Here, our highlights of the third (and last) day at OFFF Barcelona 2014.
Kate Moross is a young Londoner designer and illustrator. She’s also head of Studio Moross. With an encouraging DYI attitude and focusing on the business side of her work, she told us her story. From her first clients achieved shamelessly promoting herself on the early social network MySpace, to her current works for the likes of Adidas or Vogue. In the process, she has not lost any of her freshness, independency and visual impact. Moross has also been behind some of the most important artwork in British music in recent years. For instance, the ones for the British singer Jessie Ware.
After Kate Moross, the lunch break came. People started to look tired after several nights of “juerga” and little sleep. But enjoying of the sun warmth and the beautiful views was revitalizing enough.
Noted german type designer Erik Spiekermann made one of the most memorable speeches of the Festival, full of caustic and clever remarks about Design, Typography and other related stuff. He has designed many typefaces of extended use and been part of the team that made the Helvetica Neue typeface. Spiekermann also appeared on documentary Helvetica.
Through the years, he got involved on Web Design. Talking about the never-ending task of making websites, one of his more retweeted phrases last Saturday was “Websites are always in Beta”. After a long and successful trajectory and near to retirement, he has started a new project, the gallery and letterpress workshop P98A , mixing tools and techniques from wood types to laser cut plates. Having spent a good amount of his career in front of screens, this is his way of going from bits to atoms.
PostPanic is a Dutch film production company creating visual work for advertising, retail and music industries since 1997. In 2012, they started their most ambitious project, a feature SF film called “Sundays” with awesome visuals. After negotiations with Warner Bros and in order to keep control of the project, they decided to finance it through KickStarter, where they raised more than US$ 50,000. The shooting of the film took place in Mexico City, they reduced costs using heavily Google Maps to find the locations. Helped by a sharing economy project and using technology in a smart way, they managed to make the film they wanted. The film is due to be completed in summer 2014.
By their hand, ManvsMachine explained their wide experience as innovators in the advertisement domain. Big clients as Nike, X-Box or Channel 4 have asked them for their inventiveness and wit. For instance, in the case of Nike they have developed an impressive advertisement campaign using techniques as 3D Scanning: in particular, in the advertisement for Mercurial sneakers they have created a complete marble statue from a 3D Scanning of several footballers, for a maximum reality effect. Also, they have remarked the importance of physical effect on the More4’s branding campaign, where they have developed big rotative structures. As they explained during their talk, even if they could have done it with CGI, they longed-for the “real effect”. Here the making-of the video for More4.
Roots Stage closed with the amazing technological innovations packed in new Arcade Fire’s music video clip “Reflektor“. Their creators: Aaron Koblin, Vincent Morisset, Caroline Robert and Édouard Lanctôt- Benoit explained the creative process and technical developments involved to accomplish it. We will go back to Aaron Koblin soon to post on his recent presentation in Big Bang Data.
And suddenly we realized that this was the end of our OFFF 2014. During three days, it has really turned us on. An awe-inspiring bunch of creators explaining openly their ideas, experiences and believes: the best possible feed for curious minds willing to make things.
It really attracted our attention the recurrent argument about re-taking the physicality of creative experience, combining digital and analogical tools in the more efficient way. Designers, illustrators, programmers joined their efforts to develop genuine experiences which transcend the simple shallowness of technical bragging. In that sense, OFFF 2014 can be considered truly a postdigital fest.
The festival was so dense and nourished, that it needs some later digestion. So, we are preparing a couple of “pills” to synthesize the experience: we will publish soon a couple of extra posts, featuring our <<Top 5 OFFF14>> and covering interesting things we saw outside of the stages: our <<Off-OFFF>>. Stay tuned!
PostDigital Node
Postdigital Node 