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 three of a three part series. Read Part One | Read Part Two.
Photos by Ben Landau (The Design Droplets Photographer).
Day Three
Werner Jeker. A renowned Swiss graphic designer, Werner’s presentation was extremely entertaining and energetic. It was especially helped humorous owing to the fact that he played largely on his non-command of English to get laughs out of the audience. His work was interesting, although I feel he presented far too much of it. All the way from the start of his career in 1980 through to today.
Stephan Banham is a typographer from Australia. Thus he talked about type. Mostly about his fascination with giant type and about several pieces of his work. Not much more to say really.
Robin Eley an Illustrator based in Adelaide, Australia. His talk mostly focused on his struggle to become a creative. It was very much here is my work. He is a lecturer at the Uni of South Australia. There must have been some of his students there, as each time he said about 5 words there was a lot of groupie style screaming emanating from one area of the auditorium. He does some great work though and has some big name clients including Time Magazine.
Richard Hoare is an Industrial Designer from Breville Australia and was one of the speakers I was looking forward to seeing speak. Unlike some of the others I had been anticipating I was not disappointed. How many other designers have plugged a home modified $14.95 electronic keyboard into a $50,000 speaker system in front of 2000 people and played crazy frog? Apart from that the only other note I have down was that he showed some work by another designer – Theo Jansen – Beach Animals. He did show a lot of Breville products, their in-house 3D printer and spoke very very briefly about how they collect insights to produce innovations like the button on the toaster labelled ‘A bit more’.
Campbell Milligan & Chris Searl (Monster Children) unfortunately these two didn’t present so well. They spoke mostly about why they started their magazine Monster Children, but didn’t really give much insight into challenges or process. The one piece of information I do remember from their talk was don’t put nudity on the front of a magazine unless it is a pornographic magazine or you want it to be wrapped in plastic – apparently they landed themselves in trouble a few times over this.
Trevor Choy, of Choy Lawyers – Australia’s premier Intellectual Property specialists, did an excellent presentation on the basics of copyright law by presenting a case study of one of their clients. One of the most interesting points he made about copycats of products etc… was that “the majority of copies are originated in Australia.” He had some other great pieces of advice including – “imposter’s are inevitable”, and “prevention is better than a cure”. He also shared his basic methodology for dealing with copycats.
1. Keep watch on the market – so you know if someone copies you.
2. Move Quickly – collect evidence, get samples, photograph, talk top sales people.
3. Protection is vital - get the trademarks and patents in place early on.
You can check out Trevor’s blog here.
Luca Missoni’s talk was presented via a skype link as he was unable to attend the conference. It was reasonably well done considering, although content wise not particularly interesting.
Bradley Eldridge and Ashley Ringrose are the founders of SOAP Creative an Australian Digital Agency. Apart from not only having awesome business cards (everyone at the company has a business card featuring their superhero alter ego) and their own beer brand (SOAP Beer) which they send out to clients at Christmas time (makes me really want to be a client), they did an awesome presentation on building a culture in a creative studio.
So the key tips (and things they actually do) I wrote down from their talk were:
1. Create tribe (I think they might have been busy reading Seth Godin).
2. Have weekly studio BBQ’s on Friday’s.
3. Have weekly football (soccer) matches (substitute football for your studios prefferd sport).
4. Celebrate Anniversaries of when employees joined the company (not birthdays).
5. Have a team bootcamp fro bonding expereinces outside the office.
6. Get a shared office Flickr account.
Tony Prysten from melbourne’s Igloo did an interesting talk. He talked about many various aspects of the design field. Some key points from his talk were:
There are 4 kinds of Jobs
creative freedom – low budget
creative freedom – big budget
no creative freedom- big budget
no creative freedom – no budget
Tips for success in creative fields
1. Work Hard.
2. Don’t stop learning.
3. Evolve
4. Listen – “You’ve got two ears and one mouth – So shut the F**k up!”
5. Brand yourself/Sell yourself.
What he looks for in people he hires
1. Quality of a person.
2. Enthusiasm.
3. Ability to work together.
What he looks for in folios
1. Quality of Ideas
2. Prolific & Diverse
3. Great Sense of Design
“If Ideas are the new currency, then digital is the new economy”
Tony Gorseveski is a creative photographer. Personally I don’t like his photographs and the poor guy had obviously never had to present to more than a few people at one time as he was so nervous it wasn’t funny. He stumbled his way though his talk, which frankly I couldn’t understand a word of. Hopefully he has grown from the experience and next time he presents at something like AGideas his speaking will be much better.
Jane Prior from Foxtel gave a talk on broadcast design. It included a fairly substantial amount of her work which she used to illustrate various changes a particular brand she had worked on. She also talked largely about Illustration in broadcast media. She gave some examples of her inspirations such as the book Ralph the Rhino by Tony Edward. Some key quotes from her talk were – “You need to evolve to stay fresh”, being creative is about “making sense of chaos”, “flexibility is important for branding” and “simplicity is a key element” in design and creative endevours.
The is only one word to describe Harry Pearce’s talk. Phenomenal! Harry is a partner at Pentagram in the UK and I seriously wish I had taken a voice recording or video of his talk…although if I had I might have Trevor Choy after me! Hopefully, one day in the near future AGideas will make all their talks available like TED. I was so engrossed in listening I didn’t take many note on his talk, but some key quotes from it are, “collaboration promote growth” and “leading a creative life is such a profound privilege”. Also really interesting is that he records his dreams in a dedicated diary – notes and pictures and this has had a profound impact on his work. He also suggested two books -The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher
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