AGideas 2009 Review Part 2

I recently spent three days inside Melbourne’s Hamer Hall attending this years AGideas conference, the Southern Hemisphere’s largest design conference. This was my first time attending AGideas (I kept meaning to go in previous years, but either forgot or missed the registration). It was certainly a unique experience. Prior to the conference I was initially planning on doing a ‘live’ coverage of the conference via twitter and on Design Droplets. However this did not work out due to some technical difficulties (a dead iPhone included). And AGideas were not particularly responsive to my requests for some form of media pass (since they have several large media sponsors such as IdN and (inside) – Australian Design Review). Other professional commitments around the conference (in the evening and early mornings) also made it difficult to have time to transfer thoughts on the conference from my diary to Design Droplets. Thus I have decided that the best way to share my AGideas experience and thoughts is through this review style article.

This article is part two of a three part series. Read Part One | Read Part Three

Photos by Ben Landau (The Design Droplets Photographer)

Day Two

Opening Day two of AGideas 2009 was Marina Willer, creative director at Wolff Olins.  Marina’s talk focused around her work for MTV, which was a series of short films she originally created “without any purpose of selling”. However after producing them MTV had her select new music tracks for them and released them as a series of Ads on its network. Marina also spoke about how to maintain creative integrity while working in the commercial world. A great quote from her talk – “Its very hard to do work you don’t believe in and you shouldn’t”.

Phillip Millar from The Creature Technology Company did an absolutely awesome talk. I was so drawn into what he was talking about that I didn’t have a chance to take down any notes. Basically Phillip has been doing puppetry and animatronics for the last 30 odd years. He has produced and operated puppets for many big motion pictures including The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and Charlotte’s Web. His talk revolved largely around creating the anamatronic puppets for Walking With Dinosours Live.

Another Melbourne based illustrator (There seemed to be a lot at the conference), Ken Taylor designs posters for bands such as Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age and Pearl Jam. His work is just mind blowing in terms of detail and use of colour.

James Hackett of Hackett Films is an Australian based film maker and animator whose company has created intro sequences for Australian TV shows Enough Rope with Andrew Denton and The Gruen Transfer. He has this particularly interesting fascination with creating characters in his work that have abnormally large heads, utilizing the general proportions and that babies have between their bodies and heads.

Milton Watkins is an Australian based bookbinder who does not do spiral binding. He does traditional book binding and specialised printing. He also does restorations and has bound a huge variety of books including one from the 13th Century on Witch Craft that was made out of Human Skin!!! His talk was full of interesting pieces of information and it is disappointing he is one of the few people that specializes in this almost lost art form. He was energetic and enthusiastic, displaying his true love for his craft. It was just disappointing that bits of his talk came over as more of a sale pitch than an informative talk.

Tyler Cann is the curator of the Len Lye collection at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Tyler’s talk was highly informative, although a bit dry and as he noted the talk turned into more of an art history lesson than a discourse on how design is difference. He spoke mostly about Len Lye’s work, as oppose to his own since he is a care taker of someone elses work rather than a creator of work. I think his talk was an excellent edition by the organizers of AGideas.

Andrea Innocent is “an artist/illustrator/animator/designer and self-confessed nipponophile and otaku currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia.” Andrea utilises her wokr to tell stories and in her presentation she used her work to tell her story and to communicate some great advice as well. “Don’t be a one trick pony”. “Be flexible, develop”. “Have a strong style.” One of the slides that Andrea presented was titled “Nunchuck skills” and had the following pieces of advice for Designers/Illustrators.

• Draw.
• get together, physically, with other designers to socialise and get feedback on work.
• carry a sketch book.
• give yourself regular projects.
• get a domain name.
• don’t under estimate the power of the interwebs.

Charlton Hill of Public Domain Records and sound design studio Supersonic did a a talk on various types of sound design.

Sean Cummins, of Melbourne based advertising agency CumminsNitro and the man behind The Best Job in the World campaign for Tourism Queensland. Sean’s talk was energetic and fun. It was pretty hard to fathom that he was once a lawyer! He had some great insights to share including – “all creativity is local”, “we need to start telling stories in local voices”, “the idea or insight must be sound” and “find your inner dag” (basically find what makes you unique).

Paul Garbett, creative director of Naughty Fish, a Sydney based graphics studio had some interesting peices of branding and identity work to share. As well as a really great piece of advice – “keep nourishing your creative well”. Basically he was saying that you need to get out in the world, experience things and be inspired by everything. Not just hang out in an office.

Steven Mieszelewics & Nimrod Weis (ENESS) create amazing digital installations. Their presentation was centered around their work, which they showed quite a bit of. Their talk really showed that if you really love something, you can make a career out of doing it. They have done some amazing work!

Stanley Wong, aka anothermoutainman, a graphic Designer from Hong Kong did a very long winded talk which was highly focused on walking the audience through his entire life’s work. Making his presentation quite boring. Which wasn’t helped by his English. One key thing I took away from his talk was – “creative work is about life” – something that I think couldn’t be more true. Another great quote from his talk was – “Some people see things and say why? I dream things and say why not?”

Tobias Frere-Jones, the second half of the type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones that created the font Gotham, spoke about the creation of Gotham and Archer. Unfortunately I had to leave before his talk concluded. What I saw of it was pretty inetresting.

This article is part two of a three part series. Read Part One | Read Part Three.