… and why you should next time too!
So last week, five boys from Kochstrasse and I visited Barcelona and the amazing OFFF festival for the first time. I’ve heard some people talking about it in a positive way, but I was not prepared for the experience we’ve had there during the three days.
I personally went there for seeing big names like GMUNK, Territory, LAIKA, PostPanic, Signalnoise and Stefan Sagmeister, but in the end I was also surprised by artists I run into more or less by accident like weareseventeen, Anton&Irene, Vallée Duhamel, Filipe Carvalho, Rizon Parein and Jon Burgerman.
Instead of going chronologically through all the presentations I saw, I will try to highlight some of the best and begin with my personal favourite: Stephen Simmonds from weareseventeen. What a sympathetic and humorous guy. He talked about the process he and the rest of the London based motion design studio has been going through during the last year. Very refreshing talk in which he revealed his struggles finding the right amount of time for his family and being constantly creative at the same time. He showed some work and their reel and premiered their first short Infinite Horizon depicting the moment when an astronaut sees the whole earth for the first time.
Anton Repponen and Irene Pereyra from Anton&Irene came next (right after the two boys from the UI masters Territory). Besides their work they shared a lot of knowledge and gave us some really good advises such as: Don’t put shit in your portfolio because clients will say “Hey you make shit. We make shit. Let’s make shit together!”. And by shit they mean work that looks great but you don’t like. They were a super team on stage, appealed to our responsibilities and rights as designers and seemed to have a lot of fun on stage.
Julien Vallée was missing his partner Eve Duhamel on stage due to some passport fuck up. But nonetheless he presented a list of more or less useful advises or obstacles for a designer (time is your all-time enemy). The point I found most remarkable was something he called Structured Procrastination: make something for fun during your work time, so you don’t get stuck in your process. A technique we already practice at Kochstrasse but never had a name for. Now we have!
I got impressed by Filipe Carvalhos style and after a sluggish start (compared to other fast paced presentations) he came up with some really good advises: Find a (design) hero and never stop striving after his work until you are as good as or better than he. Than go on and look for your next shining example.
Summing up all the presentations I saw, two things come up to be definitely taken away: Use more gifs and emojis in your presentations! And second: Make the cool stuff during your free time so you still have fun with your job. People and especially clients will see this work and will hire you for this work. Don’t wait till the clients ask you to do cool stuff. Make it now!
Overall the venue beats it all. Enough room for everyone, cool and good located but they have to work on the wifi infrastructure, the chairs on the main stage (Roots) start to hurt after the first day and the smartphone app is well designed but sometimes it forgets some data so you can’t see who is coming up next. The light and sound system was a blast. The foodtrucks outside of the beautiful building were a very good idea to get some food between the talks if you wanted to catch them all. The timing and order of the presentations were really good. So there was enough time to decide if you want to hear the next talk or if you want to take a break.
The festival is not for motion designer, videographers, illustrators, graphic designers or design enthusiasts particularly but it’s for all of them. You can’t get a better value for this low price and the amount of creativity shared with you is overwhelming.
You can buy tickets for next year already over there on their website and I’m definitely wondering if I should go there again.
More photos can be found over at flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/banarne/sets/72157653754880699
Stay young, stay stupid! (man I need that t-shirt so hard…)