Remembering Hillman Curtis

HIllman Curtis, one of our design and inspirational industry icons passed away last week.

In the mid 2000’s we were doing a lot of Flash interactive design work and were familiar with Hillman’s early books on Flash design. We had the fortunate luck to meet him in person at an AIGA Miami Interactive. He was the keynote speaker and we were lucky to have personally have lunch with him and get to talk shop for awhile. I even tried to get him to come to Atlanta for a speech but he was too busy at the time.

Now, I’ve been to lots of keynote speeches through the years but Hillman’s Miami AIGA Speech stuck with me. I remember one of his key inspirational points was “Erase Cynicism”.  When we heard that we were like “Whoa!” – that’s a cool, progressive and positive idea. Every now and again through the years at the studio when we would catch ourselves being cynics about something (work, a project, a web site, etc), one of us would remember to say “Erase Cynicism”.   Oh how I wish that message could have spread across the world wide web and taken root. But I often fear its too late. I see so many media sites (like the big news sites) chock full of cynicism in the comments areas.

After our meeting him Hillman continued to be a source of design and artistic inspiration for the studio. We loved to check his site and see what he was up too, read his books and generally listen to any inspirational design words he would publish.  Hillman seemed to walk a cool line between artist and designer. Which was darn cool.

We were saddened to hear via Twitter that he had passed away last week (via a Joshua Davis tweet) at the young age of 51. He’ll be missed.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hillman Curtis please check out his life and work at hillmancurtis.com

And oh yeah…. when you find yourself being unjustly cynical about something… remember “Erase Cynicism”. You might just feel better.