Conference Recap: By Design Conference 2017, Bratislava, Slovakia
This past weekend, I attended the 2017 edition of the By Design Conference in Bratislava, Slovakia.
By Design is a conference targeted at the intersection between business and design, and features a collection of speakers on topics that are heavily visual, but also cover brand strategy and how to build a business’s design language.
I booked the conference months ago — not knowing much about where I was going, only that the lineup was going to be incredible.
It turns out that getting to Bratislava from Barcelona is difficult, and I almost had to cancel my pass due to the difficulty of finding a flight…
I’m so glad I didn’t!
The conference was held in the beautiful P. O. Hviezdoslav City Theater, on the edge of the historical city center of Bratislava. It’s a two-level auditorium with a massive screen that was perfect for such a highly visual conference.
Here are some essential bits from each of the speakers of the day.
Mark Porter, Editorial Designer, London
Mark talked about Editorial Design and how it has evolved since he entered the industry decades ago, the pains associated with moving from print to digital, and the beauty of being able to explore new spaces in design.
This was the only talk that I sketchnoted in its entirety — I realized I should focus on watching the visuals, instead of trying to write, after his talk.
Mark’s redesign of RTL Nieuws was a striking example of how deep one must dig to do such a project. The case study video can be seen here.
The key takeaway from Mark’s talk was the idea that there is no “Design Thinking”, but instead two separate but strongly intertwined concepts:
Design. Thinking.
Tilman Solé and Loran Stosskopf, Partners, Mucho Design, Barcelona
Mucho is a local Barcelona brand design agency. They are well-regarded for the high quality and great expanse of their body of work, and their talk was one of the most-enjoyed from people I met with throughout the day.
Two of the partners, Tilman Solé (Barcelona) and Loran Stosskopf (Paris), presented a walk-through of some of their most interesting case studies, as well as some comedic relief.
Unfortunately for Loran (also an editorial designer), Mark stole most of his thunder, but the duo more than made up for it in their case overviews. The work that they do is impeccable, and we hope to involve them in some activities next year — including a workshop on brand design!
Jonathan Lee, Design Manager, Google Assistant, New York City
Jonathan is, simply put, one of the most influential people in design today.
As a key member of the team that designs at Google, he’s put his mark in several places on the web, including having a hand in their logo redesign.
Takeaways from Jonathan’s talk were: people & relationships are key; when you’re designing for something bigger than your project you need to develop a design toolkit and publish it for others to use; people don’t have to study to be a designer; be engaged. My favorite quote of his?
The most obvious thing is the most obvious thing you should do.
Jonathan has also been involved in the development of Material Design, the design language used in the development of Android apps. He walked us through bits of Material Design, including how Motion plays a part.
He also spent some time talking about the importance of color, one of his favorite topics, and how the Material Design guide makes it easier to select color combinations.
Jonathan was later interviewed by Debbie Millman, but I incorporated some of those insights here — the rest will be on her podcast when it is released.
James Jarvis, Illustrator, London
James’s talk was a pivot from digital to illustration.
The key to his talk was that drawing is a process, which can be deconstructed into making a series of marks on a page or screen that result in an image.
A big takeaway from James’ talk is that art, or design, or any sort of project, might be personal… but if it’s not interesting, it’s not going to add value, because it won’t engage anyone but the person who created it.
James has done some interesting work, like this piece he recently did for Nike:
Debbie Millman, Host, Design Matters Podcast, New York City
Debbie is the most powerful interviewer I have witnessed in person. Her podcast is world-famous for the quality of content that she produces, and she’s interviewed many of the greatest design minds world-wide. Example:
That isn’t to say that she doesn’t belong on that list, too! Debbie’s been responsible for the design of several high-quality brands over the years, including work for Burger King, 7UP, and Häagen-Dazs.
As she mentioned, one of her favorite pieces of personal design is the face that was done for her podcast logo.
My favorite quote from Debbie’s talk (paraphrased) was:
A good interview is like playing pool — you want to leave enough well-positioned balls on the table after each shot that you have more shots to take.
Hartmut Esslinger, CEO, Frog Design, Berlin
Hartmut Esslinger is a designer that needs very little introduction. Over the course of his career, he has been responsible for many influential designs, including early work with Sony and Apple, and his Frog Design has been one of the most influential design consultancies in the world for decades.
Unfortunately, Hartmut couldn’t physically make the conference due to a last-minute illness, but he was able to teleconference in from his home office for an in-depth interview with Debbie.
Hartmut spoke at length about his younger years where he played music and did a lot of drawing, mostly of vehicles and other industrial design objects.
He explained how he built Frog Design, with the goal of forming the best team of designers in the world — he found the best, and he paid them the best, and they stayed the best. During the interview, he expressed deep concern as to how exploitative the design industry has become, with low wages for work that is on par with significantly-higher-paid engineers.
Hartmut had some interesting things to say about personalities such as Steve Jobs, with whom he worked closely during the 1980s on developing Apple’s design language. He was very clear to Steve that he did not like his original designs, but he also mentioned that Apple absorbed a design culture and is still the top tech company when it comes to design.
Finally, he lamented that the average person does not have a good eye for design, and the world is in a place where it is addicted to mediocrity — a place that we need to dig our way out of.
Hopefully, Debbie will be releasing a podcast of the interview! In the meantime, you can listen to Debbie’s first interview of Hartmut below:
Rejane Dal Bello, Designer, London
Rejane’s talk was a walk through segments of her career designing visual identities. It was a very fast-paced collection of cases, and I did not manage to capture many photos, so I encourage you to visit her website.
The project she did that most strongly caught my attention was a piece of pro bono work for Paz Holandesa Hospital in Peru. She designed a series of characters that the hospital could use to display good practices to the adolescent patients, and also give them something to interact with visually while having scans and tests done, or sitting in the dentist’s chair.
Most of Rejane’s visual work can be found on her website — you should check it out! Just remember, design as if everything changes, because:
If there’s life, there’s change.
Josh Higgins, Creative Director, The Factory @ Facebook, Silicon Valley
To balance out the earlier keynote by Google’s Jonathan, Josh Higgins from Facebook finished off the conference. He walked us through the story of his life in design, from his start in music…
…to poster-making…
…to shaping how American politics is advertised.
Josh gave some interesting insights on the design of the donations page on the website (don’t add video, people don’t like video). They did a plethora of A/B testing to build the final page design for donations.
The campaign earned $690 Million online. Of that, a conservative estimate is that $125 Million was due to the A/B design testing we did. A/B testing isn’t sexy… but do you know what’s sexy? $690 Million.
Now at Facebook, Josh has been involved in the redesign of Facebook’s brand, the updated thumbs up logo, and the design of the Facebook birthday videos.
Some of the key insights Josh passed along included the importance of culture and ensuring that it is sustained and not damaged, and that an alternative creative outlet (music, dance, drawing, etc) is essential to keeping your creative mind growing.
He also mentioned that Hillary’s campaign had great design, better than Trump’s, but that design requires a great idea to back it up — there was no great idea holding her campaign together.
Besides all of these phenomenal talks, the networking that occurred was great, and the heavily-Slovakian crowd was welcoming to such a far-traveling student as myself, even if I didn’t understand their mother tongue.
By Design was my first foray into the world of design conferences, but definitely not my last!
Soon, we’ll publish a list of conferences in the Innovation & Design space that might be of interest over the next year!
