On Saturday 3th of March, I took a train to London to meet my two design heroes: Chris Do and José Caballer, two American designers that are doing a tour in Europe delivering talks and workshops. I took the chance to give them a copy of the dissertation I wrote for COP, as they inspired the theme as well as my current practice.
But not only they were there. Emma Sexton opened the day with a talk titled 'Lessons learned from starting fires', where she shared her biggest mistakes in the design industry and what she learned from them. Then Sarah Hyndman, the author of the book 'Why Fonts Matter', gave a fabulous talk about the vocabulary designers should use with clients, how typography is very musical and the kind of unconscious associations that go on in this regard. Her presentation was so clear, engaging and simple to understand that I bought her two books afterwards.
Aaron Pierson gave a great talk about the benefits of niching down and finding your vector in order to find better clients. This can be done through niching by industry, capabilities, and prices. We did a small workshop that would help us to understand these concepts better. Afterwards, I spoke to him about how to initiate the process of discovering a client and lead them to the payment and how to become a strategic partner for them instead of a one-time service provider.
José Caballer is a UX designer that has an understanding of UX almost to a meta level. He explained that we introduce ourselves to relate to others, and the more someone talks about themselves the more they think they know us. In a quick workshop, we helped someone else as a group to define what the UX of his personal brand should be like. He kept repeating that designers are the new shamans/wizards/alchemists, and pointed out the importance that we have designing the future.
Last but not least, Chris Do. My favourite designer of all time. The person I look up to not only gave a great inspirational presentation but also was there to talk to everybody and to share some time with us. He spoke about many things that are normally important in his videos on Youtube: how to become a master debater, how to challenge common sense, mind games, how to charge based on value (including role-playing), how to be more confident, help clients to know who they are, how to fire clients, dealing with rejection and many other things that were coming up in his talk, as he made the talk in such way that we could choose how it would go.
José Caballer is a UX designer that has an understanding of UX almost to a meta level. He explained that we introduce ourselves to relate to others, and the more someone talks about themselves the more they think they know us. In a quick workshop, we helped someone else as a group to define what the UX of his personal brand should be like. He kept repeating that designers are the new shamans/wizards/alchemists, and pointed out the importance that we have designing the future.
Last but not least, Chris Do. My favourite designer of all time. The person I look up to not only gave a great inspirational presentation but also was there to talk to everybody and to share some time with us. He spoke about many things that are normally important in his videos on Youtube: how to become a master debater, how to challenge common sense, mind games, how to charge based on value (including role-playing), how to be more confident, help clients to know who they are, how to fire clients, dealing with rejection and many other things that were coming up in his talk, as he made the talk in such way that we could choose how it would go.
A London based creative shared with me this article he wrote, which is a summary of the different presentations.
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