Poster design by Dante Carlos
Insights is back!
March 6–27, 7 pm
See below for this year’s lineup. In the coming weeks we’ll be posting interviews with the speakers.
To watch past Insights lectures, check out the Walker Channel.
March 6
Aaron Draplin, Draplin Design Company,
Portland, Oregon
Although he makes his home in Portland, Oregon, Aaron Draplin is more a product of being born, raised, and educated in the Midwest. A native of Detroit, he studied graphic design at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before heading west to work as art director of Snowboarder magazine. He founded Draplin Design Company (DDC) in 2004, producing a wide range of award-winning projects and developing products for businesses such as Coal Headwear; board designs for Ride, Forum, and Gnu; conceiving Field Notes journals with Coudal Partners in Chicago; and the array of merchandise for the DDC brand enterprise. Draplin’s iconic forms and bold designs are steeped in a no-nonsense Midwestern vernacular and work ethic. They project an authenticity and attitude that seems inseparable from his self-deprecating personality and his clients’ passions, reflected in the DDC motto, “Work hard and do good work for good people.”
March 13
Khoi Vinh, New York
As a child, Khoi Vinh emigrated to the United States from Vietnam. He studied illustration and practiced graphic design for print before moving to New York City in 1998, where he began his career in web and interactive design. From 2006 to 2010, he gained acclaim as design director of nytimes.com, working with colleagues to transform the early web version of the newspaper into the robust, multifaceted digital platform that we know and use today. Named one of the 50 most influential designers by Fast Company, Vinh shares his thoughts about media, technology, and design on his blog at subtraction.com and at conferences worldwide. Since leaving the New York Times Company in 2010, Vinh cofounded Lascaux Co., which recently launched Mixel for iPad, the world’s first social collage app that allows users to make, share, and remix their creations.
March 20
Michael Lejeune, Metro Design Studio,
Los Angeles
Michael Lejeune is charged with “making public transportation cool,” a not-so-easy task in the car culture of sprawling Los Angeles. As creative director of LA Metro, Lejeune heads a studio with a staff of more than 20, applying design strategy and thinking to the nation’s third-largest transit agency, which serves some 1.5 million people each day. Their projects, ranging from wayfinding systems, schedules, and maps to vehicle identity graphics and advertising campaigns to promote ridership, have been honored with more than 80 awards. This mix of consistent design standards, commonsense approaches to complex information, and engaging communications strategies has made LA Metro a standout in the public sector for embracing design and the capabilities of in-house teams.
March 27
David Pearson, London
David Pearson celebrates the printed book in all its
dimensions despite the publishing industry’s woes and its headlong dive into e-books and other digital platforms. He began his professional career in 2002 at Penguin Books, the venerable British imprint, where
he fused a contemporary sensibility with classical bookish elements to reinvigorate the brand. His seemingly traditional designs can be both unorthodox and unexpected, such as all-typographic book covers for Penguin Classics, the rainbow spectrum applied to the book spines of Pocket Penguins, or the use of letterpress and tactile papers in the Great Ideas series. He formed White’s Books with editor Jonathan Jackson in 2008, repackaging classic texts by Shakespeare and Dickens as well as titles such as Jane Eyre and Treasure Island.
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