Day 2 of the OFFF festival in Oeiras and we unfortunately missed the first session, where they had a Portuguese design panel discussing design and creative things. Probably not the worst thing though as it was all in Portuguese anyways! So, after that session was Aaron Koblin, who i was really looking forward to. And he didn’t disappoint, showing his in depth data visualization work. He spoke about how tough it was to go out and try to get all of the data from people like Yahoo!, but luckily for us his ideas he had presented to them impressed enough for them to allow Koblin to use there data. In turn, it allowed him to use this as a success story to talk to other companies and organizations.
Check out this link to Koblin’s Sheep Market! http://www.thesheepmarket.com/
Here are some of the visuals that Koblin used to tell his story;
After Koblin’s talk, we headed to lunch at the beach once again, this time for a lovely steak sandwich. Anyways, as lunch finished we headed back to see Robert L. Peters talk, which was filled with quotes and snippets from his favorite personalities, and made a hugely interesting and inspirational talk, leading to a standing ovation from the huge crowds. Onesize were up next, showing the concepts and processes of the motion graphics they had made for the OFFF festival. Very interesting treatments for the 30-odd logos that they needed to show on the video. It was a nicely made video, but there was no need to show it twice! once at the start and once more at the end of the talk.
PES was very good, although i couldn’t help thinking that he was just showcasing his work from his DVD. However, the work is exceptional with excellent examples of how to use stop motion graphics properly and effectively in his personal work and his commercial work. Now Paula Scher is an exceptional designer and has been for many years. She showed her early work and also showed us how the work developed throughout the years…the only problem is that we could barely hear what she said unfortunately. But i’ll post some of the data visualization/map paintings that she loved doing if i can find them off the web somewhere.
This is Joshua Davis…and he gave one hell of a talk on Friday at OFFF!
His theme for the talk was “space” and he showed us how he uses his custom code to generate his art works. He’s excited about how the use of technology can help us do things that our hands just can’t do anymore, so he’s not worried about the technology taking over the art of hand drawing things, he is excited and intrigued about it and also thriving upon technology to make his artworks. Davis is an artist and an entertainer. One of my favourite parts of the talk was when he talked about how he though kaleidoscopes are horrible things and didn’t understand why people liked them. So, he decided to use it in his works so that he could make them look good and actually create and interesting piece of artwork instead of it being nonsense. The videos that i’ll try to upload of his talk are brilliant! He’s such an active speaker running all over the stage to try and get the crowd involved with his banter, whilst also making interesting points on his views of visual communication. The code that he develops and experiments for his artworks will be available for iPhone and iPod touch users as an app for Apple 
It will allow users to go through the same artistic process as Davis in order to create wallpapers for the iPhones/iPods.
