99% Perspiration

Last week I had the good fortune of attending the 99%Conference, hosted by Behance and Cool Hunting. The name comes from Thomas Edison’s saying, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” – very appropriate for a conference focused on execution rather than ideas. An in-depth discussion about about how you get a project done is a tall order, especially when speakers are limited to 20 minutes per session. But many of them delivered and it made for an interesting and valuable day.

I was stoked to hear Michael Beirut talk about Pentagram’s Murals for the Library Initiative. When I came across that project online several months ago it went straight into my ‘Dream Projects’ folder. It was fascinating to learn that the library murals weren’t even part of the project’s original scope of work. Pentgram had originally been contracted to do signage, wayfinding, and branding for a series of public school libraries. Along the way, the client tossed in a request that they do something with the empty space between the bookshelves and the ceiling. They could have easily said nope, sorry, out of scope. But they listened and ended up seeing the potential. For their first solution they started off small and used the resources that they hand on hand (in this case, Beirut’s wife and her photography skills). Over time they were able to engage well-known artists and the murals blossomed into the centerpiece of a long-term project with the public school libraries.

Scott Thomas, design director of the Obama campaign, spoke candidly about what it was like trying to build a strong, cohesive brand in a short amount of time with a small design staff while coordinating with hundreds of small voltunteer organizations. While they manage to project a confident brand on the outside, behind the scenese it was often like ‘fixing the plane mid-flight.’ Until something like the primaries, the Obama campaign website wasn’t even in subversion – they were just making edits to the live site on the fly. Yikes! And he had screenshot of a hilarious mistake to prove it.

Seth Godin focused on the importance of being a person who ships your product. His primary point is that we’re all creative and have more than enough great ideas. But an idea or project isn’t really worth anything unless it ships. So if you’ve really started, make yourself finish. Don’t get caught up by insecurities at the last minute. That has motivated me this week to get off my duff and finish up the last 10% of design for an internal iPhone project we’ve been working on here at Tierra.

I’d summarize all the best points from 99% but luckily someone else has already done it for me!

And here’s a round up of tweets from the conference if, ya know, you’re into that sort of thing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 5:16 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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