Last weekend Offset marked it’s 17th year with their annual design conference at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre. Largely design focused content was peppered with great nuggets of information and insights in to some of the biggest campaigns around. Overall the presentations were really engaging often limiting text in favour of strong visuals, making a powerful impact while still getting the point across. You can check out the show reels of different speakers here.
See below for a few highlights that we particularly enjoyed from the weekend.
Rod Hunt: Illustrator
Key takeaways:
- Don’t be afraid to change your style, it’s generally going to strengthen your skills and let you land on the best one.
- Develop your craft – practice as much as possible and keep pushing forward with it. Rod scamps in biro to ensure he has to keep moving forward, it can’t be fixed and reworked, it has to be redone or adapted.
- Indulge your personal interests, they are what sets you apart from literally everyone else. If you’re following trends, you’re already too far behind.
- Design and communication are about problem solving and not a style, so you need to be adaptable to the problem.
- Develop client relationships, Rod Hunt helped create one of Top Gear’s most popular products (Find Stig books) purely out of a place of trust with the client.
- Never work for free unless you get to illustrate a sex theme park.
He also created an interesting campaign for IKEA in Russia whereby he designed an illustration that showcased the personalities of a variety of Russian families. It was a really interesting example of how far you can take a simple idea, incorporating storytelling, design and multi-platform usage to develop relationships with consumers. You can read more about the campaign here.
Lorna Ross: Design director
Lorna spoke quite a lot about healthcare design, she used to work for the Mayo Clinic and talked about how a doctor’s office, outside of a computer and some updated machines, is ultimately the same now as it was in 1950, yet we know so much more about human emotions and need in the healthcare world.
Innovation sometimes is not about making things better, it’s about making awful things less awful – she worked on fireproof bed sheets for beds in children’s hospitals.
She noted that with healthcare, the healing process can be so horrific that people often said “You saved my life but you nearly killed me doing it” and she realised that people need to be supported in a more personal sense, not just a medical sense. Patients didn’t want to know what the Mayo Clinic knew, but HOW they knew it, to make it relative to themselves.
Bruno Magg: Typesetter
Key takeaways:
- We need to design for the lowest common denominator, which in general is a mobile user, and usually an Android user. Bruno also noted that the average age is 35-50 so why are we designing specifically for people with 20/20 eyesight?
- The scientifically proven optimum sentence length is 55-65 character, due to the way our eyes read the shapes.
- Dyslexia has more to do with sound recognition than reading ability. If you can’t recognise the difference between a b and a p, it will never be easy to recognise the difference between bat or pat.
Nils Leonard: Advertising
Key takeaways:
- I need an office to think – no you don’t.
- Creatives are the least open to change – it just needs to make creative sense
- They’re an asshole but they’re talented so… Not acceptable no matter what the talent level
- No one can be excellent all the time but together we can.
- Kill sign off – it gives control, pride and responsibility to every team member, builds trust and allows for greater diversity of ideas.
- Frustration is the greatest motivator so figure out why you’re frustrated and fix it.
- People are paying money to avoid our work – ads. People hate ads but love brands so make ads that don’t look like ads.
Kirsten Lepore: Director and animator
Inspirational work from this designer who did everything from her parent’s basement, showing us we can build good things with small budgets.
Chemistry: Advertising
Key takeaways:
- A good idea is not enough. Add value to the obvious.
- Always do what it says on the brief and ALWAYS read copy out loud (they presented work on the RTE guide that included the line “it’ll make your whole week”).
- Controversy can be a good thing – for example Lidl Ladyball.
- Don’t be cruel when generalising about large groups of people – men on valentine’s day.
Follow on: Get Cancer campaign with Chemistry and Irish Cancer Society:
They brought us through all the various steps and background to their campaign and went into great detail on the casting, locations, direction and style of the creative. Grainne from ICS showcased the reaction to the campaign and pulled no punches with detractors and media commentators dismissed in pretty aggressive terms. Ultimately the results were very shallow and no real metrics in terms of outcomes was discussed in this session.
However, they did give interesting insights into the level of trust needed from client for agencies to achieve award winning work. Reports have shown that a 10 year relationship is needed before clients will trust work that is brave enough to win high level awards, highlighting the importance of client/agency relationships and the importance of long term thinking.
Interesting too in light of the subsequent advertising authority ruling that some of the teaser ads broke regulations.
Kelli Anderson: Interactive designer
Kelli created a really good, disruptive campaign to challenge people’s acceptance of current events. Kelli and her team created a newspaper in the exact Times template but with good news in every section and handed them out in New York and watched people react to the good news in a confused manner because people are so used to bad news constantly. Create the reality you want to show people the issues with current events.
Project Twins: Illustrators
These guys have done some really amazing work see their portfolio here. They talked about the creative process looking to identify tensions through clichés and scouring the internet to come up with concept inspiration before bringing it to life in their signature style.
They’ve collaborated with people from Facebook to editorial magazines like Which as well doing installations in schools but in each of these pieces of work they’ve explored the clichés inherent in the story and produced work with just the right amount of tension and depth.
Mirko Borsche: Graphic design
One of the big names in European design – whilst a lot of his work wasn’t for me his show-reel was superb check it out here. He also talked about how its ok to fail – they once produced nearly 500 versions of a design for a client only to see them decide to go with another agency
Food for thought:
- Pitching is the devil’s business, that’s why he has a pitchfork.
- Make art – take pride in what you produce and try add a personal flare. It’s important to develop your own style of work and skills and make time for this.
- Collaborate – use members of your team to collectively share ideas and push your business.
- Failure leads to learnings – learn from these and move on.
- Ephemeral storytelling – storytelling will be about creating stories based on what brands do rather than what they say with customer experiences of brands trumping the message the brand wants to portray
- Hourglass brands – customers today crave a clear identity and purpose, brands will no longer be rewarded for being everything to everyone.
- Blurred reality – mixed reality is becoming more mainstream with brands embracing a combination of all types of reality, not solely engaging in single enhanced reality experiences such as VR or AR.
- World on wheels – as automatic cars are rolled out, vehicles will become communication hubs powered by multiple devices.
- Me, myself and AI – increasing use of AI by brands is expected with those who manage to crack the emotional intelligence aspect standing out from the crowd.