i’m ashamed to admit that i have never visited the beautiful dutch town of ‘breda’ nor its unique ‘graphic design museum’ before, thankfully this was all rectified last week when i spent several days as a guest & speaker at the graphic design festival 2012, a charming and well organised event that was noticeably lacking visitors from amsterdam, who generally seem to pass on anything taking place outside their own cities walls…
my presentation on thursday seemed to go down well, i deliberately made the slide show too-long (300+ slides = 20 mins.) and to amuse the audience with my own anxieties about talking to an audience on the chosen subject of ‘visual storytelling’
this trendy term is a dubious one to my mind and to prove the point i read aloud from a novel to make the point that:
the most visual form of storytelling has no images your mind creates them itself (no pictures, just words i.e. books, literature) a subject that i feel strongly about as most young designers appear to be dropping reading as an essential (not optional) pastime, a trend i find worrying if true…
although my talk looked chaotic (i crammed in lots of old 80’s guitar music, managed to mention ‘teenage masturbation’ and told a few silly anecdotes) and probably random, i in fact, spent lots of time preparing it and the reactions i got afterwards were mostly very positive: ‘…amazing life story by founder came a long way from lazy boy drawings instead of studying to the head of own studio. Every step was a lesson, every experience was useful…’
the poster i was asked to design was also featured in the open-air exhibition, always nice to see… although there were certainly many much stronger entries than mine, in the 50+ on show
the following day i was appointed as moderator for the talks in the same church i had also spoken in, the audience was notably smaller than previous days, some speakers were fun others disappointing to my mind, still designers aren’t trained to talk so that is no surprise for these kinds of events..
i got a chance to meet many inspiring people during the festival amongst others: danish design talent peter ørntoft who was lecturing before me, i will be posting some more about him later this month
meanwhile here’s a photographic impression of ‘gdfb’ 2012
