january 21st, 2012: check out my new google tv ads motion project.
friday, april 9th, 2010 The title of this post is a really lame attempt at referencing Bill & Ted. Sorry for being so hamfisted about it.
My day job affords me a lot of interesting opportunities, especially since we're involved in the production of the TED conference each year. You'll notice that apart from linking to their site, I'm not even going to bother explaining what TED actually is. If you haven't heard of it, just follow the link and let the FIFTY MEGATON BRAIN BOMB detonate.
I work as both a writer and an artist and have spent most of my last two Januaries (a word that looks extremely odd to me in its plural form) handling not only the art direction and design of a couple TED speakers' visuals, but also the content of the talks themselves. In a future post I'll talk about my experience in 2009 with Jill Tarter and the SETI Institute, but for now I'm going to focus on Elizabeth Pisani:
Pisani is an epidemiologist who discards the traditional, quantitative approach taken by health officials in favor of a qualitative, street-level study of HIV. Simply put, her thesis is that people contract the virus by doing stupid things—drugs and sex basically being the long and the short of it—but the motivations behind these things are shockingly rational from their point of view.
I was dealing with a pretty seasoned presenter, so there wasn't as much for me to do on the writing front as there usually is. We collaborated a little on coming up with a tangible "call to action" that would leave the audience with a goal and a sense of motivation, but that was about it. Unlike most of my clients, she had a very clear message and voice.
Most of her presentation was based around photos or charts, so there's not a lot of eye candy to show off, but I really liked the way this early graph treatment looked:
You'll notice that she axed the overlapping colors (which was a disappointment) as well as the angled edges on the bars (which was a smart move). We were pretty much eye-to-eye on everything else, though, and in general she was a model client. Fun to work with, extremely intelligent and very receptive to ideas. She has a great sense of humor too, which is evident in the video.
And yes, I do use colors other than red outside of my personal work.
TED 2010 BONUS ROUND: I also got to design the interstitial title graphics displayed between sessions and speakers. This was a quick-turn project with almost no budget, but it ended up working out since simplicity is a virtue when it comes to something like this. I presented three options and was blown away when they actually went with the "risky" one I just threw in for funsies; it was by far my favorite, though, and ended up being used without any changes:
Here's a photo of it in action:
The concept of the 2010 conference was "What the World Needs Now", and I was given a huge set of icons to work with. Other than that, it was a blank slate, so it was very cool of them to let me put my blindingly red stamp on the proceedings this year.
The design looks awesome! I didn't know you work for TED as well! It sounds like a pretty fun job. And it's my first time to see you used other colors than red:P
