We took the car on Sunday and went to the Graphic Design Festival Breda (#GDFB). It was a city event where different artists, graphic designers and illustrators could show their take on graphic design.
As a creative director I deal with graphic design daily but often find myself in close quarters, so if there's an opportunity seeing design work from a broad group of people, I'll take it!
This years theme was "Green is out, empathy is in". Apparently designers got inspired by the financial crisis. The event had poster exhibitions, workshops, lectures and installations.
It was nice to see some fresh work and just wonder into a couple of galleries!
Below some of the highlights:
Interactive poster (see my previous post)
Start, finished, DEF (different designers talked about their process in commercial work and how satisfied they were with the end result)
Interactive fabric installation (visitors could send a text and the machine would print some graphic symbols)
Although the theme was a nice idea, it made me chuckle that guys with 1,500 dollar brand new Macbooks and 300 dollar glasses wanted to make a statement against the financial crisis.
Besides that, there was the amount of commercial work; which was close to zero. For someone in the digital marketing industry like myself, I would have looooved to see more mobile and web design and the process involved. Instead I got a whole lot of meaningless paint splatter on canvas. Don't get me wrong, I love a bit of creative mojo jojo at times, but the mix was just off.
If you ask me what I got out of #GDFB, I would say that it motivated me to do more illustration (again). For that reason alone, I'll definitely go next year!
