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Part 1 of 2 (to read part 2 of the How Design Conference Wrap Up click here)

Today we are talking to Jennifer Chamberlain from Web MD. She just recently went to the HowDesign conference in Atlanta. Here is a re-cap on the HOW Design web site. Let’s see how that went for her. How are you doing today, Jennifer?

Jennifer Chamberlain: The conference was great. I’m a little partial because I live in Atlanta. So, it was nice to have it in my own town and very convenient.

Dan: That’s good.

Jennifer Chamberlain: Yeah, it was great but the only thing I have to say about the location is I know Atlanta well and it was held in downtown Atlanta at the Hyatt. Downtown Atlanta is not the place to be in Atlanta. Like, there is so much going on in Atlanta, so much buildings, so many great shopping and restaurants and cool places to go for artists and that’s really midtown. Downtown is only about 2 miles or a mile away but it seems like eons away.

It’s kind of dark like when you go to a city where there’s not much going on. There’s nobody really around, that’s downtown Atlanta, sadly. I think, eventually the regentrification and all the life coming into Atlanta City will make Atlanta downtown cool again but right now it’s kind of like the dead spot for conferences. So it kind of felt like, to all those people that came to the “How” conference in Atlanta, like “this isn’t really Atlanta.” [Laughs]

Dan: You’d rather show off your city with some other venue.

Jennifer Chamberlain: Exactly, exactly. I think though last night they kind of got a good glimpse of Atlanta where they went to the aquarium. That’s a fantastic spot. We love to show that off, but, hopefully, the people that went to the conference got to get out a little bit. Unfortunately, the other downside of Atlanta is public transportation is really poor. It doesn’t go to very many places so, I was like,”Oh God, I hope these people rented cars.” [Laughs]

Dan: It’s like in Dallas. You have to have a car. The train system’s great but it doesn’t take you to where you want to go.

Jennifer Chamberlain: Exactly! We’ve the same problem. So, that’s the one thing about the location.

Dan: Tell me a little bit. What did you think about the speakers? What were some of the speakers that really stood out for you?

Jennifer Chamberlain: They had some fantastic speakers. They really did and when I go to a conference I kind of have my own personal rating system. The top being you are in awe the whole time and it’s just like, “Wow!” and when it comes to the question and answer, you should stay the whole time and you don’t want to leave when it’s over.

Dan: You wish it went on longer?

Jennifer Chamberlain: Yes. Completely! And then, there’s like, “Oh, it’s pretty good. I’ve learned a lot.” But by the end you’re ready for a snack or lunch or something. Then there is, “I should stay but you keep checking your watch.” [Laughs] Then, finally, “Forget it. I’m leaving.” And you actually walk out.

So, you know, I have to say, during the conference it ran the whole gamut. There was one I actually walked out on. It was on Copyrights and Trademarks on the Internet which I went to and I was like, “This will be really fantastic.” Because sometimes I put things on the web and we always have to be so careful of WebMD. It’s a huge web site and we have to be super careful legally. So I felt this will be fantastic for me to listen to and it was super technical and the speaker who is very smart and I think she even does a column for How Magazine but as a speaker she wasn’t resonating with me and got caught up with the technology and had trouble downloading a PDF and wanted to walk us through a PDF document. I was like, “I don’t want to.”

So I actually left and went and saw Gary Baseman. He is an illustrator most famous for — he did the design for the game Cranium. If you’re familiar with that and he does a lot paintings. He was amazing! He was like the opposite end of the spectrum. Had so much energy. Before he spoke he was outside with the people while they were waiting to get the room set up. “Does anybody have a question for me?” He had his dolls out there and he was showing people his dolls. He had beautiful post cards of his work, super glossy, perfectly printed, handing them out to people, samples of his work. He was amazing. So much fun.

Dan: Let’s talk about that a little bit. The criticism for one of the sessions you just mentioned was it was very technical and, I guess you could say it was very dry. Whereas this guy had a lot of energy. Is there a place at a conference like that where people do need to get exposed to, you know, you can’t get that excited about copyright law.

Jennifer Chamberlain: [Laughter] I agree! There’s definitely a space and I was talking to a co-worker afterwards and she we were like, “She wanted to go through that document which is really important. Have it printed out beforehand as a handout and people could follow along. I can’t see in a huge conference room each type and box. Do you know what I mean? That they’re projecting on a page.

Dan: Right.

Jennifer Chamberlain: So, I think there’s other ways to do it to make it a little more interesting. And for copyrights and trademarks, I wish she would have said, “If you want a copyright these kinds of things and this is why you would do it and this is why you wouldn’t do it.” And give some interesting examples.

Dan: Right. And things you might not think about immediately. There’s some quirky things about those issues. It’s always good to hear an antidote that ties that in and then talk about why that was important.

Jennifer Chamberlain: Absolutely. I even came with questions that I wanted to ask and I was like, “Forget it. I can’t even go there.” But it was, like, I remember talking to one designer who worked and did print for lingerie businesses. She was telling me, you could, sometimes if their rights with the model had ended, they will trim the model’s face at like the nose.

Then you can’t recognize who that person is. I wanted to be like, “Hey, is that really true? Can you really do that?” Where are our loopholes? How creative can you be? You know how some people are always like, “If you take a photo you change x % of the photo, then you can use that photo without paying for it.” Is that really true? I wanted to know all these kind of things.

So, I think, there were some things that, I don’t know, maybe I got her on a bad day.

Dan: Maybe. Let’s talk about some exciting people. Gary Baseman sounded like he was excited. Got the room going. Who else did you see that you really thought was a highlight.

Jennifer Chamberlain: Yeah, he was great. I’m going to hatch at these names. So, forgive me but Matteo Bologna? And Roberto… I can’t even say his name. Have you ever seen Bembo’s Zoo?

Jennifer Chamberlain: If you google Bembo’s Zoo there are these two guys. They’re phenomenal. Mateo is Italian and Roberto is Portuguese. I can send you the links to their work. They were phenomenal .They’ve been doing …they’re all obsessed…Oh, you found it! I can hear it.

[Laughs] They’re amazing at how they take typographic forms and really play with them. Bembo’s Zoo’s been around for a while and they did this short room book and if you Google Bamboo Zoo you’ll find their web site. It’s amazing how they just change these, just using these letter forms to create animals.

They just put out a new book called Words At Play and it’s wordsatplay.com and they use letter forms to create literary figures. Portraits of literary figures like William Shakespeare and it looks like him. It’s amazing! So, they were super inspiring. They also do a lot of restaurant design for big restaurants in New York like Balthazar and Pravda and Pastis. They were talking about all those projects and showcased those. So that was really interesting.

They were also just really entertaining people as well. I went and saw one conference, seminar, rather called Logo Notions. This guy is a real ID master. His name is Steff Geissbuhler. I don’t know how to say it. But his company is called C&G Partners and his web site is cgpartnersllc.com. Amazing logos and ID’s that they’ve done over the year.

Like the NBC peacock, Turner Cable. He showed us a logo study of a radio for Europe. Another amazing one they did for the national parks of New York Harbor which featured its own alphabet that they created. It’s amazing and it’s on their site. You can totally see that. I highly recommend it and he started his seminar with a 9 minute animation of the logos that they’ve created over the years.

Each logo would morph into the next logo by focusing on, maybe it was the letter E in the logo would turn and morph into the NBC peacock or something. It was just really interesting how they did that. He was really great. Something I took away from his speech was how he was talking about — when he creates logos, he does not show the client the logo on an 8 1/2 x 11 piece on paper or on a board.

He says he always shows it in an environment that he thinks is going to be used or that’s most important to the client. Here’s the example. If he is creating a logo for a lawyer, he would present it to them on their letterhead. Or, if he was doing a logo for an airline, he would show it superimposed on the tail of a plane and a mock-up so they can see how it would be used.

So I thought that was interesting. I usually don’t do that. For me these conferences are about just getting inspired and seeing what other people are doing, for the most part.

Dan: Right.

Jennifer Chamberlain: So, I’m torn that way. Then there was one final, really great conference that I really enjoyed and that was Chip Kidd. Heard a lot of people talking about him just as I would walk along the hallway. “Oh Chip Kidd, he was so funny. Blah, blah, blah.” Another guy who’s really super talented and just an amazing performer and entertainer in addition to what he was showing us and telling us.

So, Chip Kidd for people listening and don’t know is a big book cover designer and he works for Harper Collins, I want to say. I might be totally wrong. He showed lots of examples of his work and he is one of the most popular book designers.

Right now, today, he’s also done some movie posters. He did Paul Simon’s surprise CD that came out maybe 2 year ago. So he brought through that and he told us the whole experience working with Paul Simon which was really interesting. He was really great.

The other thing I really liked about his talk was he was also very human, in that, he talked about things like every designer worries about or concerns themselves about. Chip Kidd is dealing with this like he was talking about a poster he did for Adobe. They do a student competition each year and they asked him to design the poster for it.

The woman kept saying, “Blue sky, blue sky.” He was like, “What are you talking about?” She’s like, “You can do whatever you want.” He was like, “I became a graphic designer because I like an assignment. I read the book. I create something about the book.” He’s like, “Blue sky! I can’t do anything. I’m not a fine artist. I can’t think like immediately. I get artist block.”

So he explained how he dealt with this artist block and he just pulled out some random design that was horrible and he totally admitted it. I mean, everybody could relate to that because he has to made it sound fine. He said 2006, people think that I’m super successful and I do this work and everyone’s like, “Oh, it’s fantastic. Approved! Go to print.” But he is like …”2006 was a particularly difficult year for me. I thought I did a lot of good work. Here’s all the stuff that I did that got refused. And playing out that they went with someone else, like never got approved or whatever and went through and showed us so that was really fun.

He also talked about for designers, he really thinks it’s for designers he think it’s really important for inspiration and to keep our minds really sharp to do crossword puzzles, and just a way to think of words in different unexpected ways. That was kind of a theme through his wholes speech. That was really interesting. He had a really good way of working the crowd. He was just really entertaining and funny.

We will be posting part to soon…