8 LESSONS FOR TURNING YOUR NEXT IDEA INTO ACTION
Ideas are easy – acting on them is the hard part. At Forward Festival, speakers including Mike Meiré, Johanna Jaskowska, Mr. Bingo, Julia Hoffmann of OpenAI, Studio Dumbar/DEPT®, Studio Feixen, Zetafonts, Aurélia de Azambuja of Base Design, and Erik Kessels showed us what that shift from thinking to doing actually looks like.
"IDEAS ARE CHEAP AS LONG AS YOU DON'T EXECUTE THEM"
That's Mike Meiré's blunt summary of the whole festival theme, and Johanna Jaskowska and Zetafonts both lived it out in very different ways. Jaskowska's breakout project was an experimental 3D portfolio site that barely loaded and didn't work on mobile. It's also what got her hired on the Mercedes-Benz account. Zetafonts had a similar experience in reverse: a font released with a genuine, visible design error went on to be downloaded six million times and picked up by major brands. Waiting for flawless can mean nobody ever sees the idea at all.
ANNOUNCE IT BEFORE IT'S READY
Mr. Bingo's entire working method comes down to one loop: think of a stupid idea, tell the internet, and if enough people say yes, you now have thousands of people expecting you to follow through. Felix Pfäffli of Studio Feixen stumbled into the same trick by accident. A two-minute Photoshop joke he posted about hating road signs was shared 70,000 times, and strangers in Poland ended up painting the concept onto a real building before he did. Publish the rough version, and let the audience's reaction become the deadline you can't skip out on.
MOMENTUM BEATS PERFECTION
Aurélia de Azambuja described design as a tension between control and play, more like a tightrope walker than a perfectionist, and said the real lesson isn't about getting the idea right, it's about momentum, process, and letting yourself keep moving. Erik Kessels backed that up with decades of client work: across projects for everything from budget hotels to luxury brands, his honest, occasionally blunt campaigns connected with people far more than any overpromise did. Trusting an audience to embrace imperfection and humor turns out to be a more reliable strategy than polishing an idea until it says nothing at all.
SAY NO ON PURPOSE
For Kessels, rejecting a project, a cliché, or a compromise isn't negativity, it's how he protects his creative integrity, and saying no has redirected his career toward more original work more than once. Mr. Bingo arrived at the same place from the opposite direction, spending 15 years gradually cutting agents, galleries, and eventually clients out of his process entirely, on the grounds that every one of those relationships costs some degree of compromise. Refusing the wrong opportunity is as much a decision to act as saying yes to the right one.
YOUR OWN RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN
Meiré's stretched typography got him publicly criticized before it became influential, and he was clear that the risk was deliberate: culture emerges from disruption. Studio Dumbar/DEPT® found their own version by accident, feeding a generative tool the wrong kind of image and getting a glitchy, stretched result they liked more than what they'd planned. Kessels has built an entire practice on the same instinct, treating "failed" photos, found images, and amateur creativity as fertile ground that polished brainstorming never reaches, from conceiving the I Amsterdam campaign on a bike ride home to staging protests in chicken suits. In every case, the mistake or the detour got kept on purpose instead of quietly corrected.
LET REJECTION MOVE YOU, NOT STOP YOU
When Meta shut down Spark AR in January 2025, it ended the tool behind years of Johanna Jaskowska's face filter work and a real share of her income. She was honest about the grief, then used the notice period to move fully into the AI-driven image work she'd already been dreaming about. Zetafonts described losing a design award two years running and briefly wondering if the whole thing was worth it, before reframing the setback through etymology: error comes from the Latin word for travel, a wrong turn that's still forward motion. Confidence dipping while you're learning isn't a stop sign.
BUILD THE TOOL THE IDEA ACTUALLY NEEDS
At OpenAI, Julia Hoffmann's Look to Speak app started when an engineer showed her that a phone's front camera could track eye movement and asked whether that could help people who couldn't speak. It shipped globally as an Android accessibility feature. Pfäffli works the same way in miniature, coding himself a custom brush that could generate an entire poster while he drew with it, then releasing it as standalone software days later. Sometimes the idea starts with a human problem, sometimes with a piece of technology looking for one. Either direction can get you to a working product.
YOUR PEOPLE MULTIPLY THE IDEA
Hoffmann credited an entire ad campaign in India to the fact that her first OpenAI hire happened to have run an agency in Delhi years earlier. Mr. Bingo built some of his most widely shared work out of strangers' real stories, offered in exchange for permission to share the result publicly. Base Design does the same on a smaller scale with one pro-bono project a year, including De Azambuja's own work for Le Refuge, a Belgian NGO supporting LGBTQ+ youth. Collect the relationships and the collaborators without a clear use for them yet. At some unpredictable point, one of them is exactly what makes the next idea possible.
De Azambuja closed her own talk on the point that ties all eight of these together: design shapes how people see and experience the world, and it's easy to detach from that responsibility when the world feels chaotic. Her answer was to design with awareness instead, and to choose joy on top of it, treating it not as an escape from the work but as a radical act, the fuel that keeps you designing, dreaming, and daring to act in the first place.
