This just really calms me down! Just imagine yourself lying down on the couch and playing this on your big flat screen TV and surround sound system… just beautiful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We al know the classic porcelain sets, my mother and grandma have them and I was never a big fan of there kitsch flower decorations. But I have to change my mind because a design firm in Portugal Cabracega invited graffiti artists Hium, Mar, Mr, Dheo, Quillorama and Tosco to give the classic teapot a great graffiti motif. These two are my favourites but you can find more examples on there website. The pieces were shown at Experimenta Design Lisboa and will remain on view through October 9th at Espaco Zaum in Lisbon.

Since 1 may 2009 Sheena Matheiken (New York) wares the same black little dress EVERY DAY! And see will do this one year long! The inspiration for her project was the fact that she went to a school were uniforms where mandate. She found it remarkable how kids always found ways to make their uniforms unique and personal by hiking up their pants or warring all kinds of accessories.

But of course if you want to ware one dress all year it has to be a very nifty design. Her friend and fashion designer Eliza Starbuck was the mastermind behind this multifunctional dress. It is made of breathable cotton that gets Sheena true the warm summers and makes it easy for layering when temperatures go down. The dress doesn’t have a front or backside she can ware it both ways or even as an open tunic.

By combining the dress with all possible accessories found on eBay, Etsy, local vintage boutiques, thrift stores and flea markets of New York she makes a new unique ensemble every day! Be sure to visit her website and check out all of her inspiring creations.

Her project an interesting fashion experiment but it is also a way to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation, this is a grassroots non-profit founded in Mumbai in 1990 through the volunteered efforts of college students devoted to bringing education to children living in the slums. So don’t forget to give a donation to support the good cause but also to encourage this kind of creative initiatives.

This is the basic dress and today’s ensemble:

On her website you can see every day of the past months or get a nice overview of per month:

Fail gracefully panel:

Leaded by Florian Schmidt and featuring: , Mushon zer-aviv, shual, Aaron Koblin, Joshua Davis and PES. (Alva Noto and Stefan Sagmeister did not show up.) I have to say that Florian tried his best to lead the panel but the sound was terrible, we could not hear a word Mushon Zer-aviv was saying and Joshua Davis has an enormous ego, so he is only a good speaker if it is a one man’s show.

(photo by the offf-team offfestival)

I do liked the solo of Florian Schmitt (from Hi-res) at the start of the panel conversation about how some Hi-res projects were examples of failing failures. so I would like to tell you a bit more about what we learned from him.

This website has an amazing animated navigation and looks great. The whole world is clickable and unfolds itself for the visitor, but it was a beautiful failure because during the making of the site they realised that the client had so much content to put in that the whole concept of making a experience site wasn’t really a good choice.  So in the end of the project they had an amazing website but only few visitors would ever find al the content they needed. See the video 01 and video 02

The next project he showed us where animations on the wall of a store _I don’t remember which store_ the fun thing was that visitors could change the animation by sending an sms with the words ‘water’, ‘balls’, ’snow’, etc. see the example video 01 and video 02. The hole installation worked perfectly and looked great but the problem was that not many people actually used the project. So afterwards the Boys from Hi-res came to the conclusion that the sms system was not really user friendly in this case and that they should have used a big touch screen in the store where people could just press a button to change the wall-animation. Again failing gracefully!

And last he talked about a campaign they made for Agent provocateur to promote the new Collections ‘Sirens’, ‘Virgins’, ‘Pirates’ and ‘Witches’.

And so, Hi-res made 4 stunning movies and an experience site. only to find out that a lot of the visitors to the site where mostly men over 40. But still a fantastic experience site with images that look like scenes from old paintings like the Flemish Primitives.

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SI Scott studio

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really had to concentrate very hard to understand Scott’s extreme English accent and to be honest even when I listen to him again on Youtube I still can’t understand a word his saying! This guy really needs some subtitles. But it doesn’t matter because he  is one of my favourite designers ever! I love how he can just pick up a pen and draw any kind of image in his rich refreshing Rococo style! More work on his website.

(photo by Tartanna)

(live presentation @ offf)

More video’s: Working, interview

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Grey London

did not show up…

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Nerdference Panel

Featuring: Eric Wilhelm, Peter Kim, Gijs Gieskens, Julia Carboneras.

(photo by the offf-team offfestival)

This was a bit to geeky for my taste, so the only thing that I really remember of this talk is the strange music instruments of Gijs Gieskes and esspecialy his hillarieus gameboy bricks!

“Gameboys have the shape of a brick and they are quite heavy (when there are batterys inside the gameboy). Thats why gameboy musicians often call the “gameboy classic” → “the brick”… So this snowballed into me making real gameboy bricks..
The benefit of this gameboy is that it will last much longer than the real one!” (Gijs Gieskens)

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Digital Kitchen

Digital Kitchen came to OFFF to present their newest project for HBO. After making many different Main title movies like Six feed under, Dexter and many more they are know for there expertise, so director Maurice Marable asked them to make the main title for a (new) vampire series True Blood.True Blood.

(photo by TWT Interactive)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Don’t forget to watch the making of!

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Stefan Sagmeister

(photo by r is for rioo)

The presentation of  Stefan Sagmeister this year at off was totally based on his newest book ‘Things I have learned in my life so far‘. And like the title gives away it is a best of version of the experience he has after being in the graphic industry for so many years. I would not take any fashion advise from him because for this presentation he came on stage wearing a dotted dress what triggered quite a reaction from the audience.

Of course his presentation was like always very inspiring. Not only did he share tips to have a happy (designers) life but he also showed a big part of his conceptual work. One of them was the design of the ‘Villek prize 2009’ for ‘Mike Nilhuls’. Instead of just making a nice little statue he thought of a very creative way to make the prize something very personal. If the award is standing up you only see an abstract pyramid form, but when you turn it upside down you realise that the source of the shapes are the letters of the winner’s name!

There was another installation that caught my eye ‘Obsessions make my life worse but my work better’ made out of copper euro coins. It was a very beautiful piece but there was also an anecdote with it. A big group of volunteers and some of the people that lived near the square had worked all day to complete the piece, but in the evening a low-life came by and started filling his pockets with the coins. So the people that lived near the square called the cops to arrest the man. But the funny thing is that to prevent further theft the police just swept up the money and put it in a volt for safe keeping. Very ironic!

But the project that really intrigued me was the new identity for Casa da Musica in Portugal. This very beautiful music building designed by Rem Koolhaas_ has a very specific abstract form. The concerts that are given in Casa da Musica can be very different in music style. So Stefan Sagmeister took 6 pictures of the building from different angles and these formed the base of the logo. To make sure that the logo perfectly blends into any concert poster of any music style they developed a tool that the people of Casa da Musica could use themselves to layout new concert posters. Once they chose a good image to represent a concert the tool can determine the colour of the logo by using a 17 point color-picking mechanism. This way the designer of Casa da Musica can choose from 6 different logo’s that fit perfectly in the poster. Very simple but so ingenious!

Here is a more detailed article about the new identity.

(live presentation & podcast @ offf)

(TED talk 01 & TED talk 02 Stefan Sagmeister)

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Kyle Cooper – Prologue films

Kyle Cooper gave a presentation on behalf of his company Prologue films who made the Main Titles for OFFF this year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Photo by rawmeyn)

Kyle Cooper showed us some of his older and newer work but with little extra interesting info so I would suggest that you visit there website and explore the amazing work of Prologue films yourself. They have al long and inpressive list of projects that they did for famous films and TV shows but the must see projects for me are the opening/closing titles of ‘pushing daisies‘, ‘married life‘ and ‘Ironman‘.

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To rap it up a little taste of the atmosphere at OFFF 2009:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aaron Koblin

‘Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to examine cultural trends and emergent patterns.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

I couldn’t say it better. At OFFF Aaron showed his research in which he uses the Internet as a collective work force. A really funny project is ‘a bicyle built for 2000’ ’ where people were asked to imitate a little sound. Played together this makes a very interesting soundscape of the song “Daisy Bell”, the first example of computer-synthesized vocals.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But besides these collective experiments Aaron also made a videoclip for Radiohead’s song ‘House of Card’s’.
‘Lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience. The code and data are launched on Google Code as an open source “music video without video” project.’ (bron: aaronkoblin.com)

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you visit the website you can even turn the 3D models around.

A MUST SEE is his visualisation of the air traffic in Nord America! (project info page)

“The things you don’t expect are more interesting.” (Aaron Koblin)

(live presentation@offf)

(Aaron @ vimeo)

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Campagne Valentine

Showreel

Click here to view the embedded video.

This rather excentric duo could not convince me with there visual style, but I do want to give you their  website & blog.

(Picture by the OFFF team)

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Robert L. Peters

Robert L. Peters was (together with Neville Brody and Paula Scher) one of the most experienced designers at the OFFF festival. I thought his lecture about the design process was very inspiring and very helpful. Especially his manifest:

“I have not falied 10.000 times, i found 10 000 ways of work that doesn’t work” (Thomas Edison)

“Be a surrogate, dream for your clients” (Robert L. Peters)

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ONESIZE

These Dutch dudes made the ‘Sponsor titles’ for this years OFFF. The result is an amazing combination of live video and CG effects. Step by step they explained the progress of making this movie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(live presentation @ offf)

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PEZ

And then there was PEZ, the one man’s show of lovely stop motion short films. All do Pez never intended to become an animator, he now is one of the best stop motion directors on the field (after Tim Burton that is!).

He made his debut online with his Youtube movie called ‘Sex on the roof’ about two old chairs that have sex on the roof. The anecdote behind the movie is actually that he got the chairs from his parents and when he was little he wasn’t aloud to touch them because they were only used at Sundays and holydays. So when he got them as a gift he thought ‘What would these two chairs would like to do after years of isolation?’

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now many company’s ask him to make commercials for them and with a fairly big film cru he made many different commercials. These are my favourites:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

more fun commercials: Bacardi, Tiktak, sprint, etc…

Of course PEZ doesn’t only make commercials. His most recent shortmovie is called ‘Western Spaghetti’:

Click here to view the embedded video.

More of he’s very entertaining work on his website.

“I try to make people look at objects in a different way” (PEZ)

(live presentation@offf)

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Paula Scher

I heard so much about her but this was the first time I saw her, Paula Scher. This graphic designer is bin around for a very long time, I was still in my diapers when she became a big influence to the graphic industry. The cool thing about her design is  that she didn’t like the clean, Dutch design from her time and started to make images that didn’t have one strait line in them. I just love that philosophy, all do I like the Helvetica, I can’t use it al the time. It is just to sterile.

Of course Paula is one of the old style graphic designer, she likes to paint and she does not have much affection for the computer. But still she has very up to date work and she showed some great examples of that in her presentation:

This project was kind of funny because, they asked her  (Pentagram) to make a new city logo. But they wanted the logo for al the wrong reasons. What they wanted achieve was getting people to go walking, shopping, etc. to a part of town that was on the other side of the highways. You could walk under the highways by using the bridges but those looked absolutely not attractive. So they wanted a new logo but what they got was a painted bridge, but they loved it and the bridges will all soon look like this:

“Citybank was more honest than the art gallery” (Paula Scher)

(live presentatie @ offf)

(TED talk Paula Scher)

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Joshua Davis

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anyone who doesn’t know this dude should look him up online. This true showman can rock a crowd! Few years back Joshua became famous in the multimedia subculture for his random computer generated illustrations. He was and is a big influence and inspiration to many developers and designers. That fact is proven again this year at OFFF because almost every guest speaker has experimented with computer generated designs. You could say that he showed us how to let programming and design flow in to each other.

(foto ©offf-team)

And also this year the charismatic American inspires the overflowing room of 3 to 4 thousant people with new illustrative computer experiments. In the exhibition room there was an installation he made in collaboration with ‘Float 4 interactive’ in which he plays with code, design and interactivity.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vooral het offf thema lag Joshua blijkbaar nauw aan het hart, in dit fragment heeft hij het dan ook over failing gracefully.

(live presentation @ offf)

-

Neville Brody

The first speaker of the day was Neville Brody. This guru of graphic/type/magazine design opened this year’s seminar and this year’s theme ‘Fail Gracefully’ by telling us to free yourself and our projects.  “Damn the consequences!”

Personally I was pleasantly surprised to hear that his studio was behind The beautiful Kenzo campaigns.

(portfolio website)

(live presentation @ offf)

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Multitouch Barcelona

Multitouch Barcelona made a pleading for bringing people and technology closer to each other. By adding some human warmth to their installations they not only make people interact with the screen but also bring people closer to each other. Here you can read the full report on their talk at OFFF 2009. In the main exebition hall you could play a game they made.

In de tentoonstellingsruimte van OFFF kon je ook een door hen ontwikkeld _nogal onconventioneel_ spelletje SPACE INVADERS spelen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Photo’s by Red Bull Music Academy Team, via:Multitouch Barcelona )

“Multitouch Space Invaders searches a new way to interact besides the classical multitouch applications that we’re familiarized to. We wanted to change the vision of typical finger based application to another concept that increases the collaboration with other users. Using balls as inputs versus fingers, the players could play in a totally collaborative environment.” (bron: Multitouch Barcelona)

Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Similar interactief work:

“Designed for the Red Bull Music Academy 08, Guten Touch is an interactive art installation that involves people into a natural relationship with technology. A two projected displays system plus a 3m x 2m multitouch wall showcase applications designed to engage us into human friendly experiences rather than flashy and jaw-dropping visualizations. … Guten Touch is our enthusiastic good morning to natural interaction.” (bron: Multitouch Barcelona)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(live presentation @ offf)

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Karsten Schmidt – Toxic

Karsten Schmidt from ‘Toxic’ took us into his beautiful computer generated world. This designer/programmer frequently teams up with Matt Pyke from ‘Universal everything’ (Concept and Art direction) and together they make many different code generated designs like the wind tunnel for Audi and the monster postcards.

But we already saw those at OFFF 2007 and I was more interested in their new work.
So they repeated their unique postcards idea but this time with colourful computer simulated clothes. The idea was to hang a virtual piece of wire and move the lowest point around. Than they filled in the space the wire passed by with this cloth-like surface.

And of course like I expected someone would do, Karsten and Sascha Pohflepp made the ‘Social Collider’ commissioned by Google for their Chrome Experiments collection, to visualise how memes are created and how they propagate.

An other amazing graphic of a very different kind was this cover he made for Print Magazine. This typographic visual is a picture of a 3D print! After some trial and error trying to fail gracefully they managed to print this extremely detailed sculpture from a computer generated 3D model. I was really pleased to see that 3D printing is becoming a fully integrated medium in our visual culture. This looks like the future to me!

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Eva Vermandel

Eva Vermandel the lady from Sint-Niklaas (in Belgium) who lives and works in London had a very well prepared speech about her photographic work.

Eva Vermandel: “Mijn werk draait om de zoektocht het lineaire terug te vinden in een wereld die zwaar gefragmenteerd is door digitalisering en globalisering. Ik ga tegen het idee van ‘momenten’ in en probeer de onderliggende, doorlopende golfbeweging die tussen mensen onderling en mensen en hun omgeving ligt.”

All do she spoke perfect English I had a hard time understanding her. Probably because I was sitting in a bad spot and the eco in the room was really bad. On top of that she had a rather soft voice, so I can only recommend you to go to her website and let her work speak for itself.

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Jason Bruges Studio

Anyone who likes light, interactivity and architecture should see the amazing portfolio of the Jason Bruges Studio. Jason and his colleague are masters in ‘Visualising the invisible’ in their studio they are constantly experimenting with all kinds of electronics. But besides electronic devices they always use an interactive element to create their installations. This interactive element can of course be the actions or even reactions of people (for example: 02 Memory project, Recall) but for me their most moving installations were the ‘wind tower’ and the ‘moving chandelier’ because they use an invisible force and make it visual in the most unexpected and  a very esthetical way.
The  ‘Aeolian Tower’ installation is actually a building covered by little wind mills. Every mill has a red let light inside that only burns when the wind blows into the mill. So without using any extra electricity the tower lights up like a red northern light.

A similar installation was build commissioned by a law firm who wanted to do something special inside the 8 story high atrium of there building. So Jason and his colleagues made this gouge chandelier of little balls with blue let lights inside. When the wind on the roof blows in to the atrium and the balls in the chandelier start to shake they turn from deep blue to bright white. So if the wind blows harder the balls shine brighter.

The same wind trick was also used in a different installation in the museum for … where big tubes where hanged from the sailing. In every tube there was a ball and when the wind blows over the roof of the building inside the balls go up and down like waves.

I strongly recommend you to visit there website where you can check out all of there work.
Jason Bruges: “We make people think, we don’t give it on a plate”

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U.V.A. (United Visual Artists)

Just after the lecture of Jason Bruges we continued to play with light, interactivity and architecture because next in line there was U.V.A. (United Visual Artists)

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InsertSilence (James Patterson & Amit Pitaru)

Time for something else, InsertSilence did not insert silence! This is what you get if you put a graphic designer and a musician together for to long. This is a story of an idea going musical and visual. After experimenting with James Patterson ‘s illustrations to make code based animations Amit Pitaru felt the need to go back to making music. And because the music he wanted to make was impossible to create with conventional instruments he wanted to make his own instrument. So he created a little but very cool flash tool that make music just by drawing lines on the white screen. How higher your line in the screen how higher the note you get.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course if you don’t know how to play the instrument you find yourself in a dilemma, is this music or is this a drawing? Amit put the tool in different exhibitions around the world and people just draw pictures with it and made horrible sounds. So thinking about these facts made the boys of InsertSilence realise that this tool had an other great potential. So Amit modified it and made a quite unconventional 3D drawing tool out of it. James on the other hand had a great time with it because the tool was the perfect extension for his personal illustration style. After playing around with it and animating his 3D drawings the duo made a very extraordinary looking computer game.

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Chris Milk

The last speaker of this day was Chris Milk.

I have to say that he is just as peculiar, ironic and funny as his work suggests. Chris Milk has a trouble speaking for a big crowd so a staff member interviewed him about his life and work. But during this interview the most bold comments came out of the man’s mouth.
I think he’s work speaks for itself.

http://madebyjulene.com/

A.J. Fosik

Photostream

Gráfica Elbert

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPS cardboard box world

http://www.psyop.tv/
circus & gladiotor

Click here to view the embedded video.

Achter de micro zagen wij als eerste ‘Volstok Telefunken’, Thijs De Cloedt en Wouter Sel de creatieve bedenkers en animators van de motion graphic reeks ‘De monsters‘ (uit Man bijt hond) gaven ons een blik achter de schermen van hun zeer opmerkelijke cut-out-animations. Ze slagen er in ondanks de vlijmscherpe deadlines toch een enorme hoeveelheid zeer kwalitatief werk af te leveren. En dit door de combinatie van video met eenvoudige doch zeer aantrekkelijke character designs. Meer info op www.volstok.com

Daarna hingen we aan de lippen van de fotograaf ‘Reginald Van De Velde’ die ons bekoorde met zijn uiteenzetting over ‘urban exploration‘ (kort: Urbex) en de sappige verhalen die hij op zijn tochten naar de meest verlaten en vergeten plekken van België meemaakte. Zijn motto: ‘Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints’ Wie graag al zijn foto’s wil bekijken kan terecht op de website en flickr account van suspiciousminds.

Een speciale ‘dank je wel’ van Markee gaat uit naar de laatste maar zeker niet de minste spreker van die avond ‘Mike Van Cleven‘. Deze reeds met naam en faam gezegende fotograaf toonde verschillende reeksen uit zijn editorial, fashion, collaborative, personal & commercial werk. Bij zijn uiteenzetting waren we blijverrast om verschillende foto’s terug te zien die in samenwerking met Markee tot stand zijn gekomen. Zijn portfolio kan je ook zelf ontdekken op zijn website.

Alweer een geslaagde Adobe Usergroup meeting!