Top 5 projects by DesignThinkers speakers

Happy DesignThinkers season, everyone. This is my third year writing this article, and it only gets more exciting every time I do it. I use it as a way to focus in on my own interests and hopefully turn you on to some of the incredible work of the speakers coming to Toronto. I'm not going to beat around the bush. With all of the conversation happening in the world around AI, this one is focused almost predominantly on artists who use their hands, or have used traditional design methods, or just make cool things that are… things.

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Erika Barbieri, Co-Founder, OlssønBarbieri: Theaterbaren

I have a soft spot for designers who can take something as difficult as "heritage" and make it flirt with you instead. OlssønBarbieri's identity for Theaterbaren, the new bar tucked into Oslo's Nationaltheatret, does exactly that. The building is a century-old mash-up of Neo-Baroque grandeur, Rococo interiors and Art Nouveau flourish, and instead of tiptoeing around all that history, the studio leaned all the way in: curtains, mirrors, chandeliers and florals reimagined as a loose, theatrical visual language, with Benjamin Gómez's incredible swooping Cordier Script doing the heavy lifting across menus and signage. It's ornate without being precious, cinematic without being kitsch, and it proves you can respect 125 years of architecture. I'm obsessed. This is one of my favourite visual identities ever.

Temi Coker, Visual Artist, Coker Studio: The Jackets

Look, I have enough black t-shirts and band hoodies, so when a jacket makes me feel something, I pay attention. Temi Coker's Coker Studio pieces — the Work Jacket, For The Lovers, the Good Fathers varsity — take his Afrocentric pattern-and-colour language off the poster and onto your back, and somehow lose none of the joy in the translation. This is a guy who built a whole practice on the belief that celebrating your culture loudly is a design strategy, and it shows in every stitch. Though I am sure, seconded by my partner, that I could not pull these pieces of art off, I still dream of a world where more of these are out in the streets.

Bráulio Amado, Graphic Designer & Illustrator: The Good Room Posters

Bráulio Amado is one of my design heroes, nuff said. In an industry that is often perfecting the clean vector line, Bráulio spent years cranking out a poster a day basically for Brooklyn's Good Room that look like they were scrawled onto the wall five minutes before doors opened. Hand lettering, cockroaches, Despacito references, whatever chaos was rattling around his brain that week, all of it gloriously, deliberately unpolished. Seen individually, these shouldn't work as brand consistency and yet they absolutely do; you'd spot a Bráulio flyer from across the subway platform. In a design world that's gotten increasingly obsessed with frictionless perfection, his entire body of work is a reminder that mess, drawn by an actual human hand, is still the fastest way to make people feel something.

Edel Rodriguez, Artist & Author, Edel Rodriguez Studio: The Constitution Prints

Edel Rodriguez has spent a career proving that editorial illustration can still throw a punch. TIME, The New Yorker and Der Spiegel covers built on bold, urgent, unmistakably hand-made marks. These new screenprints take the same energy and point it at the founding documents themselves: LIBERTY carved in red across a dove's face, FREEDOM rendered in shackles and reaching hands, LIFE, LIBERTY + THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS run through a halftone screen. It's protest poster and civics lesson at once. Edel does these the old-fashioned way, layer by layer, by hand, on an actual press. Edel's also bringing his 2023 memoir Worm, on growing up Cuban-American and finding his way into American visual culture, and he'll be signing copies at DesignThinkers.

Valentina D'Efilippo, Information Designer: The Palestinian Data Painting

I don't take this entry lightly. Valentina D'Efilippo has spent her career proving that data, handled with enough care, can move people the way art does. Her recent Palestinian data painting is the piece from last year that has stayed with me the longest. Where so much data visualization keeps human suffering at a clinical distance, this work refuses to let the numbers stand in for the people behind them. It's the kind of design that doesn't ask to be admired so much as witnessed and felt. I've spent 30-plus years looking at design that's meant to sell something or make someone smile, and every so often a piece comes along that reminds you design can also just make you sit with something difficult. This is one of those.