HOW Design Live Conference seeks to connect the Boston design community, to provide inspiration from industry icons, to teach new design techniques, and to enable like-minded creatives to network and share ideas.
The 2018 program featured nearly 100 sessions focused on design and creativity; branding and packaging; tools and resources; as well as career advancement. There were 12 keynote sessions featuring design industry thought leaders, focused on a broad range of issues. Spark sessions, between the keynotes, were short, high-energy discussions covering more narrow topics or specific case studies.
Here are some of the Conference highlights:
Joy Bauer and Thomas Wilder (COLLINS)
Design Makes Us Hungry
Using inspiring places to influence design. When launching their health-conscious food brand “Nourish,” Wilder pulled inspiration to influence the packaging from the circus, a favorite childhood event. All creatives should seek to pull inspiration from not only competitors, but also form best-in-class in markets that are unrelated to their own.
Simon Endres (Red Antler)
Opening Up New Experiences
How can we build a design that doesn’t require the package to work as hard? I was impressed by the innovation and design solutions behind the Allbirds shoe packaging. The company has successfully created sustainable packaging that’s effective in two very different environments: as direct-to-consumer packaging and on-shelf packaging.
Bill Gardner (Gardner Design)
A Complete Look at the Upcoming Year in Logo Trends: The Good the Bad and the WTF
Bill Gardner’s fantastic “Run to the edge of the map” presentation showcased the full range of logo categories: from nostalgic design – such as the Stranger Things logo – to this year’s current popular design box, the parallelogram. At Motiv, we seek to provide clients with branding solutions that will remain relevant for many years, and also push the design boundaries to “edge of the map,” so that they will stand apart from competitors.
Stefen Mumaw (First Person)
Designing Emotion: How to Use Design to Move People
When thinking about emotion in terms of your brand, there are three key questions to address: 1. What emotion do I want to elicit? 2. What triggers these same emotions in the “real life” of my target audience? 3. How does my brand fit address the first two questions? Emotion is an important, and often overlooked aspect of package design. For example, when designing a baby product, it’s important to invoke the mother’s emotion through the primary display panel of the package.
Joey Cofone (Baron Fig)
F*ck Design
Cofone’s provocative presentation sought to motivate designers to be confident in their work. For inspiration, he cited the Ray Bradbury quote, “Jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down,” from the novel Fahrenheit 451.
