Originally presented at Heineken’s special Pecha Kucha event (Open Design Explorations Ed. 2) at Zouk Singapore on July 13, this 20x20 presentation chronicles the journey of my life as a designer.
Here’s the remarkable thing. I just turned 20 last month. It’s a turning point of sorts, because I can no longer give myself excuses if I do bad work. Everything changes.
When you’re young, you’re inexperienced. Lana Del Rey asks if she’ll still be loved when she’s no longer young and beautiful. I ask, “Will I still love my job, if I’m no longer young and inexperienced?”
When you’re young and inexperienced, you have no idea what’s impossible. And you don’t care. I started a blog when I was 13, and I had NO IDEA how to do journalism, HTML, WordPress, Photoshop. SEO. I did those anyway.
The idea was that if I made something people wanted, and invested time in it, it would make me happy. It didn’t matter if it was difficult, impossible, or imperfect. You do it out of love.
So for the next 6 years, I continued doing that. I went to school. I wore many hats: journalism student, layout artist, poster designer, web designer. I loved it.
Eventually, I got to New York City to do an internship. Where I would like, make these little pop-up banners for Nokia. Buy Now at AT&T! Only $99.
Forfive months, I was doing that. Digital advertising, they called it. It was so boring. I no longer loved what I did. And my friends were like, but you’re in New York City. Yeah, I’m in New York City.
What New York gave me was some other thing. It wasn’t career advancement. It wasn’t even education. What it was was inspiration. An inspiration so raw and deep it clung to me.
Ultimately, it challenged me to think bigger. It was the museums of New York City that transformed me so profoundly. Art entered my life. It was beautiful.
And so I set out to recapture that magic.Not just for myself, but I want people to experience that same magic of art that I experienced. So I formed this collective with my friends to do that.
I called it ARTOS, after the Greek word for ‘bread’. The idea: art is the bread of life. The ultimate goal is to marry art, design and technology.
To use design as a bridge between the two pillars of art and technology. To update the art world for the 21st century.
Now, that’s a tough call for me. I have zero coding experience. So to begin, I turned to what I knew best: InDesign.
With the help of a team, I created a print catalog for an art exhibition called Displacements. In order to learn to marry art, design and technology, I first had to forgo technology.
I reduced my idea to its bare essentials, and made it work on paper. I believed that if it works on paper, it will work with Javascript and PHP and all that.
The idea that art can create a conversation around other art is the concept that drives the entire catalog. Every spread features one artist, one artwork, and one response.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think that we’re trying to make an offline social network. In essence, that was what it was. A community art project like Displacements was the perfect stage for it.
So while the central idea is the marriage of art, design, and tech, the whole idea is much bigger. I wrote a manifesto to help visualize that. Now, this hypothetical social network is not yet built, so this is important as a guiding philosophy.
The first of that philosophy is “A New Consciousness”. I believe that art is a way of thinking about the world, and we would all be better people if we learned the language of art. To be conscious about about art is to see the world in a new light.
Ifyou’reinterested in reading the rest of the manifesto, visit the urlartos.me. Thankyou.