Tom Brown
Tom Brown Art+Design (TBA+D) specializes in the design, art direction, prototype creation and redesign of magazines and books. The studio is located in a small town outside Vancouver where the firm successfully works remotely with clients. TBA+D maintains an international clientele that includes Adbusters, Condé Nast (Europe), Deloitte and Touche, DestinAsian magazine, Field and Stream, Penguin Putnam, Scribner, Simon and Schuster, Ski magazine, The Nature Conservancy magazine and The New York Times Magazine. Profiles and opinion editorials have been published in such magazines as Communication Arts, Print and Masthead.

Inspirations: Pretty garbage?
A self-taught graphic designer concentrating primarily in the niche area of editorial design and typography, tom brown runs a modest studio from a remote small town working for a host of high-profile international clients…some of whom he has never met. In this presentation, tom shares his thoughts on his design process, working as a virtual art director, retaining ultimate control of the work he does and finding inspirational solutions in unexpected places.

Jorge Calleja
Jorge Calleja is a Senior Art Director at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. He was born in Mexico and holds a degree in Film from Universidad del Nuevo Mundo. In 2001 he founded L3che The Mexperimental Project where he became the Creative Director and Partner. Jorge further developed his design background at Sixfoot Studios, Juxt Interactive and Exopolis. Most recently Jorge spent a year gaining critical acclaim at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, where he art directed the Got Milk? campaign and developed the campaign interactively at www.gettheglass.com. Jorge has won an impressive 30 awards in under 3 years, including two consecutive Gold Lions at Cannes, most recently in 2007 for his ‘Get the Glass’ work on the Got Milk? campaign.

Hillman Curtis
Hillman Curtis is a designer and filmmaker, whose company hillmancurtis, inc. has designed sites for Yahoo, Adobe, Aquent, the American Institute of Graphic Design, Paramount and Fox Searchlight Pictures among others. His film work includes the documentary series, Artist Series as well as multiple short films. His commercial film work includes shorts for Rolling Stone, Adobe and BMW. Hillman’s three books on design and film have sold close to 200,000 copies and have been translated into 14 languages. His books are Flash Web Design: The v5 Remix, MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer and Hillman Curtis on Creating Short Films for the Web.

Keynote: What are new avenues for growth? One such area is digital video. You’ll tap into a vast outlet for your creativity and make yourself (and your studio) infinitely more valuable in the marketplace. Designer, author and filmmaker Hillman Curtis shares examples from his documentary “Artist Series” on iconic designers and offers lessons that inform his minimalist approach to filmmaking. Lesson #1: See limitations as allies—not enemies.

Colin Drummond
Colin Drummond is Group Director, Cognitive & Cultural Studies, at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. One of the world’s hottest brand-building agencies, CP+B has been recognized as US Agency of The Year the last 2 years running. CP+B also has the distinction of being the only agency to win the Grand Prix at Cannes in three of their major categories: Film, Media and Titanium. Born and raised in Montreal, Colin studied at U of T. He spent 9 years working in Toronto’s ad industry, developing strategies for clients like Coca-Cola, Bank of Montreal and Purina. Colin headed to San Francisco in 1999. Colin works with brands that include MINI Cooper, Burger King and now Volkswagen.

Trends: Can culture trump consumer?
Quick, answer the following question: is it better to promote your brand’s best qualities within the prevailing culture, or to change the culture to better align with your brand’s best qualities? Colin Drummond addresses this question. Most companies expend enormous resources developing products and services that consumers say they want, and ignore the culture within which consumers operate. CP+B believes that culture wants to change and brands have a role in chang-
ing it. When a brand needs to differentiate itself from competitors to drive business, it also has an opportunity to initiate a con-
versation with the greater world around it using ideas that challenge accepted social and cultural beliefs.

Marc Gobé
Marc is President, CEO and Executive Creative Director for Desgrippes Gobé. A graduate from the Ecole Professionelle de Dessin Industriel in Paris, Marc’s broad experience in packaging, structural design and architecture has attracted a multi-faceted mix of apparel, beauty and consumer brand clients. He is a frequent speaker at top marketing and design conferences, and has also addressed senior managers at corporations such as L’Oréal, Montblanc, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, AOL and Peugeot. He is author of the best-selling books Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brands in a Consumer Democracy and recently released Brandjam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design.

Strategies: How can brands be humanized through emotional design?
The true measurement of a brand’s success is how it impacts culture and lifestyles through an emotional meaning that is brought to life through design. Presenting real case studies that have broken the glass ceiling of commodity marketing, Marc Gobé demonstrates how design as a collaborative process can create a profound emotional response with corporations and consumers alike.

John Hlinko
An innovator in grassroots engagement, John Hlinko is VP of Marketing and Creative Engagement with Grassroots Enterprise, a public affairs consulting firm in Washington, DC. He was the founder of “DraftWesleyClark.com,” the movement to draft General Clark for President, and is the leader of “ActForLove.org,” a dating site for activists. John has been covered by a range of media, including CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has received the “Rookie of the Year” Pollie from the American Association of Political Consultants and was recently named by PRWeek as a finalist for 2006 “PR Professional of the Year.”

Trends: Can you market a consumer product the way you market a political candidate?
If political campaigns and organizations can build grassroots armies of millions on behalf of a cause or candidate, why can’t corporations do it on behalf of a product or brand? If MoveOn.org can build an explosive movement from scratch, why can’t a Fortune 500 company? And why should you struggle to capture one customer at a time when you can cultivate “evangelists” capable of luring thousands of others? John Hlinko offers lessons for movement building from the political world and describes the cutting edge techniques being used to apply grassroots tactics to for-profit endeavours.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies
Chaz Maviyane-Davies has been described by the UK’s Design magazine as “the guerrilla of graphic design”. For more than two decades, the award-winning, controversial Zimbabwean designer’s powerful work has taken on issues of consumerism, health, social responsibility, the environment and human rights. From 1983 until recently, he ran a studio in Harare called The Maviyane-Project. As a result of the social, humane and confrontational nature of his work and the political climate, he felt compelled to leave his homeland. He is presently a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art.

Inspirations: Can design effect change?
Chaz Maviyane-Davies use images and ideas to cut through complacency and apathy while trying to raise consciousness about an array of social issues from discrimination and human rights, to health and the environment. Here he discusses the role of design as a weapon and the challenge he calls “Creative Defiance.”

Karim Rashid
Karim Rashid is best known for bringing his democratic design sensibility to the masses. Designing for an impressive array of clients including Nambe, Prada, Miyake and Method, Karim is radically changing the aesthetics of product design and the nature of consumer culture. To date he has had some 2000 objects put into production. His design for the Semiramis hotel in Athens was recently awarded a Sleep05 European Hotel Design Award for Best Interior Design Public Areas. Karim has published two monographs titled Karim Rashid: I Want to Change the World and Karim Rashid: Evolution as well as a biography published by Chronicle and Digipop a digital exploration of computer graphics. His latest book is Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work, and Play.

Keynote: How does the material world need to catch up?

Andrea Siodmok
Dr. Andrea Siodmok heads up the Design Council knowledge team, which is responsible for developing and disseminating knowledge about design for business managers, educators and designers. Andrea has developed consumer products, CD-ROM, websites and interface designs, has taught product, automotive and interaction design in leading UK universities and has developed research projects with corporations. Within education she has organized a number of concept projects with companies that include Land Rover, Samsung, Apple and Nokia. As a representative of British design, Andrea has given keynotes, run workshops and overseen design projects in Asia, Austraia, South America and Europe.

Trends: New markets for design thinking?
Andrea outlines some of the future global challenges and opportunities for design as the world moves from an industrial to a creative and service economy.

© Copyright 2007 The Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario

This collection was produced with financial assistance from Canada's Digital Collections Initiative, Industry Canada.