10 Inspiring TED Talks for Creative Professionals

Need a creative boost for your Monday mornings? Spark your creativity and motivation with these 10 inspirational TED talks from amazing designers and artists.

Janet Echelman: Taking imagination seriously

Echelman uses nets to create enormous sculptures dangling in the sky. In this talk she shares the story behind her art, how she was inspired to use nets for her sculptures, and how she got to this point in life despite being rejected by 7 art schools.

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Robert Lang: The math and magic of origami

We all tried origami right? Most of us have. And while most origami is fun and easy, Robert Lang’s origami is all math and engineering principles. He explains how to transform a plain piece of paper into high-detail origami by following four simple laws.

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Julian Treasure: Why architects need to use their ears

“We’re designing environments that make us crazy. And it’s not just our quality of life which suffers. It’s our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well.”. In this talk, Treasure talks about the acoustic problem with architectures and why we need to start designing for the ears.

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Shea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists

Shea Hembrey is a contemporary artist who showcased an international art show with works from 100 different artists.

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Stefan Sagmeister: The power of time off

Stefan Sagmeister is a Graphic Designer and Typographer from New York. He has a different approach to retirement. Instead of retiring at the age of 65, he would retire at 70 and split the extra 5 years evenly into his working years. Every 7 years, he closes his studio for 1 year.

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Erik Johansson: Impossible photography

Photoshop is the #1 software for photo manipulations and many of the most popular ones you’ve seen on the Internet were created by this speaker; Erik Johansson. In this TED Talk, Erik reveals his tricks to making his photos look realistic. He summarizes it with 3 rules:

Photos must:

1. have the same perspective.
2. have the same lighting.
3. be seamless – impossible to distinguish where the photo starts and ends

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Neil Harbisson: I listen to color

How would your life be if you couldn’t see color? Neil Harbisson was born with a rare vision condition called achromatopsia; complete color blindness. But he isn’t completely blind to color. In fact, he can even detect colors beyond what the human eye can see. Using a device attached to his head, he can hear colors. He describes going to the supermarket as, “…going to a nightclub. It’s full of different melodies.”. But what’s exciting is that he not only can hear 360 colors (just like the amount of hues you can use in Photoshop), he can hear infrared and ultraviolet light – colors we cannot see.

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