Austin Kleon

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A visit to the Chattanooga Public Library

Here’s a photo of me in front of some punk rock flyers I saw while touring the Chattanooga Public Library before my chat with the mayor for his new book club.

My favorite part of the library is the 4th floor, which used to just be storage (hence the sign when you come out of the elevator: YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE), and is now a gigantic creative lab, with a Zine collection, 3D printers, laser cutters, a vinyl plotter, photography studio, screen printing, power tool, and all sorts of other stuff:

On the second floor, there’s even a full-blown recording studio that you can reserve for a 3-hour session with your library card:

I love doing library gigs so much, because 1) I’m a former librarian and librarians are my people 2) I get inspired by all the amazing ways libraries are adapting themselves as resource centers for their communities.

(Two years ago I was honored to deliver a few talks for the public and for staff development day at the Richland Library in Columbia, SC. I was so impressed with that place.)

As I’ve written before in my posts about how much I love my local library, library tourism, and my summer reading assignment, I think of the public library as one of the last spaces in this country where you can go and feel like a real citizen. You’re not being sold anything. You’re welcome to be who you are, or work on becoming what you want to be. The library is there for you.

Here I am speaking with Mayor Andy Berke in the wood-paneled auditorium. (It’s a bicentennial building, built in 1976.)

Here’s a bonus photo of Josh — he teaches marketing to culinary arts students — I loved how his tie matched the post-it notes that were packed all over his copy of Show Your Work! so I asked if I could take a picture.

(You also learn something every time you visit a library: one of the women in the signing line was named Tonette — a musical instrument I’d never heard of!)

Special thanks to Corinne Hill, Mary Jane Spehar, Andy Berke, and the Friends of the Chattanooga Library and the Chattanooga Airport for having me out. (If you’d like me to speak at your library, drop me a line!)

How to keep going

How to keep going

A few weeks ago I gave a new talk at Bond in San Francisco. It’s a list of 10 things that have helped me stay creative in such chaotic times:

  1. Every day is Groundhog Day
  2. Build a bliss station
  3. Forget the noun, do the verb
  4. Make gifts
  5. The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary
  6. Art is for life (not the other way around)
  7. You are allowed to change your mind
  8. When in doubt, tidy up
  9. The demons hate fresh air
  10. Spend time on something that will outlast them

I really loved giving this talk. (And, as I’ve hinted, it is a preview of my next book.) If you’ve been struggling too, hopefully you’ll find something helpful in it. Please share it with anybody you think could use it. The full video is below.

(Special thanks to Andy McMillan for inviting me and Paul Searle for the great video.)

The shape of the cards


I’ve been working on a new talk for Bond next month. (Tickets still available!) I had these 10 points on index cards, but I was trying to figure out a flow for them, and it just wasn’t working. So I did what you do: I quit for the day, ate dinner, drank wine, and watched several hours of Frasier.

The next day I looked at how oddly I had them laid out on the table in two rows of five. Instead of trying to re-shuffle the order of the cards again, I started just changing the layout of the cards, and the minute I hit on the last shape in my diary doodle above, everything clicked for me, and I had my talk.

That’s the thing about visual thinking and laying it all out where you can look at it: the tiniest tweaks can lead to significant insights….

Keynoting

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Very pleased (and no, not at all terrified, not me!) to announce that I’ll be giving the opening keynote at SXSW Interactive 2014. I’ve been drawing and organizing panels at the conference since 2008, but this is quite the step up, and I’m honored that the SXSW crew asked me.

I gave my last keynote back in June at HOW Design Live in San Francisco. It was a huge room with a couple thousand people — definitely the biggest room I’d done up until that point, and probably the best talk I’ve given, ever. Alas, due to a miscommunication on my part, we didn’t get any video, but some lovely people on Instagram captured bits and pieces, which you can see below.

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Maybe my favorite part of speaking, other than Q&A (yes, I actually love Q&A, because it’s unrehearsed and time I get to think on my feet), is signing books afterwards and getting to talk to people who were in the audience. The line at HOW was at least a hundred people long and it took me 2 hours to get through, but, as should be expected from a design conference, there were some creative moments along the way, such as when Genevieve asked me to sign with a silver Sharpie (why had I never thought of that!?)…

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…and when Allan (maybe frustrated from the line length), did a blackout on the last page of Steal:

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I’m not doing a lot of speaking for the second half of 2013, but I’ll be hitting the road again next spring for the release of Show Your Work! If you’re interesting in having me talk at your event, drop me a line.

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