Speakers

DANNY YOUNT Prologue Films

A self-taught designer, Danny Yount has exercised his natural talents to become one of today's top main title designers for film and television. He has been elected into the Alliance Graphique Internationale and has earned many notable industry awards – TDC Gold, ADC, BDA Gold, D&AD Silver, 3 Gold awards from the AIGA, as well as an Emmy for his concept, design, and direction of the opening sequence of HBO's  Six Feet Under, which has been called "television's most gorgeous opening sequence." At Prologue Films he has designed and directed many notable feature film main titles such as: - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which IFC has rated as one of the greatest sequences of all time, Iron Man, which was featured in Creativity magazine's Top 5, Sherlock Holmes and Tron Legacy end titles as well as hologram VFX sequences for Ironman 2. Recent works have included Sherlock Holmes and Morgan Freeman's Science Channel promo.

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SEAN ADAMS AdamsMorioka

Sean Adams is a partner at AdamsMorioka in Beverly Hills. He has been recognized by every major competition and publication including: Step, Communication Arts, Graphis AIGA, The Type Directors Club, The British Art Director's Club, and the New York Art Director's Club. AdamsMorioka has been exhibited often including a solo exhibition at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Adams has been cited as one of the forty most important people shaping design internationally in the ID40.

Sean is President ex officio and past national board member of AIGA and President ex officio of AIGA Los Angeles. He is a Fellow of the Aspen Design Conference and an AIGA Fellow. He teaches at the Art Center College of Design. Sean is a frequent lecturer and competition judge internationally. Adams is the co-author of Logo Design Workbook, Color Design Workbook, and the series, Masters of Design. AdamsMorioka's clients include: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Adobe, Cedars-Sinai, Richard Meier & Partners, Nickelodeon, Sundance, Target, USC, and The Walt Disney Company.

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DEBBIE MILLMAN Sterling Brands

Debbie Millman has worked in the design business for over 25 years. She is President of the design division at Sterling Brands. She has been there for nearly two decades, and in that time, she has worked on the redesign of over 300 global brands.

Debbie is President Emeritus of the AIGA, the largest professional association for design. She is a contributing editor at Print Magazine, a design writer at FastCompany.com, and Co-founder and Chair of the world's Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2005, she began hosting the first weekly radio talk show about design on the Internet. The show is titled "Design Matters with Debbie Millman" and it is now featured on DesignObserver.com.

In addition to Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits, Debbie is the author of Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design, (HOW Books, 2009, How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer (Allworth Press, 2007) and The Essential Principles of Graphic Design (Rotovision, 2008).

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JOHN POBOJEWSKI Thirst

John Pobojewski is an intermedia artist/designer focusing on blending the worlds of movement, print, sound, video, and generative art.

John has been senior designer at the studio 3st since 2003, together, with Rick Valicenti and Bud Rodecker. In 2007, John received unique recognition as one of Print Magazine's New Visual Artists: 20 under 30 and recently presented at TEDxBGSU in 2011.

John has also received recognition from the STEP 100, The Type Directors Club of New York, AIGA, and Graphis, and his work has appeared in many publications including ID Magazine and HOW Magazine. Selections of John's work at Thirst are included in the permanent collections of Chicago Design Archive, the Denver Art Museum, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum. He has lectured at several schools throughout the United States and has judged several design competitions including the Type Directors Club TDC 53 in New York.

John is a graduate of Northern Illinois University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication and a Bachelor of Music in Performance. He currently lives outside of Chicago with his lovely wife, Therese.

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ROBERT ZOLNA gravitytank

Robert is an Associate Partner at gravitytank, a 70 person innovation consultancy based in Chicago with an equal mix of researchers, strategists and designers. Their office in Chicago consists of consumer labs, studios, and model shops where GT works in the 'fuzzy front-end' of new product and service development — in other words, where people don't always know what they're making...yet.

Robert refers to himself as a hands-on innovator. He leads interdisciplinary projects and heads gravitytank's Visual Communication Design team. This seven-person team of graphic and visual communication designers brings traditional graphic design expertise — information, identity, packaging, interface, and visual storytelling — typically used in the implementation phase of design into the earliest stages of problem solving in order to provide clarity and meaning to client engagements.

Robert's experience covers 20 years in both the US and Japan — where for ten years he helped clients such as Starbucks, Microsoft, and Revlon translate their brand messages to new audiences and cultures. Here in the US, Robert's passion for people and the 'everyday' has lead him to design everything from beer to dog food, diapers to cell phones experiences, file folders to markers, all with the intent of returning a bit of delight to the mundane.

He holds a Bachelors degree in Design from Northern Illinois University and a Masters degree in Human-centered Communication Design from IIT Institute of Design where he co-teaches the principles of visual communication to strategy and research students. He also teaches an advanced class for designers called Storytelling through Data Visualization. Actively involved in the Chicago design community, Robert has a passion for inspiring young creatives to look more broadly at places to apply their creativity.

When not teaching or designing, Robert can be found walking his dogs around the West Town neighborhood of Chicago with his partner.

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BOB FAUST Faust LTD

As principal and creative director, Bob brings with him more than 20 years of industry experience. He collaborates with clients to define project strategies and objectives and works with the design staff throughout the lifespans of all projects. Bob's non-secular approach to design fosters unexpected solutions to creative problems, void of formulaic, industry-specific executions. Bob has a BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign and has been recognized as a design leader by many prestigious organizations and publications.

After 5 Affiliations: Riverside Arts Center, AIGA Chicago, School of the Art Institute Fashion Committee, Riverside Sustainability Council. Publications/Exhibitions: STA Design Archive, 1,000 Ideas from 100 Graphic Designers, How Magazine, The Black Book Award Show, Print Magazine, Design Secrets: Layout, Communication Arts, HOW, Men's Heath, The Best of Business Card Design 9, New Graphic Design, Inside Illinois, Where the Cows Are.

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PLURAL

Plural is a Chicago-based creative studio practice founded in 2008. With a focus on pursuing meaningful projects, Plural explores new approaches within the design process, experimenting in a wide range of media including print, web, video, sound, interactive, and installation.

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THE POST FAMILY

The Post Family was born in 2007 on a beautiful spring in the small town of Chicago. It's a resource, gallery, letterpress, and screenprinting studio, experimental music venue, and a creative incubator awarded and critically applauded by the art and design world. It's named after a Christmas card found mysteriously one day in Grand Rapids, MI.

The Post Family is also a group of seven guys who really like each other. They make stuff, and they work really hard. They come from all across the country and all different backgrounds from different schools and dozens of nine-to-five jobs. They came together to support each other's passions – as individuals, as a group, as community members – in their own space on their own terms - as a family.

Pretty soon, the Post Family and it members' work kept popping up in magazines like Print, Communication Arts, HOW, and Readymade, plus design blogs like Apartment Therapy and Swissmiss. In 2009, the Family website won Best Art & Design Blog from Chicago Magazine. Then came the growth spurt – the Family started publishing books through Post Press, scored some commissioned fine art and creative consulting work, raised almost $90K on Kickstarter, and participated in the Levi Printmaking Workshop in San Francisco.

Today, the group has spoken at academic institutions across the country, including every college-level arts institution in Chicago. Their Space – The Family Room – hosts regular showcases (from painting to collage, photography to prints to you-name-it), plus parties, potlucks, and experimental music showcases. And their mission hasn't changed. "Everything," says the group, "is for the growth of our family and community."

These seven don't sleep much, they love what they do, and their real moms are all real proud. Welcome to the Family.

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NICK LO BUE Razorfish

Nick is a Creative Director with 14 years of professional experience. Since 2003, he has been leading the creation of online digital experiences. Nick specializes in leading the conception and evolution of large-scale user-centered design systems that engage customers in a relevant and accessible way.

In March of 2009, Nick became the first-ever Creative Director for the White House under the Obama Administration. Nick returned to Razorfish in 2010 where he has been responsible for managing creative efforts for clients such as Pulte Homes, Dell, AT&T, Fellowes, and the San Diego Padres. Nick holds a B.F.A. in Visual Communication from Northern Illinois University. 

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