What Makes Work "Sing"? TDK 2026 Awards Judge Gemma O'Brien Explains

It’s quite a vague statement, but I set it for myself as a challenge—a way to distil the next phase of my art practice while still connecting it to my history and love of typography, writing and language.

I think over time, a lot of artists become interested in stripping something back to its essence or getting to the heart of it. After 20 years of working with text and words in both commercial and art contexts, I started wondering: what does it mean to paint a word from the inside out? Is it about how language appears in our brains and bodies? How words live in culture over time? Is it looking deeper into where and how language is formed?

It connects to the research I’ve started doing, but it’s deliberately an open question. It’s something I want to explore intuitively over the next few years rather than already knowing what the answer is.

Do you feel like that relationship with type has changed over time, or has a core pull of it still been the same for you?

So much of my early career was defined by my love of letterpress and typography, so it really shaped my creative identity. There have been phases where I’ve moved away from it—towards illustration or pattern—or questioned the limits of working with words. And yet I always come back.

There’s this push and pull I love. Language is so grounded in being human, in culture, pop art, posters and graphic design. But then you have artists like Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha, and this bigger question in art about the limits of language—that words can’t fully express human experience, which is partly why we have abstract painting, music and other forms.

I like that tension: what can words do, what can’t they do, and how do you represent that visually? Especially now, as AI becomes more present and we’re questioning what is uniquely human, language feels like an interesting place to dig deeper.

You're currently developing a 2027 solo exhibition shaped by your neuroaesthetics research. What's that research revealed so far, and how is it already influencing the way you create/work?

Firstly, neuroaesthetics is a big word and I don’t like scaring people away with big words. I basically think of it as brain plus beauty. The “neuro” is neuroscience and psychology, and the aesthetics side leans into art, design and aesthetic theory.

We normally look at art and design through art history or design history. Neuroaesthetics asks different questions: how does the nervous system respond? Are there common patterns in human preference? Why might people respond to certain colours or forms, and how much of that is biological versus cultural? I became really curious about that scientific lens, which is what led me to study it in London.

My own research focuses on artists and flow state—that feeling of becoming completely absorbed in what you’re doing and losing track of time. I was working alongside research looking at musicians improvising under EEG, and I brought that question back to 2D visual artists: what might lead to flow during art-making? What’s happening in the creative process?

I’m finishing that first study now, so I don’t want to overstate what it means for my art yet. It’s unfolding in real time. But I’m interested in whether some of the things being studied scientifically can be brought back into the art and design world in a useful, practical way.

I feel like ‘flow state’ is a feeling every creative person is so familiar with. Has your research in this area helped you self-reflect on how to get in your own flow state or helped in that way?

Sometimes studying something in too much detail can interfere with the natural process, so I’m actually cautious about over-analysing it.

Fortunately, I was drawing some custom letterforms recently for Orchard Street in Sydney and, without even noticing, suddenly it was three in the morning. I’d completely disappeared into it. I remember thinking, “Okay, good. This can still happen.”

Some of what helps is fairly intuitive: fewer distractions, enough time and resources to focus, and the ability to temporarily forget everything else going on in your life. But one of the big things is intrinsic motivation. If you’re genuinely drawn to something, you’re much more likely to become engrossed in it. That makes side projects, strange interests and work driven by your own curiosity really valuable.

There’s also a relationship between flow and feeling confident enough in the skills you’re using. I’m more likely to find flow painting or doing calligraphy because I’m not second-guessing every move.

So if I can’t get into that state, I’m interested now in asking: is it my environment and attention? Am I actually interested in what I’m doing? Or am I still learning the skill and therefore having to think about every step?

We enter creative fields partly because there’s something deeply rewarding about the process itself. I think protecting that part of the work is really important.

A theme comes up constantly in our community — even at your level, with a client list like Apple, Nike and Google, does imposter syndrome still show up for you?

I’m always slightly curious about the phrase “imposter syndrome” because it can mean different things. Is it “I shouldn’t be here”? “I’m not good enough”? Fear of failure? Comparison? I don’t know that I always label all of those feelings as imposter syndrome, but the feelings themselves absolutely persist at every stage of a creative career.

For me, second-guessing usually gets louder when I’m comparing myself to someone else: are they better than me, is their work more impressive, am I doing enough? That’s very human, but it’s also why I try to keep returning to my own criteria for what good work means.

Some of the biggest client names in my portfolio aren’t necessarily attached to my favourite work. Some of the work I’m proudest of came from exhibitions I funded myself or personal projects where I could follow an idea without a commercial brief.

You also have to keep making things despite rejection and feedback. Early in my career I took feedback very personally because it felt like, “My creative work is me.” It took time to separate myself from what I make and to recognise that having lots of other facets to your identity is healthy.

Creatives are often sensitive—that sensitivity is partly why we make things that connect with people—but it can be a blessing and a curse.

Even now, I’m working on a project for NASA. I send a round, then until the reply comes back there’s still a part of my brain going, “Oh my God, has it hit the mark, will they love it, is it my best work!?”

That doesn’t disappear. You just keep going anyway.

Something you’ve really been able to do with your own career path is forge your own way. Looking back, what made you trust your own intuition and direction enough to go out on your own?

Looking back, it feels like it’s gone incredibly quickly. I’m speaking in Berlin next week and it’ll be almost 20 years since my first design conference, which is wild.

I’ve definitely taken my own path. There are moments when I’m incredibly grateful I did, and moments when I think, “Holy shit, this is hard.” I have agents, assistants and people who support different projects, but ultimately I’m still making most of the decisions about what happens next.

When I was younger, I think I just went full force without that much reflection. I followed my instincts and my gut, and I’m grateful to my younger self for that. I’m definitely not as fearless now. It’s also a very different world—when I started there was no Instagram, TikTok or current version of AI.

So I’m wary of telling younger creatives that there’s one correct path. There isn’t. Some incredible creatives work full-time in companies. Some work independently. Some have four jobs that all feed each other.

One of the advantages of being creative is that you can apply flexible thinking to the structure of your own life as well. You can create your own strange concoction of making work, earning money and living in a way that works for you.

Every version has compromises. Employment gives you things that working for yourself doesn’t. Independence gives you freedoms but removes certain securities. The grass is always greener somewhere. You have to work with the reality you’re in and find the good parts of it.

Hard lessons

I'm sure along your way you've had many knocks and lessons that you've had to learn through that process of forging your own path. So what would you say has been maybe the biggest lesson you've had to learn that's shaped how you work as a professional creative?

One lesson is that not every part of making amazing creative work is exciting. There are lots of boring parts, and they’re often what make the exciting parts possible: administration, training, preparation, repetition.

It’s a bit like surfing. You can paddle around for ages, get exhausted and not catch a wave, but catching one makes you want to go back out. Creative careers have those same dips and flows. You keep paddling out.

The other big lesson for me has been collaboration. Early on, being very driven by my own instincts helped me develop a voice quickly, but I think at times I underestimated how important—and fulfilling—collaboration can be.

Now, even when a brand comes to me specifically for my work, I want to understand what happens when their world and mine meet. Sometimes that has pushed me towards a colour, process or idea I never would have reached on my own.

The result should ideally be something that wouldn’t have existed if either person had worked alone. And collaboration also means learning how to listen, communicate and work with different personalities. As creatives, sometimes we’d love to hide away and just make our own thing, but learning to work well with other people is a creative skill in itself.

Is there a lesson you've had to learn the hard way? From wearing all the different hats?

So many. A lot of my hard lessons have probably come from being too optimistic. Optimism is one of my strengths, but it doesn’t always mix well with deadlines. I underestimate how long things will take, or I’ll dream really big before working out how the dream fits the budget or timeline.

When I was about 22, I worked on a Play School project with Animal Logic and built this entire handmade sky out of hundreds of cut triangles. I became completely convinced: this is it, this is the background. I hadn’t shown the client first.

Then they saw it and basically said it looked too jagged and potentially scary for children. I was devastated because I’d spent hours making it. That was a very practical lesson: before doing an enormous amount of labour, show someone the idea and get it approved.

Going back to study in London was another humbling experience. When I was thinking about neuroscience, psychology, art and design freely in my studio, it felt exciting and open. Studying those ideas formally, in another country, as a mature-age student, suddenly involved statistics at a level I’d completely underestimated.

I definitely overestimated my ability to just pick up something entirely new very quickly.

But I don’t regret it. Being stretched beyond what you think your limits are can be painful while it’s happening, but you often come away having learnt far more than you expected. You also learn where your threshold actually is.

Going back to study, maybe you get to reconnect with another sense of purpose in the work that maybe wasn't there before. How does your work connect to a sense of purpose for you?

I think my sense of purpose has changed through different phases of my career.

At the beginning it was much more intuitive and curiosity-led. I loved typographic history and wanted to learn. Then, when I started making large-scale typographic murals, there was this excitement around doing something I hadn’t really seen before. I was driven by novelty, experimentation and the feeling that I could push my own little part of the field somewhere new.

Now it’s shifting again. I’m more interested in connecting with younger artists and designers and sharing some of the skills and lessons I’ve gathered as they enter a very different creative landscape.

I’m also increasingly interested in the human side of things. As we move further into an augmented world, I’m curious about what makes us distinctive and about some of those bigger philosophical questions. If I can add another layer of research or reflection to a body of handmade work, and that prompts somebody else to think differently or make something, that interests me.

But I also think you can overthink purpose. You can gaze into your belly button for hours asking, “What is my purpose?” and eventually you still have to get up and make something.

Often purpose emerges through what you repeatedly enjoy doing and the ways that work connects you to other people.

I guess this is a question that's sort of happening in the zeitgeist of an augmented world that designers are stepping into. While your work has always been connected to a sense of humanness through the craft of handdoing things and drawing. How do you feel about that type of work in the context we're stepping into?

I’m definitely not nostalgic about working by hand for the sake of it.

When I was learning typography, going back and understanding its roots in handwriting helped me understand typography differently. That didn’t mean every project then needed to be handmade—that would be completely inefficient. But understanding where something comes from can give you a deeper relationship with it.

Personally, I know there’s something about having my body and mind working together that I find incredibly fulfilling. But I’m careful not to assume that’s universal. A designer who works with me draws almost everything on an iPad, and that may be the tool through which she feels most connected because that’s what she has always used.

What I do know is that when I’m working with a team on a hand-painted mural for several days—mixing paint, talking, solving problems and physically working towards a shared goal—there’s something very special about that experience. I want to protect that.

But I don’t think that feeling belongs exclusively to handmade work. A team making an animation digitally might experience the same camaraderie.

For me it’s less about declaring one method better and more about asking: what’s the best tool for what I’m trying to do right now? And occasionally checking whether I’m choosing a tool because it’s actually right for the work, or simply because it’s the easiest and most familiar to me.

The Design Kids 2026 Awards

What are you looking for when judging the 2026 Awards submissions?

I’m really excited to judge them because I love seeing what people are making at a particular moment in time.

There’s always an unknown factor—something you see and it instantly makes you stop or become curious. That X factor is hard to define.

I’m looking for something original, but also something that feels genuinely connected to the person who made it rather than originality for its own sake. Usually I don’t completely know what I’m looking for until I see it, which is part of what makes judging exciting.

I love when the idea and execution really come together—when you can see coherence between what the work needs to do, who it’s speaking to and how it’s been made.

That might come through care, complexity, beauty, humour or an immediate emotional connection. There are lots of ways it can happen, but when all those elements feel in harmony, the work really sings.

I’m excited to see what people do.

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