Day I

Monday I whent to Kortrijk to get my first demo of CS5 for designers. So Ton Frederiks from Adobe gave us a nice overview of the most important new features of Illustrator, Indesign, Flash Catalyst and Photoshop.

(photo by marc-thiele)

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Perspective grid

As usual in a new Adobe release a lot of small handy improvements were made but What really got my attention was the perspective grid that you can use in Illustrator. You can see a demo of this new feature here at Adobe TV.

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Content-Aware Fill

Also very impressive is the new Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop. In a previous post about the release of CS4 I wrote about an amazing new features called Content-Aware scaling or ’seam carving’. Content-Aware Fill is a quite similar tool because it allows you to remove an image element, and replaces the missing pixels almost magically. This new tool matches lighting, tone, and noise so it looks like the deleted content never existed. The technology is also added to the healing brush. Here is a demo of this new feature at Adobe TV.

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From Indesign to Flash Player

An other remarkable change was made in Indesign.  We all know Indesign as an application that provides precise control over typography and design to create page layouts for print. In Indesign CS5 it is possible  to build interactive documents for playback in the Flash Player using a series of new panels. Here is an introduction to how that should work. Personally I’m a bit sceptic about these additional features. Webdesigners today don’t work with Indesign, so if you ask a print designer to make an interactive document it will not result in amazing top of the bill interactive creations. Adobe probably felt the buzz about online magazines (especially with the coming of the iPad) but forgets that print designers mostly don’t have the education or experience in a digital environment. So in my opinion not the best choice if you want your online magazine to stand out and exploit the opportunities of a digital medium.

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Day II

Yesterday was day II of Multi Mania 2010, hopes were high but the expectations were met!  we started off with a quick overview of Adobe CS5 and a kick-ass talk by Aron Balkan. Here are some memorable quotes of the speakers I went to see. I can only encourage you to check out there blogs and websites because they are all very interesting personality’s.

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Aral Balkan – The art of emotional design

“Worry about the user’s needs not yours, dont drive people crazy!”

(photo by vormplus)

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Geert Coppens – Animated Explanations: Viral educational content

“It’s all about attention!’

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Brendan Ciecko – Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: One Pixel at at time

“Today I’m 22 years old and I founded my company ‘Ten Minutes Media‘ in 2003″

As a true entrepreneur Brendan started designing and developing music websites when he was only 11 years old. In a few years Brendan made sites for a variety of artists in the music industry like Katy Perry, Mick Jagger, Snoop dog, New Kids On The Block, Splash, David Guetta, Lenny Kravitz and many more. His company Ten Minutes Media is a absolute success serving clients like Warner Brothers, Capitol, SonyBMG, Clear Channel, …

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Christophe Rooms – CS5 for developers

Here is a demo of some new features in Flash CS5. It explains the Flash Text Engine, new Text Layout Panels, iPhone App Development, streamlined workflow with FXG support and the ability to import between the Flash tools, Photoshop and Illustrator.

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Branden Hall - HYPE: Combining creativity & code

“Creativity is not a talent it’s a skill!” & “Don’t forget to play, Play is practice.”

Branden is an amazing developer who frequently works with designer-rockstar Joshua Davis and try’s to keep his vision and his work fresh by constantly experimenting with his code. A good example of this philosophy is the HYPE framework a collaborative visual framework developed in FDT and AS3. At Multi Mania he showed us some examples of what the HYPE framework can do. Read more at http://www.hypeframework.org/blog/

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ADNERDS – Kicking ass in advertising land

“Technologie means noting if it doesn’t run on brainjuice”

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Little Miss Robot – Show some f°cking empathy!

“Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer’s, co-workers, suppliers and community”

After showing us some amazing work like the domotica interface for Nico and opera live: Rigoletto & Gaetano Donizetti, the boys of Little miss Robot and there cute mascot tried to learn us an important lesson. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the client and the people around you, so don’t try to make something that only you like.

And they did than in a quite unusual way. They tried to engage the audience into a roll play in witch a client ‘Wimpy the pooh’ (who tries to sell toilet paper to a younger target group) and 3 volunteers from the audience (the creative studio + one senior jury member of cannes) had to improvise to solve problems the sector runs in to every day. It proved to be a serious challenge to get the timid Belgian people to participate but I’m sure everybody in the session was obligated to consider his or her roll in this very important discussion that is going on in our sector.

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.

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!

This weekend (from 13 to 15 March 2009) me and my fellow college’s from Markee whent to Colophon 2009 in Luxembourg a biennial symposium for magazine makers, experts, advertisers, readers and all creatives involved in the world of the independent magazine.

http://magculture.com/blog/

A big thanks go’s out to the PostrMagazine Boys for sending out great party vibes! Here is there picture report and party report.