My first stand out session was Kathleen Shannon, the Co-Founder of Braid Creative, a personal branding house for working creatives.  Her talk centered on how she works with her clients to help them overcome fear, make decisions, and achieve their dream job.  Beyond being personally inspiring, I took away lessons that will help me advise our clients when developing their strategies.

Kathleen described the fears that we can feel that then become barriers to our ability to achieve our goals.  She described a number of mental exercises she does with her clients that are feeling stuck.  The one that I have actually applied is sitting down and writing out your ideal day looks like.  The goal is to get as specific as possible so you can start to set tangible short term goals to get to your ultimate goal over time.  

MARTHA #2 STANDOUT SESSION -

My second stand out session was led by The Heads of State. The Heads of State are a small studio that works on design and illustration projects big and small. Their work is filled to the brim with conceptual meaning, creativity, a modern aesthetic, and most of all – passion.

One of two main ideas that the Heads of State touched on during their session was the idea of looking back into history for inspiration. Using the aesthetics found in mid-century paperback book cover designs, Heads of State rebranded the packaging of a set of Rosenfeld Media manuals on user experience for the web. The mid century graphic design aesthetic definitely accomplishes the main goal they were given by the creator of these books - which was to make them look a lot cooler than all the terrible user experience books out there. Although while these book covers seem simple and geometric, they also abstractly represent themes and ideas discussed in each manual.




The other main idea that the Heads of State talked about during their session was the importance of personal work in driving passion, and ultimately creating better things. Their team does internal personal projects often, one of which was called Pilot & Captain. Pilot & Captain started as one persons collection of vintage baggage tags, but when mixed with design, creativity, and time – has become an entire apparel and lifestyle brand.

 

 

BRIAN #2 STANDOUT SESSION-  

Doug Bowman, former Creative Director at Twitter, gave a talk that stood out to me for two reasons.  First, he spoke about the amount of data Twitter collects and how it can be used. Second, he described how powerful of a tool Twitter is in social movements across the world.   

Doug talked about how much data can be collected from the tweets that people put out there and how you can look at the data to make interesting insights about patterns in human behavior.  One that stuck with me was a chart that showed the use of the phrase “feeling happy” and it clearly indicated people were using the tag more in the second half of the year.  This data is more than just interesting, it's also really powerful.

Doug also described how Vivienne Harr, a 5 year old from the Bay area, used Twitter to raise $150,000 to free 500 child slaves.  Vivienne pledged to sell lemonade every day for an entire year to raise the money she needed.  By using Twitter as a way to promote, she caught the attention of enough key influencers and she met her goal 6 months early.  At 10 years old now, she is the founder of Make A Stand a lemonade company that pledges 5% of its revenue to organizations committed to ending slavery.
 

 

The Circles Conference had a great line up of creatives working across many mediums. Each offered inspiration both in the form of their work and also their thoughts. We walked away with a toolkit of advice we can use in our work and personal lives.  Thanks Circles!