Month: January 2018

Designers and long-time friends Dava Guthmiller and Arianna Orland wanted to cultivate a community of designer, artists, and creative thinkers. Their brainstorms on how they might accomplish this led to their founding the In/Visible Project, a series of small-scale salons and the one-day, one-track In/Visible Talks conference that will be held in San Francisco on January 11, 2018. “We wanted to have conversations about the art of design,” Dava says. They want to make the invisible visible.

Walking their talk, Dava, who is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of branding and design agency Noise 13, and Arianna, Founder of Paper Jam Press, set aside a weekend for collaborative creativity, and the Project’s distinctive logo came out of that process. “We said, ‘Let’s have some fun dipping things in paint!’” Dava says. They already had a Pinterest board with ideas and inspiration for the event, and that’s where the “in-your-face” colors—the yellow, hot pink, and bright blue—came from. After they each spent $50 on items purchased at a dollar store, they got down to some seriously fun dipping. “It was totally part of the whole In/Visible spirit,” she says. “We were doing things because it felt great, it was just fun!”

The paint-dipped mouth quickly became the top contender for the first year’s branding. “The project is about talking, communicating, sharing,” Dava says. “It was perfect.” From photos they took that weekend, they did some initial drawings. From there, the Noise 13 team took over with the branding and design of a series of doodles, collateral, signage, merchandise, and website. “Whether it was critiques or concepts, we really tried to get everyone in the Noise 13 office working on this,” Dava says. “It’s very much a team effort.”

This collaborative spirit of creativity is highly contagious—come “catch” it at the conference on January 11!

The inspiration for Tattly came from a mom’s frustration. Tina Roth Eisenberg was so totally over the poorly designed temporary tattoos her kid was drawn to, that she came up with a new model: “Fake Tattoos by Real Artists.”

In 2011, Brooklyn-based Tattly launched online with 15 designs by professional designers and artists. “These aren’t the temporary tattoos from when you were a kid,” says Director of Marketing and Partnerships Yng-Ru Chen. “A lot of grownups love Tattly, and our more mature designs are doing really well.”

Today there are more than 775 designs available, from over 130 artists, and Tattly’s products are sold online and in stores in over 40 countries. (They also do custom work for big brands.) While that’s certainly a boon for the company, what makes this even more awesome is that they have paid out over $1 million in royalties to those artists.

We are so excited to show off our custom In/Visible Talks temporary tattoos, created for us by Tattly! In/Visible Talks 2018 attendees will get one, plus some extra Tattly love in their swag bags.

In addition to the traditional “tattoo goes on skin” method, Tattly loves to get creative and think outside of the box. Inspired by their Tattly + Christmas ornaments project, we’ve tatted up some chairs to bring a pop of WOW to the conference! We’re in love, and can’t wait to share what we have in store for the attendees!

 

Basheer Tome’s first job was editing for a photography studio. “It’s hard to say what convinced them to hire me,” he says, “but I did have a solid Star Wars forum signature featuring a hand-photoshopped lightsaber.” After stints creating automotive interfaces and programmable materials for Jaguar, Lexus, and New Balance, he now combines filmmaking tools, electronics prototyping, and form-finding techniques to create “hardware interfaces that give physical form to digital interactions” at Google.

At the January In/Visible Talks conference, Basheer will be talking to us about the challenges of designing in a fast-moving, tech-driven world and “Faking the Future.” As a teaser, today we get some insights into his creative process.

What is your relationship to the creative process?

“A lot of my job is a combination of (a) protecting the creative process by helping others understand how much of an actual process it is, and convincing them to treat and respect it much more like a science, and (b) helping to infuse the creative process into the rest of our disciplines. Some of the hardest engineering and product challenges can be and have been solved creatively.”

How or where to you find inspiration?

“I find a lot of my inspiration in food. From restaurants, to cooking, to farming, to film, it’s an incredibly important and rich thread to follow that cuts across technology, society, culture, and art.”

When did you first realize you needed to be in a creative field?

“I was Pre-Law up until my second year of Industrial Design school. The assignment was to re-design a kitchen timer with the choice of disassembling a mechanical timer to re-package with our shell design or to make a dummy foam mockup of a digital one. I wanted to make a round, rotating, digital timer that was a mix between analog and digital. When my professors and I got to an impasse about ‘not picking sides’, I decided to stick with it and build an electronic prototype to prove them wrong. By the time I was done, I realized how much fun I had: design could be about more than aesthetics but also how something works. That’s when I fell truly in love and never turned back.”

Who is one of your heroes and why?

“The Spanish chef Ferran Adrià has been a huge inspiration for years. He’s able to so intensely incorporate science into his process and yet, unlike so many others, it hasn’t even come close to compromising his creativity and poetic vision. All the above combined with his meticulous note-taking and extreme focus on sharing his methodologies easily makes him one of my top heroes.”

What’s your favorite color?

“Over the years it’s wandered from mint to avocado to now more of wasabi, but it’s always been green.”

BONUS ROUND: What’s on your current playlist?

“I like listening to what I call ‘Sunday Club’ music: something with a beat, ideally some real instruments in there, not too intense or aggressive, and mostly devoid of vocals. My favorites are Bonobo, Odesza, Jon Hopkins, and Gramatik.”

Artist/Designer Brian Singer recently left the corporate world to pursue cool side projects. Learn about his creative process in this lively Q&A—and at January’s In/Visible Talks conference!