8 KEY LESSONS FROM FORWARD VIENNA
On the Forward Vienna stage, that proof came in unexpected forms: an email address scribbled on a scrap of paper, a misspelled pastry box that became the mark of an original, a record-cutting machine that runs on a single power plug. Speakers including Gabriela Namie, Luna Maurer, Annie Atkins, Jim Stoten, Dada Project, Cachetejack, Supersense, and Erik Kessels kept arriving at the same place: ideas don't wait for permission, perfect conditions, or a bigger budget. They move when someone starts.
DON'T WAIT TO BE INVITED
At 23, Gabriela Namie walked up to a director at a major Latin American brewer and asked whether he needed design services. She had no business card, so she wrote her email on a piece of paper. He said yes, and that first client funded the smaller, more experimental projects her studio in Brazil wanted to take on. Dada Project's founders had the same instinct about where they work. After years in mostly male-dominated teams, they stopped waiting for a studio that felt right and built one themselves in London. Their advice to the room: you don't need an invitation, and you don't need to fit an existing mold.
WORK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE
When Instagram first pushed video over still images, illustrator Jim Stoten couldn't animate. So he cut leftover footage of himself sitting and worrying into short “nothing films,” which drew more response than anything he had posted before and eventually pushed him to learn animation. Cachetejack's early years ran on the same logic: grants, residencies, competitions, and an illustration market in 2011 where the duo earned €30. Three years later, a French sparkling water brand paid them €30,000 for a poster campaign across France. Neither waited for the right tools or the right moment. They used the ones in front of them.
PUT THE FRICTION BACK IN
Luna Maurer argues that seamless technology removes the resistance that makes us move, engage, and care, and she has a name for where total comfort leads: death by convenience. Her alternative is designing friction on purpose, through discomfort, delay, and tools that ask for your whole body. Annie Atkins builds that resistance into her own process. If a film prop would have been made by hand in its period, she makes it by hand now, so a baker's lettering starts with a bag of icing sugar and a king's signature with a real quill. The analog route is often faster, too: one rubber stamp across a photo beats wrestling a desktop printer into position.
SAY NO, AND MEAN IT
For Erik Kessels, turning down projects, clichés, and compromises isn't negativity. It protects the work and leaves room for braver ideas, sometimes enough to redirect a whole career. Cachetejack reached the same conclusion by doing the math. In 2017, the duo was working ten-hour days, weekends included, and still not earning enough. They stopped accepting endless rounds of revisions, started asking for more, and now read every contract before the first sketch. That includes turning down a brand that wanted its centenary illustrated for free.
KEEP THE MISTAKES IN
On a film about Virginia Woolf, Annie Atkins's team neatened the writer's wonky handwritten margins and stripped the letter of its character. On The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson felt a love-poem inscription looked like the art department had made it, so they taught the actor to use a dip pen and let him write it himself. Even a misspelled “patisserie” on the Mendl's box turned into an asset: the double T is how she recognizes a genuine prop at auction. Supersense founder Florian Kaps keeps his own list, from an analog BMW project that never reached production to a record-cutting machine that failed in 2019. His team set the design aside, started from scratch, and kept going.
BUILD SOMETHING THAT RUNS WITHOUT YOU
Dada Project had three weeks before Christmas to produce six videos and nine minutes of footage for On's first wholesale presence at The Running Event. Faster rendering wouldn't save them, so they built a system instead: a modular film with a seamlessly looping middle section that could run as long as each runner did. At YouTube Music, Gabriela Namie was the only graphic designer on the platform. Rather than become the bottleneck, she worked with an engineer on a tool that let music teams worldwide produce playlist covers without her, and the team could suddenly launch and test far more playlists than before.
LET PLAY DO SOME OF THE WORK
Jim Stoten's sketchbook has no purpose, and that is the point. It's a meditative space and a catalog he draws from when a client calls. A monthly pub quiz with a friend led to posters, then a band, then music videos that became his animation practice, and a short film he made for no reason was invited to a festival in Poland. Erik Kessels treats his own side projects the same way: books, collections of amateur art, even a snore pressed into vinyl. For him, they aren't distractions from the real work. They are where the ideas for it get tested.
HAND IT TO EVERYONE ELSE
Florian Kaps has a simple test for new projects: if the bank understands the plan, it isn't worth doing. His latest, a professional record-cutting machine built by Teenage Engineering on Supersense's technology, needs nothing more than a power plug to start producing records anywhere, and he invited the audience to help build a production network around it. His lesson from Polaroid is that a product's power comes from the people who use it. Luna Maurer closed her talk the same way, releasing her talk-dance gathering, a format that alternates between three minutes of conversation and three minutes of dancing, as open source. Her instructions were simple: try it, change it, and pass it on.
