Richard Seymour

Richard Seymour is one of Europe’s best-known product designers TED speaker, and an adept and charismatic keynote speaker.

Concerned with beauty and how products matter to us, Richard designs idea-driven products, and instils in audiences an emotive and thrilling analysis of the importance of design.

Educated as a graphic designer and illustrator initially at the St Martin’s Central School of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art (where he has been visiting professor), Richard’s successful career has taken him through all kinds of design fields, from book and record-sleeve design, through advertising and film production design, to a commanding position on the international stage with Seymourpowell (which he created with Dick Powell in 1984).

Seymourpowell is now regarded as one of the world’s leading product and innovation design consultancies. They have an extensive list of A-grade clients including: Ford, Virgin Galactic, Tefal, Casio, Nokia, Guinness, Samsung and Unilever. Richard also works as a creative director of design to Unilever’s Dove, Axe, Lynx and Vaseline brands.

The consultancy has won numerous awards for design excellence since it started operation, including several D&AD silver awards, the BBC Design Award and several DBA Design Effectiveness Awards. The pair have also been awarded the D&AD President’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Design, three shortlist nominations for the Prince Philip Design Prize and voted sixth Most Important Shakers and Movers in British Culture by the BBC in 2004.

Seymour himself has also won D&AD Awards for his work in graphic and advertising design, and the Smarties Innovation Award for book design.

He is a past president of D&AD, has sat on the UK’s Design Council, was a founding board member of the DBA and is a trustee of the Design Museum in London. In 2006, he was presented with a senior fellowship of the Royal College of Art.

Since then, the consultancy has risen to the forefront of product and Innovation design, with a string of world-firsts amongst its achievements, including designs for the world’s first cordless kettle, pocket mobile phone and privateer spaceship for Virgin.

More and more of his time now is spent helping large international companies understand what lies before them in the future, and finding ways to ‘rewire’ them to better face these challenges.

He has appeared extensively on British television, most notably in two series on design for Channel 4 – Better by Design and Designs on your.... They have also appeared on Equinox, Design Challenge and several radio productions.

Richard’s TED talk, ‘How we feel Beauty’ has received millions of hits across the Web and he was selected by the BBC to contribute, along with 15 other Professors, scientists and Nobel Laureates, to a series about the future, which will appear on their digital platforms worldwide.

He is a formidable public speaker, specialising in product creativity, how we perceive beauty and work and business agility.