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.

Camera Obscura: Using an Old Lens to See Anew In this workshop, we are literally going to be flipping our perspective. To say the very least, we live in technologically remarkable times. In this era of Slack, Skype, Periscope, hyper sharing, our language attenuated to half words and emoji icons, we are in contact with colleagues, family and friends, near, far, and more frequently. So much so, that the perspective and lens through which we see the world is often through the electronic device. Without any judgment as to technology being inherently good or bad, we’ll examine how looking at the world though a different kind of lens can change and refresh our perspective. Workshop participants will be making their own camera obscura. We’ll talk about seeing things differently when we unplug. And through the “technology” of this ancient device, using light, space, and a box, we’ll examine how we can refresh the way we see and our rethink perspective creatively.

Geoff Cook is a founding partner at Base Design, an international network of strategic branding and design studios with offices in New York, Brussels and Geneva. As founder of the New York office in 1998, he has since headed up business development, and has shaped Base’s distinctive and conceptual style of design, marketing and brand strategy to build one of the most sought-after studios in New York. Having lived and worked in Europe and Asia, Geoff is proficient in four languages. He brings a global perspective on culture and commerce to an eclectic, international slate of projects that span the worlds of art, education, fashion, beauty and beyond. Recent clients include MoMA, Miami Art Museum, L’Oréal, Le Pain Quotidien, Spin, Gagosian Gallery, Neuehouse, Milk, Puma, Fred Segal Beauty, Infiniti, JFK Terminal 4, Kiki de Montparnasse, The Met and Wellesley College. Under Geoff’s leadership, Base built their brand of ingeniously simple yet flexible design and branding solutions that transcend and adapt to today’s ever-evolving consumer landscape. Their work has earned them top awards from D&AD, AIGA, LAUS, PRINT, The Art Directors Club and they were listed as a finalist for the Cooper Hewitt Communications Design Agency of the Year. Geoff is also active in leadership and mentor roles in the tech world, acting as a mentor-in-residence at the renowned tech accelerator program TechStars, and serving on the boards of advisors for start-ups Placemeter, Social Sign-In and Crest & Co. He combines his passion for education and the arts as a member of the Board of Directors for New York’s Children’s Museum of the Arts. He regularly speaks about creative marketing and entrepreneurialism at top business schools and industry conferences and is a contributor to Fast Co. Design and PSFK. Prior to his tenure at Base, Geoff held senior positions at DKNY and at the fragrance firm Firmenich, establishing a solid foundation in the fashion and beauty sectors. As head of DKNY’s International Menswear Division, Geoff led a team of 10, and grew the business from $980K to $56 million in 6 years. Hailing from Philadelphia, Geoff is an avid art and furniture collector. You can often find him riding his Brompton bike around Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and five year old son.

Brand Personality in the Technological World In an increasingly wired world, Base partner Min Lew examines the importance of brand personality across digital platforms, social media, and artificial intelligence.

As the Creative Director and Partner of Base New York, Min spans the spectrum between design, brand strategy, and management. She has lead the New York studio through work with such clients as MoMA, Infiniti, Neuehouse, Terminal 4 at JFK, Le Pain Quotidian, Milk, NYCxDESIGN, Kiki de Montparnasse and Gagosian Gallery. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, raised in Seoul, Korea, Min received an MFA from Yale University and worked with B.I.G. at Ogilvy & Mather, Pentagram, and Simon & Schuster prior to joining Base. Next to passionately building brands and building Base, she served as a board member of the AIGA/NY and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts. Min also serves on the steering committee of NYCxDESIGN and is a regular speaker at design conferences.

Brand Personality in the Technological World In an increasingly wired world, Base partner Min Lew examines the importance of brand personality across digital platforms, social media, and artificial intelligence.

Evan Ratliff is the co-founder and CEO of Atavist, the media and software company behind the Atavist digital storytelling platform and the award-winning The Atavist Magazine. The Atavist platform is home to some of the web’s most innovative publications, beautiful stories, and cutting-edge design. The Atavist Magazine, which produces one blockbuster longform story each month, in 2015 became the first digital publication to win the National Magazine Award for feature writing, one of eight nominations in its four-year history. As a writer, Evan is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist, a two-time Livingston Award finalist, and his feature writing appears in The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Wired, where he is a contributing editor. On the side, he is a story editor of Pop-Up Magazine, one of the most successful live literary events in America, and the co-host of the Longform Podcast.

The Life and Death of Digital Magazines Few forms of media have been as durable over the last century as the magazine, but few have been left as adrift by digital change. How do you design a magazine whose parts are stripped for social media and read on phones? Does the concept of a magazine even exist in the current world of web media? Conversely, are so many web media efforts like magazines that the category has lost its meaning? We’ll look at how the conceptual ideas behind magazines translate, morph, or die in the current landscape.

Christopher Simmons is a designer, writer, educator, design advocate and principal of the noted San Francisco design office, MINE™. He is the author of four books, including the recently released Just Design, which focuses on designing for social good. Christopher’s work has been exhibited at museums ranging from the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art (Japan), to the Smithsonian Institution. He is an adjunct professor of design at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and a past president of AIGA San Francisco. On completion of his tenure in that role, then Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an official proclamation declaring San Francisco to be a city “where design makes a difference.”

This Is Progress The things we make (and how we make tem) are a philosophy about ourselves. This session looks at how technology, invention and design shape the way we make art, war, coffee, connections, and sweet, sweet love.

Laetitia Wolff is a design curator, creative strategist and author, a cultural producer interested in building bridges between design and the city. Her work focuses on creating community-centered projects that generate new discourses and experiences around design’s potential as a tool for change and investigation. She joined the NY chapter of AIGA to direct Design/Relief, a creative placemaking program and now leads other civic initiatives, such as Identity Design Action: East New York. She headed the nonprofit startup desigNYC as its first executive director following her 2010 launch of expoTENtial, an urban intervention platform that investigated design’s strategies to address pressing environmental issues. In 2013 she co-curated “EmpathiCITY, Making our City Together” for the 8th edition of the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennale which activated the UNESCO Creative Cities network. In 2014 she produced for the City of Montreal “Unsitely!,” an international colloquium that explored design’s potential in addressing the negative impact of construction sites. She is an instructor in the SVA’s Impact! Design for Social Change summer program. Formerly the editor-in-chief of Surface and Graphis magazines, and a frequent contributor to design titles, Wolff is the author of the award-winning monograph on French graphic master Massin and of the seminal Real Photo Postcards.

Designing for Communities What are the challenges and benefits of designing for communities – not just online communities – but real people, on the ground, perhaps in underserved communities unfamiliar with the design process and whose needs are pressing and often unaddressed.