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SQ1CON 2018        

Square 1 Conference

July 20, 2018

Advanced Design Sketching held their annual Square 1 Conference last week in Chicago and our team spent the weekend sketching with over 500 other attendees and learned from some of the most influential and renown designers in the industry. SQ1CON 2018 was headlined by Creative Sessions, the creative outlet for Anh and Hoang Nguyen. Creative Sessions consists of the two San Franciscan brothers, both Industrial designers, who notably designed the Nike Fuelband, Amazon Echo, and Kindle.  Other All-Star sketchers that joined the duo included Reid Schlegel, Spencer Nugent, James Connors, Nick Baker, Jeff Smith, Paul Sohi, Anne Goodman, Kelly Lin, Teddy Lu, Graham Allan, Jacob Ballard, Joey Zeledon, Alexandre Nys, Zeeshan Hakkim, Dominic Montante, Carly Hagins, and Derek Cascio.

The event was held at the Illinois Institute of Design over the weekend. IIT is the sold graduate-only professional design school in the country.  Grounded in design strategy as well as in human-centered design and systems thinking, ID offers leading Master’s and PhD programs in design and design-driven innovation. By educating the next generation of designers in relevant, emerging practice, ID develops pioneering thinkers and interdisciplinary problem solvers who navigate and facilitate change across complex systems.

Industrial Designer, Carter Gerard, sketches shoe designs during the conference. 

Square One’s Mission Statement: All great work starts at the beginning: square one. Square One Conference is a design event for people who are interested in design and development. This event focuses on the importance of process, featuring talks in analog, digital, and innovative visual communication techniques through workshops and lectures. Square One welcomes hundreds of students, educators, and designers ranging from all experience levels.  Below, Spencer Nugent leads a packed classroom.

“This conference is meant to embrace failure, encourage the process, and push creativity. Unlike other design conferences, which do not highlight the importance of design sketching, Square 1 will embrace the universal language of Industrial Design and encourage students to obtain its fluency through: rapid visualization; visual communication; marker rendering; understanding hierarchy; product relationship; sketching techniques; speed and efficient techniques; sketch notes; and storytelling.”

Industrial Design intern, Garret Son (second from left), is part of Purdue’s Sketch Squad, a group that takes lecture note taking and turns it into elaborate and vivid sketching. The process captures complex theories and turns generic notes into attention-grabbing notes. It is an “idea-visualization” club and continually attend on and off campus events and take their unique notes creating a new way to learn and retain knowledge. The Sketch Squad spent the entire weekend note taking and are pictured above with Spencer.

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