Marion and I (Jason) attended the Reasons to conference in Brighton. We were able to get a flexi-pass so we could legitimately pass the lanyard back and forth depending on the session.
A full schedule is available. This conference is a healthy mix of “Design, Code and Create” as their site says. I managed to get to the conference for all 3 days; usually attending for a half day.
The highlights for me, and in no particular order, were:
Joshua Davis – An American designer with a love for creating art with code like Processing and ProcessingJS. I’m not the most creative person when it comes to sketching so using mathematics and java or javascript to produce art is very appealing. I can blame the maths if it doesn’t look good. I heard about Joshua Davis when looking for new courses or things to learn. Joshua Davis is a shy, retiring person and didn’t want to say too much on stage. After mentioning people he’d worked with: Nine Inch Nails, Pharrell Williams, Kiran Gandhi and the Superbowl he showed us one of the music videos featuring his work.
(All the stuff in the background is Joshua’s work)
Seb Lester is a designer; most famous for his Calligraphy videos which trended a lot last year. This talk was essentially a biography. An off-handed remark during an interview led to Seb designing logos for space missions
Eva-Lotta Lamm attempted to show us how to sketch. See above about my sketch skills; I think I can do a fox and a banner.
There were lots of talks which were a little more serious and more technical on topics such as Music in VR, What the movies taught us and a chance for anyone to try an elevator pitch to over 1000 people in the Dome.
The Reasons to opening credits were also quite fun to watch.
Reasons to: 2016 – Opening Titles – Mike Brondbjerg from Reasons to on Vimeo.
and for me (Marion) the highlights were:
Gavin Strange, Aardman designer, freelance designer & creative, a lover of pink with more energy than a deep fried mars bar.
Gavin talked about his work at Aardman as a senior designer, his own project the Jam Factory as well as his latest project, with his wife Jane, Strange.
As a lover of all things creative his energy and passion were infectious, and a reminder that with energy and creativity you can realise your dreams, oh and that I should use more animated gifs in my presentations!
Wilfrid Wood, artist, maker of human heads (among other things) and Instagram fanatic. A different style of presentation all together. A quietly humerous style with a characterful twist at the end. Wilfrid described a number of his projects but for me the most interesting was his use of Instagram as a means of sourcing unusual subjects to sculpt and sending those sculptures back to the subjects. You can see more about this project if you follow him on instagram
However there’s also the giant head project….words fail me 🙂
Summing up I would say if you’ve not been to this conference check it out next year as there’s def. something for everyone!
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