Art: Jeff Greenspan is a creative thinker everyone should know and love

Sadly our flights back to London from Dublin’s OFFSET conference last weekend meant we missed the last few speakers on the Sunday schedule, but our colleague Karl Toomey was there and waxed lyrical about the work of Jeff Greenspan. Closer inspection revealed Karl’s excitement was justified, as Jeff boasts the kind of playfully creative mind of which we can’t get enough.

The New York based mischief-maker has worked with brands like Facebook and Buzzfeed (where he used to be Chief Creative Officer) to create the kind of engaging and shareable content that has become the holy grail for so many marketing teams. And yet Jeff’s ability to imagine and execute these sorts of ideas seems like a compulsion rather than a career plan, with some of his most interesting work completely self-initiated.

From building The World’s Most Exclusive Website to painting local/tourist lanes on NYC pavements, and investigating in very literal terms whether the chicken or the egg comes first to setting hipster traps around Brooklyn, Jeff makes an art form out of the silly and the simple. Many of his projects concern our relationship with technology, including working with long-time collaborators Improv Everywhere to provide guides for people trying to walk and use their phones simultaneously, or exploring the photobomb phenomenon in an anachronistic (and presumably painstaking) oil painting context.

There is something electrifying about not only the way Jeff thinks, but also in his willingness to get out and make these ideas a reality.