Beyond Fonts: What Creative Work Is Really About

Beyond Fonts examines how a lifelong relationship with typography became a way of understanding creativity, attention and growth. Over more than fifteen years, Gemma O’Brien’s path has moved from writing about type to building a global practice spanning large scale hand painted installations, illustration, teaching and speaking.

This talk is not about fonts themselves, but about what sustained creative curiosity reveals over time. Drawing on lived experience and recent research into neuroaesthetics and flow state, it reflects on the wisdom and the cost of following intuition fully, and on how craft often becomes a language for something far more human beneath the surface.

The talk invites the audience to see their own creative work differently, reframing success as something shaped through attention, persistence and presence. This thinking is extended through a corresponding workshop that brings these ideas into the physical act of making.