2022 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Debbie Millman
Debbie Millman
debbiemillman.com
@debbiemillman
Named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, and “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA, Debbie Millman is also an author, educator, curator and host of the podcast Design Matters.
Debbie’s podcast, Design Matters is one of the first and longest running podcasts, and as host and founder, Millman has interviewed nearly 500 of the most creative people in the world over the past 17 years. Design Matters won a 2011 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, in 2015 Apple designated it one of the best overall podcasts on iTunes, and in 2021 designated it one of their “All Time Favorite Podcasts.” In addition, the show has been nominated for six Webby Awards, and has been listed on over 100 “Best Podcasts” lists, including one of the best podcasts in the world by Business Insider and Vanity Fair.
Debbie is the author of seven books, including two collections of interviews that have extended the ethos and editorial vision of Design Matters to the printed page: How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer and Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits. Both books have been published in over 10 languages. Her most recent book, Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People, will be published by Harper Collins in Fall 2021. She is also the co-owner and Editorial Director of PrintMag.com.
Debbie co-founded the world’s first graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2010. Now in its eleventh year, the program has achieved international acclaim. The inaugural class wrote and designed the Rockport book Brand Bible: The Complete Guide to Building, Designing and Sustaining Brands, in 2013 the students created branding for the Museum of Modern Art’s retail program, Destination: New York, the class of 2015 worked to reposition a Kappa Middle School in Harlem, the class of 2016 rebranded Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation, the class of 2017 worked with Kholsa Ventures, Performance Space New York and Chobani Incubators, and the class of 2018 worked with Brian Koppelman to design a logo for the television show Billions. The class of 2021, along with selected alumni, created the most recent design of the Sundance Institute Film Festival.
For 20 years, Debbie was the President of Sterling Brands, one of the world’s leading branding consultancies. She arrived in 1995 when the company was two years old and had 15 employees in one office. Under her leadership, Sterling grew to 150 employees in five offices and she was instrumental in the firm’s acquisition by Omnicom in 2008. Omnicom is one of the world’s largest holding companies. While there she worked on the logo and brand identity for Burger King, Hershey’s, Haagen Dazs, Tropicana, Star Wars, Gillette, and the No More movement.
Debbie’s writing and illustrations have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Print Magazine, Baffler and Fast Company. She is the author of two books of illustrated essays: Look Both Ways and Self-Portrait As Your Traitor; the latter of which has been awarded a Gold Mobius, a Print Typography Award, and a medal from the Art Directors Club. Her artwork is included in the Boston Biennale, Chicago Design Museum, Anderson University, School of Visual Arts, Long Island University, The Wolfsonion Museum and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art. She has been critic-in-residence at Cranbrook University, Old Dominion University and Notre Dame University, and has conducted visual storytelling workshops all over the world.
Debbie is also President Emeritus of AIGA, one of five women to hold the position in the organization’s 100-year history and was awarded a lifetime achievement award from AIGA in 2019. She is a frequent speaker on design and branding and has spoken at TED Women (her talk was one of the Top Ten most popular talks of 2020), moderated Design Yatra in India, presented keynote lectures at Rotman School of Management, Princeton University, Michigan Modern, the Hong Kong Design Association, the Melbourne Writers Festival, Design Thinkers in Toronto, the Festival of Art and Design in Barcelona, Webstock in New Zealand, QVED in Munich, ING in Dubai, ND2C in Pakistan, PS One in China, Web Summit in Lisbon and many more. She has been a juror for competitions including Cannes Lions, The Clio’s, the One Club, the D&AD awards and many, many more.
Debbie is currently working with Law & Order SVU actor and activist Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart Foundation to eradicate sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse and the rape-kit backlog.
Scott Boms
Analog portrait at St. Frank Coffee (Facebook building 20) by Cris Mendoza
Scott Boms
scottboms.com
@scottboms
Senses and Sensibility (or Why Reality Still Has a Place in the Future)
Nothing is inevitable if you’re willing to consider what is happening. Traditional analog technologies, mediums, and processes to many feel like the past, but as the world continues to drift into an ever-increasing digital reality, these changes may instead be their greatest opportunity. In this talk, we’ll look at reasons why the future could be different than those driving this digital revolution might have you believe.
Scott Boms is a cross-disciplinary graphic designer, printmaker, and occasional sign painter from Toronto, Canada. He currently curates and manages Meta's global environmental design and internal poster program from the heart of Silicon Valley where his work has been described as “the cultural heartbeat of the company.” Scott’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Hammer Museum in LA, the London Design Museum, Designmuseo, Helsinki, Design Museum Den Bosch, the Type Directors Club in New York, and has appeared in HOW, Mohawk’s Maker Quarterly, Fast Co, Wired, Offscreen, Tech Crunch, Inc, Ad Week and more. He also appears in the documentary film An Impossible Project and in 2020 began setting up an experimental Risograph studio and press called Risolute.
Angelina Lippert
Angelina Lippert
Chief Curator
Poster House
@posterhousenyc
Angelina holds an MA in the art of the Russian Avant-Garde from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and a BA in theology and art history from Smith College. Prior to working at Poster House, Angelina served ten years as a poster specialist at a leading New York City leading auction house. She has produced dozens of auction catalogs and articles, as well as The Art Deco Poster, and has lectured at SVA and The Cooper Union. She is a member of AAM, AAMC, AIGA, and is on the Board of Directors for The Ephemera Society of America. Her research interests include German Expressionism, Soviet film posters, and the history of food and wine in advertising.
Poster House is the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to posters. Through exhibitions, events, and publications, the museum presents a global view of posters from their earliest appearance in the late 1800s to their present-day use. Poster House takes its mission from the medium, aiming to engage and educate all audiences as it investigates large-format graphic design and its public impact.
Kelli Anderson
Kelli Anderson
kellianderson.com
@kellianderson
Kelli Anderson is a designer, author, and paper engineer. Her work playfully pushes the traditional materials of graphic design to an interactive extreme. Her tech pop-up books reduce familiar tech objects down to their functional paper minimums—rendering digital black boxes into transparent materiality. In her work, humble materials are used to connect us to knowledge through our bodies, by bringing larger-scale phenomena into the realm of the handheld. (*like light, time, sound, encryption, and deep space)
She is best known for her design, animation, and illustration work for NPR, The New Yorker, Wired, MoMA, and the Exploratorium, as well as her redesign of NYC brands such as Russ & Daughters and Momofuku. Her two experimental and interactive pop-up books: This Book is a Camera , (MoMA) which transforms into a pinhole camera, and This Book is a Planetarium, (Chronicle Books) which houses a tiny planetarium and other contraptions, have been called “A marvel of paper engineering and imagination" by The New York Times. Some of her other projects include Tinybop’s award-winning Human Body app and a counterfeited "utopian" newspaper distributed with The Yes Men.