My all-time favourite must-listen-to podcast (apart from the Ideas Architect podcast) is 99% Invisible created by Roman Mars. It’s a beautifully crafted, professionally polished set of stories about design. It tickles my fancy in multiple ways – it’s about design, the quality of production is beautiful and the stories are entrancing. I wish my podcast was like that! Perhaps, one day…
I also love his name… Roman Mars. It’s the kind of name that I would have been embarrassed by growing up and completely proud of as an adult. It’s a personal name crying out to be a brand.
Image: From Roman’s Twitter Page
Recently, Roman Mars was presenting at TED in Vancouver. He was talking about his personal obsession with flags. And, it’s not your usual TED talk as he tinkered slightly with the typical format.
Firstly, he’s sitting down!
Secondly, he plays a whole bunch of audio recordings to complement his presentation.
It’s not so much a TED talk, he says it proudly, it’s a showcase of him doing his radio show. And, for a fan like me how could I not love it?
The great thing about this presentation style is Roman knows who he is. He’s a radio guy and he presents to his strengths. And, in this TED talk he lets his quiet sense of humour loose with a clever and irreverent look at flag design.
[Tweet “What’s your best way of presenting? Great example: @RomanMars on Ted talking about Flag Design #knowthyself”]
And, I adore his simple introduction too…
I tell radio stories about design.
I think we all need a statement like that about what we do. My version of this is:
I design ideas.
What’s your simple, everyday introduction of what you do?
[Tweet “I tell radio stories about design by @romanmars – #whatdoyoudo”]
[Tweet “I design ideas by @ideasarchitect – #whatdoyoudo”]
I started writing this blog post to talk about Roman Mars and Flag Design and along the way I’ve become distracted by Roman’s artful presentation. I think there’s two pieces of gold in this post already! Answer these two life-altering questions…
We’ll talk about Roman Mars and flag design in our next post…
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