How to negotiate like Nike designer Tinker Hatfield and other takeaways from DesignThinkers Conference
The Engine Digital design team was pretty impressed when we first saw the lineup for the DesignThinkers Conference Vancouver. Design icons such as Emily Oberman of Pentagram, Tinker Hatfield from Nike, Chip Kidd —“the Meryl Streep of book design”, and David Carson—“the Father of Grunge” design, made the decision to get tickets a no-brainer.
I was only able to attend day two, but still experienced plenty of highlights. Emily Oberman’s journey — from student, to rising star at M&Co, to boutique firm principal, to Pentagram partner — was particularly inspiring. Her arc of branding experience included everything from decades of SNL titles, The Tonight Show, and DC Comics.
She even designed a cannabis products brand called Leafs by Snoop for her most notorious client Snoop Dogg. Upon revealing her modern take on laid back West Coast design, Snoop said, “You’re a funky bitch,” which she took as the highest of compliments.
Chip Kidd, author and long-time book jacket designer for Alfred A. Knopf, took us behind the scenes for a compelling and often hilarious look at the ping-pong match that the design process often resembles. More interesting than his myriad of successes were his failures and the scrapped ideas and client interactions that led to them.
For one job, Kidd had made three different attempts to interpret the cover for Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. All of them missed the mark and he was ultimately fired from the gig. He remarked that the final cover design was better than anything he could come up with. It was an admirable sentiment that I felt was the mark of an honest and confident designer, as was his willingness to share work that was not up to par.
For an even greater dose of Chip Kidd’s wry humour, I highly recommend his first novel The Cheese Monkeys.
The biggest draw for sneakerheads at the conference was undoubtedly Tinker Hatfield, legendary Nike shoe designer and star of Abstract: The Art of Design. Although, he didn’t reveal too much more than what is already covered in Netflix’s outstanding documentary series, he did add some color to his stories about his track and field injury, previous life as an architect, and how the movie Wall-E inspired one of his Nike creations.
His most memorable anecdote was on the subject of selling through a design idea and revealed his ultimate tactic in dealing with his naysayers at Nike. If he was presenting an Air Jordan design that was particularly bold and challenging he always had something in his back pocket — literally. It was a piece of paper with Michael Jordan’s phone number, which he invited Nike executives to call and verify Mr. Jordan’s support for his latest designs. None took him up on the offer and so Tinker continued to use this back pocket tactic over the years.
From casual conversations with David Carson and Timothy Goodman at the lively delegate party, to the speed mentoring sessions, the Engine Digital Design Team found countless sources of inspiration during the event. We came back from DesignThinkers refreshed and motivated with many exciting ideas, mantras, and takeaways to ponder. To sum it up, the team put together a series of memorable quotes from the conference in a format inspired by Base Design’s “5 Minute Posters” which Min Lew presented during her talk.
We also started a repository for our takeaways from this event and future ones that you can check out here. Needless to say we are looking forward to DesignThinkers VAN 2018.
Peter Pimentel is Associate Design Director at Engine Digital. Check out our blog and follow us on Dribbble.
