iQ 360’s creative team had the opportunity to attend the Adobe MAX creative conference in Los Angeles and learn from today’s leading creatives like Paula Scher, Stefan Sagmeister, Billie Eilish and M. Night Shyamalan. Speakers shared their thoughts and processes on how to stay creative, create identities and rethink the power of beauty. The team also spent some time at creative labs learning new technical skills in animation and graphics.
Here are their top 10 takeaways:
- To inspire creativity, allow yourself to be bored. Restrain yourself from picking up your devices when you hit a wall and instead allow your mind to wander.
- Beauty performs a function. When faced with two products, people can make a decision instantly based on aesthetics, while a purely functional object will allow one to linger on other components of design.
- Your story is your style. Your style is based on your design tricks, themes that you’re passionate about, and your philosophy. No one can truly steal your style if they aren’t YOU.
- Create brands for the future by designing a system that’s adaptable. Paula Scher’s design for the Philadelphia Museum of Art has an identity that can be customized depending on the current exhibition.
- Embrace the power of play. Make time for it in your daily life. It’s not only healthy to relax and create, but the explorative process can often lead to your best work.
“Humanity can be restored with beauty.”
- Humanity can be restored with beauty. A simple coat of paint can change people’s perceptions and moods like this mural by Stefan Sagmeister x Yuko Shimizu to improve the DUMBO neighborhood in New York.
- M. Night Shyamalan recommended that to be successful, you must stay in your creative bubble and do what’s in your control. Don’t let others’ perceptions and other factors you can’t control affect your artistic choices. If you constantly create to please others, you will never achieve success. The only way to win over your audience is by doing what’s in your control really well.
- Always show logo identities in application so clients have a better idea of how the logo will look in real life. Clients will almost never see the logo by itself.
- ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ – false! Stefan Sagmeister revealed data collected over the years that shows people share similar perceptions on what’s beautiful. A circle and the color blue are considered the most beautiful while a rectangle and the color brown are considered the least beautiful. Data like this can be helpful in informing future designs.
- The ultimate design goal is to create an identity system so distinct that you can recognize a company without the logo. Paula Scher’s work for Jazz at Lincoln Center utilizes a custom type that is unique and unmistakably theirs.