Mixing vision and everyday life is tough, but it’s the heart of what designers do. It’s rare for a design conference to address this gap meaningfully, answering questions like: How can you persuade a client to take a creative leap? Where do design, craft, advertising, and our natural environment intersect? Are you putting the right price on your work? STEP’s Stretch conference, held in Washington, D.C., last October, deftly balanced theory and practice in a blend of speakers and interactive workshops.

Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style, opened the conference with an apt message: Design penetrates more than the surface of things, bringing real pleasure and better function to everyday environments. Her frank, optimistic observations about design struck a common note with the other speakers. Humorous, irreverent, yet unabashedly serious about their craft, these top designers spiced their talks with anecdotes and advice. “Be true to your intuition—that’s what we have as creatives,” urged Richard Boynton of Wink. “Authorship can be shared. People will support what they helped to create,” remarked Dana Arnett of VSA Partners, a strategy he uses in partnerships with IBM and Harley-Davidson. Brian Collins of Ogilvy & Mather’s Brand Integration Group (BIG) whipped out a pirate flag—now that’s a brand message that really delivers on its promise. “Don’t think nouns, think verbs,” noted Doreen Lorenzo of frog design. “Consumers consider products not as standalones, but in terms of how they fit into a consumption situation. It’s about experience.” Steve Manning of naming firm Igor International encourages firms to embrace his “theory of negativity”: Brand names like Virgin, Apple, and Chrysler’s Crossfire stick in the memory because they dare to draw from a deep well of connotations, positive and negative.

No sleeping! Workshops, including lessons in Adobe’s Creativity Suite, kept things active. In one room, designers interpreted fortune cookie messages using only rub-on Letraset graphics and scrap paper. In another room, FontHaus enjoined designers to find a fitting typeface for Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, and Osama bin Laden. In other rooms, designers absorbed straight talk about copyright law, pricing client work, and the pressures of judging design contests in handson exercises. Another group armed with bone tools and natural fiber paper made envelopes and accordion books while their neighbors wrestled with Javascript.

Mixing informally with other designers led to plenty of chances to talk and debate—a trend that carried over easily into the exhibit hall over drinks and booth-mingling.

Whether viewed as a lofty or humdrum pursuit, design springs from a simple need to make beautiful, useful things. Closing speakers Natalie Chanin of Project Alabama and Clay Weiner underlined the power of design as craft. “A lot of hands have touched this shirt,” Chanin noted, describing the cycle of workers from cotton pickers to Goodwill sorters to her quilters in Florence, Ala. In many ways, design’s most rewarding connection comes down to this: one person reaching with pleasure for another person’s work.