The Transformative Power of Personal Projects

Ji Lee is currently the Creative Director of Google Creative Labs, but as he’ll reveal in this inspiring 99% lecture, it took nearly 4 years of mind-bending corporate dialogue and stifled creativity at his previous job to teach him the value of projects taken on simply to make you happy. The now famous, 2002 Bubble Project was the brilliant idea born of all that pent up frustration. It’s been over seven years since it’s inception, and although I had since forgotten who’s project it was, there’s no doubt that the Bubbles had a profound effect on me. It wasn’t long after reading about Lee’s work that I began to stick business card magnets to Hummers reading “H2 Dummer – Big Car. Small Mind.” I also took to replacing manager’s business cards at Starbucks with replicas featuring a reworked logo declaring ”Starbucks Sucks” and copy that encouraged the support of local coffee houses. Not exactly earth-shattering I know, and not even in the spirit of his work, but I fell in love with the idea of a piece of design taking on it’s own story once released into the wild. There are a lot of takeaways from this short talk, and for each of us they’re a little different, but the joy and purity of a creative endeavor rooted solely in self is something not to be debated or ignored.