Hillman Curtis has added some new (to

Hillman Curtis has added some new (to me) videos to his series of interviews with designers, including interviews with the folks at Pentagram and David Carson.

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Stefan Sagmeister

I quite enjoyed Sagmeister’s presentation on happiness…where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:

• Emma Gasson made a day-planner with room for 82 years, the current life expectancy of a British citizen. It looked to be about a foot thick.
• Omnivisu. Richard The and Willy Sengewald constructed a kiosk in Berlin with video cameras inside. When you look into the kiosk through the viewfinder (very much like peering into a pair of binoculars), the cameras record your eyes and beam the video to a nearby location where the images are projected onto a building which rather looks like it’s got a head. When you blink into the kiosk, the building’s head blinks also.
• Ji Lee pastes empty speech bubbles over advertisements on the streets of Manhattan, people often fill them in, and Lee returns to photograph the results.

Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he’s used that list in a recent series of projects:

• “everything i do always comes back to me”
• “trying to look good limits my life”
• “everybody thinks they are right”
• “money does not make me happy”
• “thinking life will be better in the future is stupid. i have to live now”
• “complaining is silly. act or forget.”
• “having guts always works out for me”

“Complaining is silly…” is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.

[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.

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