25 Useful Videos and Presentations for Designers

• By Otba Mushaweh
• August 14th, 2010
• Videos, Workflow
• 42 Comments

With the huge number of design-related conferences and events around the world, the Web gives those of us who cannot attend them a great opportunity to listen and benefit from their great and talented speakers. To aid in this, here we present some of the best videos, interviews and presentations about design and related topics.

Using Design to Make Ideas New

Speaker: Milton Glaser
Legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From there, he muses on what makes a convincing poster, by breaking down an idea and making it new.

Designing for Obama

Speaker: Steven Heller
Steven Heller speaks at AIGA Philly on the outpouring of posters for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Heller also compares today’s political graphics to the campaign posters of the last generation and explores the relationship between democracy and design.

Paula Scher Gets Serious

Speaker: Paula Scher
Paula Scher looks back on her life in design (she’s done album covers, books, the Citibank logo and much more) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Watch out for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.

An Interview With Debbie Millman

Speaker: Debbie Millman
AIGA President Debbie Millman talks at AIGA Philly about the need for designers to embrace technology and how the AIGA can adapt to changes in the field through an active membership.

David Carson on Design and Discovery

Speaker: David Carson
Great design is a never-ending journey of discovery, on which it helps to pack a healthy sense of humor. Sociologist and surfer-turned-designer David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images.

Designing the Obama Campaign

Speaker: Scott Thomas
As the design director for Obama’s 2008 campaign, Scott Thomas led a now-historic political campaign, in which branding, design and the Web played a truly pivotal role. Likening the experience to “building an airplane in flight,” Scott talks about the creative individual’s need for triage, the crucial role of incremental improvements and the importance of returning to the hand and keeping things simple.

Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy

Speaker: Don Norman
Design critic Don Norman turns his incisive eye to beauty, fun, pleasure and emotion, as he looks at design that makes people happy. He identifies the three emotional cues that a well-designed product must hit to succeed.

Designs to Save Newspapers

Speaker: Jacek Utko
Jacek Utko is an extraordinary Polish newspaper designer whose redesigns for papers in Eastern Europe not only win awards but increase circulation by up to 100%. Can good design save newspaper? It just might.

Typographic Hierarchy

Speaker: Tony Pritchard
Typographic hierarchy is about analyzing textual information and prioritizing based on meaning. The designer determines the order in which the user views information through basic typographic techniques such as size, weight and position of type.

Urging Designers to Think Big

Speaker: Tim Brown
Tim Brown says that the design industry is preoccupied with creating nifty, fashionable objects, even as pressing questions like clean water access show it has a bigger role to play. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking.”

How to Make a Font

Speaker: Chank Diesel
Watch a font come to life before you very eyes! Filmed on location at alphabetician Chank Diesel’s font-making workshop at Clockwork Active Media Systems in Minneapolis.

How Art Shapes Culture

Speaker: Thelma Golden
Thelma Golden, curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, walks us through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The “post-black” artists she works with are using their art to instigate a new dialogue on race, culture and the meaning of art itself.

An Interview With Erik Spiekermann

Speaker: Erik Spiekermann
An interview with professor and typography designer Erik Spiekermann about his opinion of typefaces such as Helvetica and Arial.

Happy Design

Speaker: Stefan Sagmeister
Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister takes the audience on a whimsical journey through moments in his life that made him happy and notes how many of these moments had to do with good design.

Interview With Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere

Speaker: Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere
Hoefler and Frere-Jones are American typeface designers. Here is a clip of them talking about everyone’s favorite font in the documentary Helvetica.

John Maeda on His Journey in Design

Speaker: John Maeda
Designer John Maeda talks about his path from a Seattle tofu factory to the Rhode Island School of Design, of which he became president in 2008. Maeda, a tireless experimenter and witty observer, explores the crucial moment when design met computers.

Two Minutes With Robin Nicholas

Speaker: Robin Nicholas
Robin Nicholas, creator of Arial, discusses his creative inspirations, favorite typefaces and the evolution of fonts.

The True Face of Leonardo Da Vinci

Speaker: Siegfried Woldhek
Mona Lisa is one of the best-known faces on the planet. But would you recognize an image of Leonardo da Vinci? Illustrator Siegfried Woldhek uses some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo.

Five Secrets from 86 Notebooks

Speaker: Michael Bierut
Renowned graphic designer Michael Bierut claims that he’s not creative. Instead, he likens his job to that of a doctor who tends to patients: “the sicker, the better.” Digging into the 86 notebooks he’s kept over his career, Bierut walks us through five projects, from conception to execution, extracting a handful of simple lessons (e.g. the problem contains the solution; don’t avoid the obvious) that lie at the foundation of brilliant design.

Thinking Deep on Design

Speaker: Philippe Starck
With no pretty slides to show, designer Philippe Starck spends 18 minutes reaching to the very root of the question “Why design?” Listen carefully for the perfect mantra for all of us, genius or not.

Two Minutes With Nadine Chahine

Speaker: Nadine Chahine
Nadine Chahine, a font designer and Arabic specialist at Monotype Imaging, discusses her creative inspirations, favorite typefaces and the evolution of fonts.

Treating Design as Art

Speaker: Paola Antonelli
Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wants to spread her appreciation of design in all shapes and forms around the world.

Practice Makes Pixel Perfect

Speaker: Ryan Sims
Ryan Sims speaks about how to understand talent and how to become a great designer.

Intricate Beauty by Design

Speaker: Marian Bantjes
In graphic design, Marian Bantjes says, throwing your individuality into a project is considered heresy. She explains how she built her career doing just that, bringing her signature delicate illustrations to store fronts, valentines and even genetic diagrams.

Designing for the Tablet

Speaker: Marian Bantjes
Books, magazines, televisions. We hear these words and understand well what shape their content will take. But tablet? Digital magazine? How does the size of the object frame the user experience? How does it affect the object’s portability and accessibility? How will our experience with these devices compare with that of more “full-figured” media? Do we need to consider grid, typography and behavior differently? Hear four perspectives on how telling stories in new spaces creates new experiences.

Other Resources

• Videos about design at the TED Conference
• Videos about design at the 99 Percent Conference
• Videos about design on Vimeo
• Adobe Design Center: Video Workshop
• Seven Must-See Web Design Videos and Presentations
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials: Best Of
• 20 Beautiful Video Motion Pieces
• Seven Must-See Web Design Videos and Presentations

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