Earlier this month, I attended the HOW Live Conference in Boston, MA. It was full of interesting talks. Here are some highlights:
Sagi Haviv: Partner & Designer, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv
The old State Farm logo was difficult to read and was in need of a modern take on it. However, when the firm proposed simplifying the pictogram, they received significant pushback from the CEO. Haviv was told that they needed to keep the rounded square border.
In order to convince State Farm to ditch the rounded square border altogether, they put together a number of logos that had been redesigned recently. Then, they showed what the halfway point of those logos would be.
This convinced State Farm to go with the simplified three-oval approach.
Stephen Gates: Head of Design Transformation, LinkedIn; Creator of The Crazy One Podcast
Stephen talked about the importance of design in large companies and how to build trust and confidence in design.
He asked us:
- Can you express the value of your team beyond your work?
- What is your team’s identity outside of the company.
- Create a scalable ecosystem for design: As a design team, what are your set of beliefs?
He also talked about his framework for thinking about design environments inside a company:
This helped to visualize an idea that I’d been personally trying to capture for a long time. It’s a handy tool to help you think about where your design team is and where it can go.
Daniel Pink: #1 New York Times Bestselling author
Daniel Pink spoke about the science of perfect timing. Using big data, he has developed principles for everyone to use for when to accomplish certain kinds of tasks.
Pink talks about how everyone has a chronotype.
15% are early birds, 20% are night owls and the rest are “third birds.” Most people see a peak, a trough and then a recovery in their day to day work performance.
= People tend to perform better at the beginning of the day.
He talked about using timing to work better and smarter. If you know that you have more energy at the beginning of the day, use it to do analytical work. Set time aside in the afternoon when you’re more sluggish to do administrative work.
The Design Ocean 