Yeah, I hadn't either. I came across an article back in early 2000s explaining synaesthesia. Boy was I surprised that not everyone experienced colors and textures and whatnot when they thought of letters. "You know, M is blue and shiny, K is red and rough…?" I got some strange looks when I started talking about it. Turns out, scientists have known about it for a really long time, but it fell out of common knowledge. (If you're curious and want to learn more, I recommend a book called Wednesday is Indigo Blue as a good technical starting place.) 

Turns out that for synaesthetes (people who experience synaesthesia), it's very common to have more than one kind. I have grapheme → color + texture + location (+ personality but just for numbers, go figure). It means I perceive colors and textures with each letter. As do days of the week, and months of the year. And they all have a spacial location in my mind's eye. I hadn't met anyone else with synaesthesia until the spring of 2011.

Back in 2011, as a HOW Design speaker I was also asked to review portfolios. I know I looked at several people's work, but I can't remember any. Just Rebekah Paulovich, and her work involving her own form of synaesthesia. Rebekah is also a synaesthete; she sees sound. Technically, it's sound → color + shape synaesthesia, but she has several kinds. Her work still blows my mind!

Rebekah is an amazing artist (seriously if you didn't click on that link up there, do it now, I'll wait), and since 2011 I had sent her a few messages asking how that project was coming along. She sent a message letting me know she was also in Boston for this year's HOW. We crossed paths on the same day that I pitched my coaching to 3,000 designers from HOW's main stage. She literally found me in a hallway full of people — again, how serendipitous, as with all things HOW-related — and we left to grab a coffee and catch up.

On the way to coffee, Rebekah told me an incredibly inspiring story of her life during the past 7 years since I'd seen her. (Her story is seriously amazing, and will come later, I promise.) Oh, and with true HOW serendipitous magic, the total for our coffee was $4.26 — not only her birthday, but also the birthday of the guy who rang us up!

​One of the delightful outcomes of the coffee meetup…?

Because both our alphabets are also spacial in nature, this has the potential to be a VERY different kind of book. Rebekah's alphabet appears in her mind's eye as a stepped series moving from upper left to lower right. Mine is all around me, as if I was standing inside a typewriter ball in an old Selectric typewriter. We'll see how well each translates to a 2-dimensional plane.

There's loads more teasing to come as our book unfolds — literally! Ha!

Thanks for reading! Good juju to you! =)
​—Cami

In my last post I talked about my spur-of-the-moment pitch onstage at HOW. Here's what it looked like from the audience.
​What do you think? After hearing this, would you "buy what I'm selling"?

Thanks to Ally for catching this one from the front row.

Here's a link to the spark session in its entirety. I come in at about the 15-minute mark.
I feel like I'm still catching up with myself. But big—really big, scary, fun, amazing—things are in the works. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. Good juju to you!  =)

—Cami

I had no idea what to expect. I was only 3 years out of school, having received my BFA in graphic design/illustration in 1991. I met David Carson, Kit Hinrichs, McRay Magleby, Charles Anderson, and the like. I had no idea who they were! My education focused on art history, not design history, so I didn't recognize their names or their faces. 

Another name I had never heard of was Gordon MacKenzie, the closing keynote speaker. Back then, we sat at round tables and were actually served lunch at the closing keynote! This was before Gordon wrote Orbiting the Giant Hairball (which I strongly recommend you read, if you haven't already), and his session was called "Achieving and Maintaining Creativity Within a Bureaucracy." ("Orbiting the Giant Hairball" is a better title, don't you think?) There weren't any slides in this talk. Behind him on stage were instead sixteen numbered posters with curious little drawings on them. He told us he had tried unsuccessfully to put them into some kind of sequential order, and asked us to just call out the numbers of the drawings that interested us, so he could tell us that story. When he was finished with each story, he'd say, "Next number." These stories became part his Orbiting book as chapters.

Several stories in and I fell in love… with the format, with the stories, with the unique, vulnerable, amazing human being up on stage. I decided I'd call out a number… "Thirteen!" Card number thirteen had the word "courage" on it. (Being a Leo, that word came up often for me; I have always been drawn to the word.)

Unlike the other stories, this time he said, "Who said number thirteen?" My face reddened, and slowly, I raised my hand. He pulled an envelope off the back of card number thirteen, came down from the stage, and made his way through the hundreds (thousands?) of designers, toward me. My heart raced, my mouth dried up, all eyes were on either me or Gordon. When he finally reached me, he opened the envelope, pulled out a $50 bill and handed it to me. 

"Never be afraid to single yourself out again."

My eyes bulged, my jaw dropped. I didn't know what to think, or what to say.

"Next number." 

After the stories were finished, I stormed the podium. I can't remember what exactly Gordon and I said to each other, but we ended up crying and laughing and hugging — we bonded. This changed my life. (I'd like to tell you that it happened overnight; it didn't.) I still have that $50 bill.

Fast-forward to this year's HOW Design Live — also in Boston, also in May. Tuesday afternoon's Spark was session with Marta Stiglin was called "Shameless Self-Promotion." She had us pair up and practice our pitches with each other. When we "bought" what our partner was pitching, we were instructed to stand up. I've been working with my business coach on perfecting mine, so I felt I was pretty ready; my pitch partner stood up right away. Then Marta asked for a volunteer to pitch to the entire audience.

I think I channeled Gordon for a few seconds there, because my hand shot up and "Meee!" came out of my mouth (at least I think that's what I shouted). I think I was as stunned as the people around me. Marta chose me and I sprinted toward the stage. I'd never pitched to an audience of 3,000 people before! Surprisingly, I wasn't nervous, but I was seriously out of breath (I don't run — ever)! Marta told the audience to hold up their phone flashlights when they "bought" what I was pitching. There was a moment of slight panic after my first pitch — there were no lights! No one "bought" it. And again, as if channeling Gordon, I started over. I said the same thing, but in plainer language. From my heart instead of my head. Suddenly there were hundreds of lights shining my way. I was SO inspired! ​