OFFF. For those of you who don’t know what OFFF is, Here’s a little teaser for you…
They call it a 3 day festival of makers, I’d call it a 3 day conference.
There’s no mud, no drugs, no wellies and no rave tent.
It did however have overflowing toilets, poor to no wi-fi, and a huge queue for the (coffee) bar.
So maybe it was a festival.
It’s been going since 2001 and is run by this guy, Hector Ayuso.
Hector on why he created OFFF:
“What would happen if you brought the Worlds best creative minds together. Not just the best designers, best artists, or the best potters. But every sort of artist and maker. The answer is OFFF: a festival of creativity.” Sounds great right?
Past speakers have included Stefan Sagmeister, John Maeda, Neville Brody, Kyle Cooper, The Mill, Digital Kitchen, Chris Milk, Paula Scher, Rick Poynor, Erik Spiekermann, Erik Natzke, Ze Frank, Alex Trochut, among others.
Cool right?
Well yeah, I guess. if you didn’t already know their work. The problem I had with OFFF, aside from the lack of wi-fi, the overflowing toilets, the huge queue for the coffee bar, and the ratio of boys to girls being 5:1, was that I didn’t really learn a great deal.
Ok. That's a lie.
I did learn a lot.
I learned that ideas come from putting odd things together.
If your reference points are different to others, then guess what, your ideas are going to be different.
We get to interesting ideas by stepping outside our daily thing.
We leave behind what we know for a bit.
So if you code, don’t got to a conference on coding.
If you design, don’t go to a design conference.
So next year I’m heading here… at least they’ll have decent toilet facilities.
I also learned that some people, although great creatives, aren’t great presenters.
Which I am most certainly guilty of.
It doesn’t matter how good your work is, if you can’t stand up in front of people and talk about it, you’re screwed. People zone out.
They check Instagram (if they can get on wi-fi).
This happened with a lot of the talks.
Most of the talks we attended we’re informative, engaging and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
But lacked any real storytelling.
Hardly anyone shared their thought process.
How they came up with their ideas.
What struggles they came up against.
Their failures. Their learnings
That’s the stuff I wanted to hear about.
That’s interesting.
But sadly it was never really touched upon.
It wasn’t all bad.
There we’re some brilliant speakers.
The ones that stood out were:
People like the legendary American Designer Chip Kidd. He had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand.
He took us through some of his rejected work and why it didn’t get through.
Casey Neistat, the American for whom the New York Times coined the word ‘viral’ after he made this video…
Danny Yount and Aaron Becker, the American title designers, took us through the importance of references.
Joshua Davis the American designer/technologist/artist/whatever you want to call him, owned that stage. There’s definitely a theme here.
Americans.
Americans are just more confident, louder and prouder. Ok, there were some great presentations by non-yanks that went down well too.
The brilliantly mental French directing duo Fleur and Manu exuded confidence.
But their work really does speak for itself.
Sadly Fleur couldn’t be there so Manu held the fort, but really all he had to do was say hello and press play.
[video for Gesaffelstein's 'Pursuit' directed by Fleur & Manu]
Erik Spekermann, German typographer with a sense of humour. Yes they do exist.
Erik has created a winch for his library.
I need say no more.
And even a Brit, yes, the effervescent Kate Moross, love or hate her, delivered a colourful and charismatic display of her work like only she can.
And Irish Illustrator and writer Oliver Jeffers. Now the Irish are famous for their story telling, and Oliver didn’t let us down. Also, Oliver’s been living in New York most of his life.
What made these guys memorable was not just what they had to say, but how they said it.
The delivery matters. It always does.
Casey Neistat put it nicely “Ideas are cheap, ideas are easy, I care about execution”.
Rant over.
So what did I take from OFFF?
Go see stuff you don’t understand.
Be more American.
And sign up for a presentation course.
