Conversations: Talking to Eva

Conversations for relationship, possibility and opportunity!

This week, Tanya's part of the project is to talk to designers. Firstly, to see what they think about applications of the image bank. Secondly, to invite them to become part of the community of designers we are creating by making a podcast (video, sound and stills) about their personal design process. The easiest thing for me is to talk to people in Hong Kong, but I'm also starting email conversations with people in other countries.

This morning I booked a one hour conversation with Eva Ng, a creative designer who works as a Strategic Planner for BBDO - the advertising industry. It turned into a two and a half hour conversation with a lot of emailing of links. She uses resources like Getty and a cheaper one called istockphoto for personal design projects when she wants to buy an image with rights.

Resources for designer how-tos (Ms Eva also makes strange little sock creatures for animal charities in her spare time) include www.Blip.tv and Etsy.com. Apart from taking about our resource, we had a ripping good conversation about creativity in all our various projects. I told her about Anna Gleeson's book-binding-for-artists business, and that sent us off in another direction. i talked about my projects. At the moment I am creating two diary series of the area I live in, Aberdeen. One called 'crimes of my neighbours: diary of a complaint' and the other called 'crayonographs: diary of an illiterate', as well as a blog to document the creative protest of a group of residents in Sham Shui Po whose district is being redeveloped and who will lose their 50 year old community. So we shared all that stuff, which all has nothing to do with the costume image collection, but a lot to do with how inspiring and USEFUL it is to be in touch with people who are really up to stuff with their creative projects. It's fabulous, and it's the life-blood of Beautiful and Useful.

Some other things we discussed: Threadbanger, how to think, the from Mao to Now exhibition.

Eva has taken on starting to look at her design process and how she manages her ideas for work. She'll take notes and snapshots and then we'll get together and turn it into a podcast later this month.