At the beginning of the talk he very vaguely referenced the title of his talk, but pushed it aside and just started talking about himself. He went into detail about his studio and home in Brussels. Pretty seamlessly he segues into how he works as a teacher. Showing student work, including books, magazines, and t-shirts. the one thing I noticed that was commonplace for their work was humor. The great thing about this is he seemed to encourage the use of humor and embraced it. I loved this because as a designer myself, humor is one thing I try to incorporate in everything I do (when appropriate of course).

With his students he started organizing an annual design conference called Integrated. The conference started as a very, very, very small conference, but has gradually gotten bigger as the conference continues on.

As a designer Hugo Puttaert was offered a job to make a poster for an exhibition. The only catch was the client wanted him to pitch his idea. He pitched the idea and they didn’t like it and dropped him from the projects. The organizer hired another designer and released the poster that was picked in the end. The final poster was so drastically different from what he had wanted to do that Hugo Puttaert just revised the original poster he did and printed it out. He then preceded to post them all over the city the day before the exhibition.

The central idea to his topic was that he is a specialist in not specializing. That Hugo Puttaert is not just a Magazine editor, a teacher, a graphic designer, a conference organizer, or a father. Hugo Puttaert is a person who just happens to do all of this, and he does it well.

Text — Ashley Hampton