The guys went through there work failures, which is slightly repeated from yesterdays talks but interesting as always. We got to learn a bit more about their processes when working on personal and corporate projects, and also about there keen-ness to spread their own code in order to let people either improve it or even to use on our own projects, just accustomed to our own needs. All in all you could see why these guys are called the pioneers of digital design…they use there own failures and experiments to help design progress furthermore. Some interesting type treatments from Joshua Davis too!

Unfortunately, Grey London couldn’t make it due to work/client problems, which led to the farcical presentation of the workshop go-ers from the previous 2 days, lead by Renecent. It wasn’t of any fault of the students though, i’m sure its not easy to speak about your stuff in front of 3,500 people who were already at disappointment because of Grey London, but ahh well, they tried but in theme with the festival, it was a graceful fail!

Digital Kitchen showed us a HBO television title sequence. I’m trying to think about the name of the show but can’t seem to get it. Anyway, the presentation was nicely done from the Creative Director, who showed us some of their fails during the whole process of concepting and realization. The whole deck was nicely made actually, they used motion graphics to do all the transitions, which made it uniquely stylized in theme with the tv titles.

And then, the 3,500 strong crowd said hello to someone in a black/blue dress with white spots. Yep, that was Stefan Sagmeister in the black/blue dress with white spots! Quite a way to make an entrance i’ve gotta say! Not a 100% sure why he wore the dress but who cares! As the crowd settled down and got to grips with the guy, he began his talk on the subject of Happiness in Design. A lecture that i’d seen before but he did show a couple of new designs since then. The double school bus project that he mentioned about a year ago has finally gone through and the good news is that Obama has approved plans to take around $70b away from military funding and begin to use it for the US education system instead (don’t quote me on those figures though!).

Unfortunately we had to miss Kyle Cooper’s talk about his OFFF titles as it would have taken forever to get back to Lisbon with the 3,500 others also trying to get onto one train. I’ll be looking for a video of his finale once i get back to London and finally get to use the internet without having to pay €8 for 60mins of usage!

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.

Kyle Cooper, who is going to close the whole thing on saturday night will explain more on the motion piece that Prologue made for the event so i’m extremely excited and looking forward to that!  Should be a party atmosphere too!

The huge hall that emerges from the entrance is filled with exhibition pieces, ill upload the videos later on when i figure out how!

…stalls for artists to sell there products like t’s, screenprints and books, and also a cool little energy spot where all those macs and iphones can get charged up, whilst you can also watch the conference speakers too!

by the way, saw a submarine and a warship whilst we were having lunch today at the beach!  is something going on with the Portuguese army???

In the Loopita room, there are VJ’s doing there thing, which echoes nicely into the main entrance hall.  Theres just an amazing shudder that bounces off the wall that just simply draws you in to see what kind of visuals they have to support the awesome noise.  I saw two artists working there magic in the Loopita room, some cool vids will be uploaded soon;

My bro tells me also that Alva Noto will tear down the walls on saturday evening.  CANNOT WAIT!

The one talk i was mostly looking forward to today was from Dave Ferner of United Visual Artists and of course they didnt dissapoint.  He showed most of there best works like the installations from Japan, and more recently the V&A in LDN.  The thing that made it more interesting for me was that he explained in some detail about the process that each one of the guys goes through during a project, such as how they build there own programs to produce the work.  This Basement Jaxx video is amazing (again once i figure it out)

(edited 11/5/09) And here we are, Videos!

S

The general theme of the talk was about taking risks in our design work in order to help design progress in the future.  All very lectury although the point was well made, as i’m sure it always is with him!

Top dude!

Just watching some cool Visual/audio stuff from Toxi/Postspectacular Lovely lovely work!

This mornings first talk was from Neville Brody, pretty cool stuff too, will speak more about that a bit later

S

The weather is awesome! 28c, so here’s a shot of me re-tanning my arm, or top up should i say!

There’s the reference point for myself if i ever get lost in the city, Marques da Pombal. Beautiful surroundings to this magnifico statue! i like very much

On Google maps, it didn’t seem like such a long walk but what the hey! It was great to see all of the extra stuff that i wouldn’t have seen if i had taken a taxi or bus.

This little magnificent thing (below) was Lisbon’s first ever Street lift (i’ll try to find more info but thats what i know so far )

Check it out at night too…sooooo pretty

On another perspective on Lisbon, there seems to be a lot of graffiti going around the walls of this great city. Don’t get me wrong, i love to see cool graffiti, but the stuff going around Lisbon seems a bit…heartless

Ahhh also went to Oeiras to exchange our tickets for wristbands for the OFFF event happening tomorrow. Or what would have been tomorrow had i had the internet ready in my room!

Met some lovely people also from the UK, hung about with those guys got drunk and, well you know how it goes eh! Nah it didn’t go that much out of control but we did have some top gun fun on the gorgeous Oeiras (actually pronounced Or-e-as) beach.

Man o man i’m tired! left the house at 3am for KX and then headed to Luton, and then got on the EasyJet flight at 7am to arrive at Lisbon at around 9ish, although didn’t get through passport control till about half 10!

The first day in Lisbon was amazing, hope that days 2,3,4 and 5 are just as good!

S

Get off the 754 or 44 bus and walk to hotel. Should stop when we see the Marques de Pombal (roundabout thing…)

anyway my bro tells me that http://postspectacular.com/ which links from http://toxi.co.uk/ are the guys to look out for at OFFF this year, looking at the website i’d have to agree…some pretty cool stuff

S

Bring on 3am! *tired eyes*

artwork