Gil Gershoni
Co-founder & Creative Director, Gershoni Creative Agency

For more than 25 years, Gil Gershoni has been developing cutting-edge ideas that keep brands like Google, Apple, Spotify, and Nike ahead of the curve. After immigrating to the United States from Israel and supporting himself through a brief stint as a magician, Gil enrolled in Pratt Institute, where he earned degrees in Communications Design. He founded Gershoni Creative, a San Francisco-based creative agency, in 1996. As the agency expanded, working with clients at the forefront of technology and innovation, Gil realized that his dyslexia — a childhood diagnosis he’d long thought of as his albatross— was actually the secret sauce to Gershoni’s creative process. Through his work and advocacy, Gil is helping others discover something he’s long known: there’s a little bit of magic in dyslexic thinking.
In 2017, after decades of wielding the power of his nonlinear thinking to help his team and clients innovate, thrive, and problem-solve, Gil founded Dyslexic Design Thinking, a program that teaches people how to leverage strategies that come naturally to dyslexics to enhance how they work, think, and create. His mission is to educate people about dyslexia and move away from the traditional — and incomplete — perception of the condition as a limitation only. For Gil, dyslexia is a hyper-ability, not a disability. Dyslexics are often able to make surprising connections and find solutions in unexpected places — and Dyslexic Design Thinking can help linear thinkers unlock their creative potential.
Dyslexic Design Thinking has grown to include the Dyslexic Design Thinking podcast and The Bigger Picture with Amazing Dyslexics, a virtual salon series that explores how dyslexics and non-dyslexics alike can use big-picture thinking to create and innovate across different fields. In October 2022, Gil executive-produced Dyslexic Dictionary, an exhibit in San Francisco showcasing works by dyslexic artists and leaders, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Twitter logo designer Martin Grasser. The exhibit also launched Dear Dyslexia, a project that invites dyslexics worldwide to mail in postcard illustrations of their personal experience with dyslexia.
Most recently, Gil used the principles of Dyslexic Design Thinking to redesign the Schwab Learning Center at Palo Alto’s Children’s Health Council, a space where college and high-school students with dyslexia and other learning differences can come to discover their gifts, strengths, and potential, and develop a sense of community.
Gil has presented at South By Southwest, the Whitney Biennial, the Sundance Film Festival, Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, San Francisco Design Week, California College of the Arts, and UC Berkeley.
He has been featured in Wired, the San Francisco Examiner, AdForum, San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Standard, and 48 Hills.
How to Think Like a Dyslexic — And Why You'd Want to
IDC
Workshop
August 24, 2023
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Breakout - Shubert
Steve Jobs built one of the most innovative tech companies ever. Steven Spielberg changed cinema. Octavia Butler transformed science fiction as we know it.
What did these creative disruptors all have in common? They each had dyslexia. In this lecture, you’ll learn how to think like a dyslexic, and why you would want to.
Dyslexia currently affects more than 40 million Americans, and the words we use to describe it — learning disability, disorder, condition — automatically frame it as a misfortune. But Gil Gershoni — a designer with dyslexia and, briefly, an amateur magician - has a different perspective.
In this session, Gershoni will teach the audience how to wield the power of dyslexia for creative good. Having helped brands like Google, Apple, Spotify, and Nike stay at the forefront of innovation, Gershoni will reveal why dyslexia, when harnessed, is not a dis-ability, but a hyper-ability.
Created for linear thinkers and anyone interested in expanding and challenging the way their brain works, the Dyslexic Design Thinking tenets teach, among other things, negotiation, discipline, and perspective; how to approach problem solving like a dyslexic; how to disrupt cyclical thinking and overthinking; and how to control creative spin and never run out of ideas.
The audience will learn. . .
• How to leverage strategies that come naturally to dyslexics to enhance how they work, think, create, and problem-solve.