Face to Face with... Robert Wong

“Increasing market share by 5 per cent is not a reason to wake up in the morning,” said Robert Wong at last week’s sell-out Design Indaba conference. He used to be an accountant in Toronto, before waking up one morning and flying to New York to be a graphic designer.

During his presentation at last week’s event it was clear he made the right choice as he took the audience on a visual tour of creative Google Labs projects such as its YouTube Life in a Day film, the Chrome speed tests and the interactive music video for Arcade Fire. He also gave insight into the origins of the Google name describing it as “nine tenths awesome science and one tenth baby talk”

Here Wong tells us how he prefers scaring himself on a daily basis, providing the soundtrack to his own parties, and YouTube films which turn into Super Bowl spots.

Why did you make the move from accounting to the creative world?

I like design and storytelling way more than I do numbers and money.

How useful are Google's tools in today's world?

I won't speak for others but my life would suck without Google Search, Maps, Gmail and my Android phone.

You referred to the film Highlander in your presentation, how much of an influence is film in general to you and your work?

I'm a big movie buff so I'm sure its influence is all over my life and my work.

You also mentioned the element of surprise and showed a homemade wedding video. What's the biggest surprise you've ever had?

I used to throw a lot of parties but my friends always complained about my crappy little CD collection. Ten years ago, I came home from a weekend away to find that my friends Stefan Sagmeister and Hugues Hervouet had installed a 300 disc CD player with 50 new CDs loaded in.

They got all my friends to buy CDs, broke into my place, rewired my whole sound system and manually programmed every CD into the disc player. It must have taken days. It totally blew my mind.

Tell us about creative accidents and what can result from them?

We encourage the making of ‘creative accidents’ or what you might call unauthorised work. Sometimes, it's the little side projects we do for our own enjoyment that become the big hits. Androidify started its life as portraits that Jonathan Jarvis made of his colleagues. Two million people have downloaded this app that was launched only a few weeks ago. 

Online films and promos are becoming increasingly popular. Is digital the way forward for advertising?

Online films enjoy more freedom from the format and function of regular TV spots and there are more technical opportunities to innovate because of the web platform. So in general, yes, I think it's a very important playground for the future of advertising.

What's your favourite thing you've worked on at Google?

I love all my children but I'm probably most proud of the little YouTube video that became a Super Bowl ad for Google (Parisian Love, top of this page). Never in a million years could we have predicted its fate.

How important is it to take risks as a creative or just a person in general? Why should we be doing ‘epic shit’?

I have a fridge magnet that says 'Do one thing that scares you every day’. I totally buy this. Life would be boring if we're not scared shitless at least part of the time.

And how did your presentation go?

I hope people got something out of it. I would hate to have wasted 40 minutes of anyone's time, never mind 1,500 people.