HOW Design Live 2015 Closing Keynote Features Modern Media Icons: Musician-Artist-Author Amanda Palmer, Brain Pickings Founder Maria Popova

NEW YORK, April 8, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- HOW Design Live (@HOWbrand - #HOWLive) is bringing together two cultural icons for an exciting closing keynote presentation on Friday, May 8 – "Amanda Palmer in Conversation with Maria Popova." Palmer is a musician, artist and author of the best-selling book The Art of Asking, and Popova is the founder of Brain Pickings, which is included in the Library of Congress archive of culturally valuable materials.

HOW Design Live takes place May 4 – 8 in Chicago, Ill. at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. The conference is the biggest, most inspiring, educational and talked-about design event anywhere in the world, covering the latest topics in graphic design, marketing and branding. Conference details and registration are at howdesignlive.com.

For the HOW Design Live closing keynote, Palmer (@amandapalmer) will talk about her work, her connections with fans through social media, and the not-so-simple task of realizing when you need someone's help and asking for it, a topic she focuses on in The Art of Asking. In the book, Palmer grapples with "the new rules of exchange in the 21st century," both online and off, and she challenges readers to rethink their own ideas about asking, giving, art and love.

As a musician-artist-writer, Palmer has an uncanny ability to connect with her fans. In 2012, she made international news when she raised more than $1 million to support her album, Theatre is Evil, by pre-selling it directly to fans on Kickstarter. Her 2013 TEDTalk, based on her touring and Kickstarter experiences, has been viewed more than 6 million times and is the basis for The Art of Asking.

Widely known as "The Social Media Queen of Rock-N-Roll," Palmer's intimate engagement with fans online has been at the vanguard of using both "direct to fan" and "patronage" business models to build and run her enterprise.

The HOW Design Live closing keynote with Palmer will take place as a conversation with Maria Popova (@brainpicker), an MIT Fellow who has written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab, The New York Times, and Smithsonian Magazine, in addition to her writings at Brain Pickings.

Popova is a reader, writer and self-declared "interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large." Brain Pickings is her one-woman labor of love – a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. She says it's a record of her "own becoming as a person – intellectually, creatively, spiritually – and an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life." Brain Pickings was founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends and eventually brought online, and the site was included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive in 2012.

The core ethos behind Popova's Brain Pickings is that creativity is a combinatorial force: one's ability to tap into a mental pool of resources — knowledge, insight, information, inspiration and all the fragments accumulated over the years. Popova says that in order for people to truly create and contribute to the world, they have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine those pieces and build new ideas.

"HOW Design Live is thrilled to welcome these two remarkable cultural icons to its main stage," said Gary Lynch, vice president/group publisher, design and publishing communities at F+W, A Content + eCommerce Company, the organizer of HOW. "You'll never have another opportunity to see this inspiring presentation, which is just one part of an unmissable lineup of outside-the-box keynote presentations, education sessions and programs at HOW."

To learn more about Amanda Palmer, see AmandaPalmer.net, and visit Maria Popova's Brain Pickings at BrainPickings.org.

Visit howdesignlive.com for advance registration, or e-mail [email protected] to inquire about attending, sponsoring or exhibiting.

About HOW Design Live
HOW Design Live, which includes both education tracks and an exposition, offers the inspiration to rekindle one's passion for creative work plus the tactical, take-home information needed to achieve and advance a career. The event, which has its finger on the pulse of the creative industry, is divided into five programs, each with a specific focus. The five programs include: HOW Design; The Dieline Package Design; HOW Leadership; In-House Management and Creative Business. Additional conference themes include: Innovation, Novelty, Interactive Design, Freelance, Design Strategy, Branding, Career Advice and Thought Leadership, among others. Attendees can customize their personal agenda by picking the sessions and social events that help fulfill their goals.

About F+W, A Content + eCommerce Company
F+W, the company behind HOW Design Live, is an enthusiast-focused Content and eCommerce company, serving 20 Million consumers annually via the Company's print portfolio, ecommerce stores, extensive online education programs, trade and consumer events, popular consumer catalog brands, nationally-broadcast TV programs and more, all in service of passionate niche communities of professionals. (fwcommunity.com)

SOURCE F+W, A Content + eCommerce Company