He went on to discuss his career as an editorial illustrator when he began to feel something that would be a recurring fear for his creativity, comfort. He has stated himself that he doesn’t really believe in talent and that you must take time to replenish your creative tank. The only way you can do this is by failing or doing something that you do not know what the outcome is. Suddenly he developed back pain and to combat it, he took yoga.

To his chagrin, he hilariously concluded that, “Yoga will destroy your design career.” Why? Because the drawings he made to him sucked but because he was a more relaxed person, he loved it regardless. In addition to yoga, his illustrations also tackled the hot topics such as what to do with his bottom arm when spooning (he states that he is a professional spooner), battling for the arm rest on red eye flights and a pie chart on the content of dreams.

The second half of his talk revolved around the process of doing animation, first for Google Chrome (which can be seen here) and his app. He began to do research on video games with his sons and realized very quickly that he wasn’t very good at them. Christoph went on to say that he enjoyed the demo mode in the game and that it was like a petting zoo. It was the eureka moment he was looking for but from that arose a problem, how can he create an app? He was able to do some programming but for the most part had to learn. He happily reported that it took a month to make a green rectangle into a green one. One of the key learning points was this fight between being the artist vs the editor. He states that the basic problem with any design work is learning how to edit your ideas and to not be too married to them. “The good stuff happens in the process.”

In the end, Christoph Niemann had the audience howling in laughter and delight. We highly recommend you check out his new app, Petting Zoo by Christoph Niemann. A certain Typo SF blog writer may have spent hours of giggling delight playing with the app.