Category: <span>Culture</span>

Another bumper sticker day with a marvelous line up. So to decode some of my mangy scrawl (because it’s pretty dark in Hamer Hall when you’re up in the audience):

Highlights:

Marina Willer -graphic designer, shared some pretty interesting branding outcomes quite inspiring especially in regards to letting brands be more versatile, she also had some nice comments on work and play and doing jobs close to your heart

Paul Garbett (Naughty Fish) – graphic designer, really enjoyed where he was coming from in showing how collections and objects under-girds some of his work and also his comment on digging into your background and replenishing that lot of experience and not treating it as an everlasting source. I am jealous admiring too of their lovely work. If they weren’t Sydney based I would aspire to work there.

Scott Schuman/The Sartorialist – surprise guest and a blogger! Oh I was happy. Admittedly I’d never heard of the blog… must travel in the wrong circles (fashion not really being my primary interest) but I love his approach and he had some great take away stuff about blogs and point of view and finding the right audience not the biggest one and the potential in blogs for portraying a brand (ie. self) and also about the evolution of input through blogs. The only really sad thing is that he uses blogspot…

Stanley Wong – a very well known designer from Hong Kong some glorious philosophical stuff, comments on ‘staying local’ and designing for social impact and in an alternate field: justice.

Tobias Frere-Jones – a typographer (one of) who designed typefaces like Gotham which was used for the Obama ‘Yes We Can’ campaign, he shared the stories about the development and reasoning behind it, and the Martha Stewart font. Twas marvellous, got the biggest clap. And he totally looked like a Tobias. I like it when people fit their names.

the others also worth a brief mention:

Philip Millar – a puppeteer of dinosaurs (from walking with the Dinosaurs) and movies like Charlottes Webb (think Pig), it was good fun, quite left of field

James Hackett – the guy who worked on animations for title sequences like the Gruen Transfer and Enough Rope… again very enjoyable presentation

Milton Watkins – I was pleased to see that AGIdeas threw a bookbinder in our mix, he was somewhat hilarious and injected some kind of heightened admiration in me for the craft – and evern more so helped to probably lift the glug in my mind associated with trying to track down people who can turn computer work in to reality, a chore sadly made more difficult by living in the Eastern suburbs.

(and there were lots of other good ones besides those listed)

Something I was thinking about today in listening to those around me was (excuse the crappy drawing, the Wacom is new to me, it’s late and I drew it very quickly) is seed vs swing:

And seed vs swing… is knowledge vs. experience. As I listen to some of those around me (and I’m sure it’s a small percentage – but could very well be true of Gen Y) and their comments on which speakers they’ve enjoyed, I wonder if they’re (and myself at times) care more about the experience over the knowledge on offer and that knowledge itself actually plays far less of a role than it should. We kind of assume the knowledge is there (like the tree) and swing off the experience of the conference and the speakers, instead of grasping that start (the cliched seed… which is what that sprouty thing is meant to be) that small birth of inspiration or wisdom or insight. And that friends is as far as that thought has gone.