Manager, his job is to communicate the company’s story to pinners from all walks of life.

Before coming to Pinterest, he was the Environmental Design Manager and an early communication designer at Facebook. During his time there, he helped design the company’s campuses (recently with Frank Gehry Partners LLP) and global satellite offices, created the audio mnemonic and sonic identity, and produced several brand videos. He was also the co-founder of the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, a print studio and workshop led by a rogue band of pirates determined to challenge the status quo.

In addition to tech, Everett has done a lot of work in the museum industry for the J. Paul Getty Museum and as a freelance exhibition designer. Many of the exhibits he designed were a first for the Getty, ranging from baroque portrait sculpture to contemporary architecture and design.

Seeing With Sound

Using sound and emotion through improvisational sound design for storytelling.

Jonah Lehrer is a writer, primarily about science. He is currently at work on “A Book About Love”, to be published by Simon & Schuster. He blogs at jonahlehrer.com

On Failure

In this personal talk, Lehrer will discuss the educational benefits of failure. He’ll argue that failure is both a necessary and painful part of the creative process, which is why the best kinds of creativity require the sort of lasting commitment that can only come from love.

Heidi Reinfeld is a Partner and Vice President of Creative for Sequence, a leading creative agency based in San Francisco and New York that focuses on connecting brands, products and people.

A classically trained designer, she couples a refined visual sensibility with a holistic understanding of large-scale interactive systems. She has rich experience both in-house, with Bank of America, and at agencies like Sapient and Studio Archetype. Her career moved from traditional print to a strong foundation in user-centered design and design strategy by working closely with interaction designers, researchers, and technologists. Because of this experience, her approach to every project is as interdisciplinary as possible—truly understanding the integration points along a project’s lifecycle.

Throughout her career she has worked on a variety of projects—most recently various mobile devices, physical environments, marketing websites, e-commerce, packaging, numerous identity and branding initiatives, and pure brand strategy and product development projects. Despite the wide array of end deliverables, Heidi thrives on designing a complete experience across multiple touch-points. To each engagement she brings a strong, yet considerate, point of view, an ability to set a vision and ensure it is executed and a strong level of storytelling – all while never forgetting that everyone has to still laugh and enjoy what they do. Brands she has worked most recently are: Peet’s Coffee and Tea, Apple, Chevron, Disney, Medtronic, Lytro and WebMD.

Embracing and Empowering Both Introverts and Extroverts

The design process has become more complicated, team members have become more diverse, and the need for rapid, thoughtful ideation has not just become part of the process but often the product itself. Design thinking is beyond just part of the selling process — it is something that clients and peers need to see and be part of, and with that comes the diverse set of designers who are involved in the mix.

While introverts and extroverts don’t always necessarily translate to being shy or overly thoughtful vs. gregarious and dynamic, there are tendencies that start from these personality traits that need to be considered in this ever changing design environment. There is a need for collaborative, iterative working sessions that happen by the hour or group brainstorms which have taken on an integral part to the design process. Here is where these personality traits are forced to battle their strengths and weaknesses and designers need to figure out how to adapt.

Lisa is passionate about helping leaders envision and create more expansive futures. Lisa is the coauthor of Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change (Simon & Schuster, February 2014), which offers innovative teams and leaders a creative framework for tackling high-stakes challenges using the disciplined principles of design. Lisa teaches innovation and strategic foresight at the MBA in Design Strategy program at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts, where she helps leaders embrace their full potential as innovators using the concrete skills, tools and mindsets of design.

Lisa is a frequent lecturer and keynote speaker at leading business schools, and has designed and delivered innovation programs for a wide range of executive teams in organizations, ranging from ING Bank, Citi Ventures, Herman Miller Inc., Toyota Financial Services, and Roberts Endowment Development Fund to Stanford’s Media X and the Kauffman Fellows Program for venture capitalists. In addition to her corporate work, Lisa also works extensively with educators and students to bring innovation and discovery skills into primary and secondary education. She recently delivered a TEDx talk on her passion for design, co-chaired the Nueva School Innovative Learning conference and was the co-host at the international Business Design Summit with Alex Osterwalder, coauthor of the global bestseller Business Model Generation.

Designing Moments of Impact: Strategy as Experienced

What does a baby food fight, a scavenger hunt and a live graffiti wall have to do with strategy? Everything.

In a time of growing complexity and dynamic change, how can we can solve challenging problems in co-creative and collaborative ways? Through strategic conversations – creative, collaborative problem solving sessions that generate ideas and momentum that accelerate innovation and lasting change.

Learning how to design great strategic conversation is a craft and discipline similar to great product design. Together we’ll explore how a design mindset, a sharpie, and the right conditions can stimulate new ideas and advance impact on your most vexing challenges.

Alissa Walker writes and speaks about design, architecture, cities, transportation and walking for many publications and events. She is the urbanism editor at Gizmodo and her work regularly appears in Los Angeles Magazine, the LA Weekly, Dwell, Fast Company, GOOD, T Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as on the KCRW public radio show DnA: Design and Architecture. In 2010 she was named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow for her writing on design and urbanism, and in 2011 she was awarded an ArtPlace grant for the initiative GOOD Ideas for Cities, where creatives propose solutions to urban problems proposed by city leaders. Alissa lives in a Dodger blue house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles where she throws ice cream socials, tends to a drought-tolerant garden, and relishes life in L.A. without a car. Read more at her blog, A Walker in LA, and follow her @awalkerinLA on Instagram and Twitter.

Sidewalk Critic: Exploration, Observation, and Mid-Century Modern Architecture

Part walking tour, part architectural criticism lecture, this session will head out into the nearby Twin Palms Estates neighborhood to discover and disseminate hidden details of the urban environment. Wear comfortable shoes, and bring the following: A notebook, something to write with, and a camera-enabled phone.