New OFFF brand - contest

OFFF is the process to do a global rebrand to OFFF Festival and has decided to give you the opportunity to send your ideas.



This is a big step for them and they would love to have you all involved in some way on this process.

To make it more fun and spontaneous, you only have until next Sunday 5th September 2010 to send your idea/concept.

What OFFF needs is:

- New Logo for OFFF (with a solution to include subareas like "OFFF Logo + Atelier", "OFFF Logo + Ontour", or "OFFF Logo + F.C."), vector format.
- New tagline (no more Post-Digital Creation Culture).
- A quick sample of identity cards.

OFFF will select at least 50 proposals that will be included in the next OFFF Book Project to be published by Indexbook next June 2011 and of course only one will have the opportunity to be "the one".

OFFF 2010 - Skill Lab aftermath

OFFF 2009

Unfortunately I will miss this years edition but I suggest many of you to join me in tracking the event online as OFFF is a magnificent event.
Computerlove is looking for people to report from the OFFFestival in Oeiras (May 7-8-9). So if you're going and you're an enthusiastic blogger with something to say about graphic design and interactive applications you might wanna consider contributing to the CPLUV+OFFF blog.

Check inquiry here



Since 2001, OFFF is exploring software aesthetics and new languages for interactive and visual expression.

Every year, the festival features digital artists, web and print designers, motion graphic studios and avant-garde electronic musicians. But OFFF is more than an event about any of these disciplines. More than a design conference, a multimedia trade fair, or a digital animation festival. OFFF is an enthusiastic celebration of a new visual culture.

From exercises in interactive synesthesia that excite all our senses to stage performances made of lines of computer code. All this, and much more, is shown every year at OFFF; one of the essential meeting points for the international scene of postdigital creation.

Past participants in OFFF include legends of graphic design and visual communication like Neville Brody, Tomato, Kyle Cooper or Stefan Sagmeister; acknowledged software artistssuch as Jared Tarbell, Lia, Casey Reas & Ben Fry, or Daniel Brown; innovators of the moving image like We work for Them, Tronic Studio, D-Fuse or Renascent; explorers of advanced interaction like Soda, James Paterson, Amit Pitaru or Craig Swann; and the most important names that have defined the aesthetics of the experimental and creative side of the Web: Joshua Davis, Yugo Nakamura, Hi-Res!, Josh Ulm, or Erik Natzke. The festival has also a special spot for the main names in the Spanish scene (Area3, Vasava, Innothna, Cocoe, Dani Granatta, La Mosca...) and for creators of surprising new kinds of sonic landscapes: Tujiko Noriko, The Vegetable Orchestra, Sutekh, Taylor Deupree, System, Daedelus, Stephan Mathieu, Kenneth Kirschner...

OFFF is spreading the work of a generation of creators that are breaking all kind of limits. Those separating the commercial arena from the worlds of art and design; music from illustration, or ink and chalk from pixels. Artists that have grown with the web and receive inspiration from digital tools, even when their canvas is not the screen.

OFFF Report

Click the OFFF-header to display all OFFF reports on this blog.

VIDEO & PHOTO

The OFFFestival was held at the CCCB. A cosy marketplace was the friendly host for arriving designers, check the video

PROGRAM

10 may 2007
12:30 » Sagmeister and Curtis
13:30 » Bestiario
16:00 » North Kingdom and Goodby Silverstein » extra link
17:00 » Mario Klingeman
18:00 » Stamen
19:00 » The Barbarian Group » extra link
20:00 » Futurefarmers
21:00 » Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson

11 may 2007
12:30 » OnClick
13:30 » No-Domain
16:00 » Unit9
17:00 » Graffiti Research Lab
18:00 » Motion Theory and Josh Nimoy
19:00 » Raster NOton::Alva NOto
20:00 » Raster NOton::Alva NOto
21:00 » Joshua Davis & Neville Brody

12 may 2007
12:30 » Promsite
13:30 » Onionlab
16:00 » MotionGraphicsPanelTalk
17:00 » MotionGraphicsPanelTalk
18:00 » Universal Everything
19:00 » James Victore
20:00 » John Maeda
21:00 » Takagi Masakatsu

There are some videos uploaded here

OFFF interview

The OFFF-posts i wrote during the OFFF-festival will soon be online and published, they're awaiting some moderation for the moment. Anyway some girl interviewed me during the fest.. Yihaaa
→ It's over at TAGR.TV

OFFF 15 - James Victore

12 may 2007 at 19:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

15. JAMES VICTORE

Starting of handing out stickers that read "advertisers think you're stupid". Then talking mostly on what he is known for, posterdesign and soem of his projects working on surfboards. Furthermore a very funny but yet good speaker, teaching graphic design next to his work as a designer.
James Victore Inc is an independent design studio hell-bent on world domination. We strive to make work that is sexy, strong and memorable.
James Victore is the most furious designer of his generation; his work is extremely crude and direct, and he never has problems to raise uncomfortable questions. He likes provocation enough to often declare that graphic design is not too interesting, although his work is one of the best arguments against this. In his covers, illustrations and posters, Victore make a direct call for us to take a position and do something for the most basic political and social conflicts. His presence is an appeal to the power of visual communication, and one ofthe greatest surprises of OFFF07.

OFFF 14 - UniversalEverything

12 may 2007 at 18:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

14. UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING

Math Pyke, former Designers Republic, working now from his studio in the backyard. Working for MTV, Nike, Nokia, Audi. Cooperating a lot with Robert Hodgin & Karsten Schmidt (processing) for motion and installationprojects. Next thing up is an interactive installation for a Nokia Flagshipstore, wanting to make the store react or respond to messages send to it when it's closed overnight. Cool! The processing opens a lot of doors other programs cannot handle because of the intens rendering issues. They worked a real cool ad for Audi working the processing, a motion-post production company bailed out for, check it
There's also Advanced beauty == a laboratory for audio-visual research.

OFFF 13 - MotionGraphicsPanel

12 may 2007 at 16:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

13. MOTIONOGRAPHER

A curatorial space... If its' not online it's hard to get inspired by. There's a whole lot on motiongraphics, at mographwiki. There are a lot interviews and links at motionographer, so do go check it out. The first incarnation of motionographer was Tween, by Justin Cone. Motionographer doesn't make motiongraphics but it publishes, only, it's a platform. 20 to 30K visits a day! (rss feeds axcluded) the curatorial role is where the core of motionographer is. But most important is; what is motiongraphics? A mixture of animation, design and visual effects. An important trend is that print is slowly overtaken by motiongraphics. Time sugggests narrative, narrative suggests persuasive.. and it is the most relevant medium at the moment. Justin did some motiongraphics for Creative Commons » you're building the past right now. He sees it as visuals essays, with the goal of letting people know what it is and raise the interest to go and check it out, there's a lot of stuff there » check this, "Next industrial revolution"

.BIS BUCK

Talking about the importance of filtering, filtering impulses on the street, message that flood the mind daily, and narrative is a key to stick into the filter of most minds because basically you're telling a story. Always trying to get to the heart , the essence compiling as short as possible because most work is intended to play on USA channel (max30sec) and again the imhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifportance is the narrative. But at first it was meant to be only for the web, later on for nightbroadcast in the end it played at 9 o'clock in the morning, so scripts had to be rewritten, a lot.
Working for TvLand » all designed to create an emotional response.
And on » lateron changed names, a marketingcampagne for XionXB car...
The tower of Granville is a fantastic animation by them.They are also the motiongraphers of the animation in "An Inconvenient truth".

» Extra RE*NASCENT was here as well! and we did a movie with 3D glasses == cool! yeah ;p It was the Re:fresh OFFFestival presentation.

OFFF 12 - Joshua Davis & Neville Brody

11 may 2007 at 21:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

12. JOSHUA DAVIS and NEVILLE BRODY

Two of the most influential designers from the last twenty years, one on paper and the other one on the screen, sit together to converse about the great questions that serve as motto for OFFF 2007. Which is the true power of design in the world nowadays? Which should be its priorities? What things are really important, and which we could miss for ever? A stimulating dialogue in search of new ideas and urgent solutions for the most immediate crises. Davis is definetely the clown of the evening, but also known as a good codewriter and designer.

OFFF 11 - Frank Bretschneider

11 may 2007 at 20:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

11. FRANK BRETSCHNEIDER, with OLAF BENDER of Alva NOto and raster Noton

Created in Chemnitz in 1998 by Frank Bretschneider, Olaf Bender and Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto as a result of the fusion of the seals Rastermusic and Noton.Archiv für ton und Nichtton, Raster-Noton is one of the most respected houses in the scope of the vanguard music. In his almost ten years, the German record has managed to extend its publishing nature to become synonymous of an unmistakable aesthetic, cradle in a conception of the electronic art that is translated in audio-visual exercises of austere but constructed appearance on structures of an overwhelming geometric complexity.
In their conference-performance in OFFF 2007, the three founders of Raster-Noton will expose the formal and conceptual matrix of their individual works as both their individual works and the common denominators that are shared by the set of artists who collaborate with the Germanic record house.

OFFF 10 - Motion Theory

11 may 2007 at 18:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

10. JOSH NIMOY

First a small walkthrough of his work as a kid and an artsstudent. Starting of with Windows95, in 1996. Working allready with BASIC backthen, you can understand this guy has a firm scripting background. But he didn't really like being in the art-department, because they didn't like digital work at all, o he switched to the designdepartment. Working with Shockwave in 1998. Interactive pieces in 1999, hanging around at MiT, working with ACU, jT2 working with openFrameworks. Developping
Textension this is 1999 !! » what more can we metaphorise when we work with a textlayout interface. Worked with Aftereffects but quickly got back to doing the same work with doing coding and programming. Make a fair deal of plugins for MAYA, a plugin with Python for Illustrator,... noting shortly what HECTOR does with javascript for his spraycan-installation. Attended UCLA, doing interactive installations with sensoring devices and videowalls, and lateron NYU.
Working now Processing-renders for MotionTheory

OFFF 9 - GraffitiResearchLab

11 may 2007 at 17:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

9. GRAFFITI RESEARCHLAB

They started off in a coding and hardware lab, everything they do is free to use for everything and everyone. They were worked into the hacker-community. With the high interest in technology and both graffiti (or anything that happens in the public sphere without permission) so that evolved into there projects. They see graffiti-artists as publicspace hackers.
They made a hack in for CounterStrike, and they really try to band hacking and streetart — the underground will become overground and they will tear the city apart.
Led Throwies: the story of an open-source perspective.
Magneties, are magnets into ties, and brainstorm way with LED throwies, there giving a workshop on it. (Playing the audience and creating a community beyond a really simple material wrap) It are wrapped LED which you can throw onto objects and vehicles..
Ward & Pat Cunningham's Throwie tackle.
Sustainability is the keynote of the group. They work with the AntiAdvertisingAgency and also Art Rotterdam, for a laserproject. They took over the INGbuilding with a lasergraffiti, and after released some code openSource for other people to work with it » C++ libraries at openFrameworks.
And the mobile broadcast unit has arrived in Barcelona!

OFFF 8 - Unit9

11 may 2007 at 16:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

8. UNIT 9

Trying to get emotion into the content. In recent projects they'll focus on the process of the work.
Adobe: The Creative Mind (with Goodby and Silverstein, where Adobe is client)
» It's all about being inside the creators mind... talking to designers which allowed the navigation to go more experimental and get away from the obvious. It's about getting ionto a mental space, an amorfous site. Thrying to storytell how a creative process can be formed, but translated into a feeling you get by browsing the site and still give the content about the product a platform to present itself. The monkey is the main character (also t-shirts are maid of this host-character) He's a main navigational element, he's let's say the help-character » the backbutton. A moodboard was madup to capture the possible mind of the targetted audience. But off course a thourough testing for clarity was necessary/essential. The storytelling is only later-on merged with the overall interaction, and also there's a lot of randomstates added to the project. But the most important aspect was the linearity of the whole story. Not to forget the importance of the sound.
Foster Farms
At first the chicken-puppets from the commercials had to be used but that would never get as far as the impact of the puppets in tv. So they decided to construct them in 3D (using Maya fur-package). Trying to get the same feel of them, they were struggling to get them resemble the same but first setting them into motion with simple models. The idea is the chickens are trying to get into the farm, but the secret is they never will. an oldskool game amuses the audience but the chicken gets fat and goes down.
V-festival (Virgin mobile festival)
The idea was to get it audience on the site long enough to get the commercial message (hey it's aVirgin mobile festival site) because most people play the game and stop after having some fun... Go there and type PICKLE, it's a hack you'll get some extra's.

OFFF 7 - No-Domain

11 may 2007 at 13:30 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

7. NO-DOMAIN

Ever since Sónar trusted them with the job of creating images to illustrate its best nights, No-Domain has become an essential name in the international VJing scene. But visuals for stage are not the only thing they do; in graphics, TV or sound this team prints its particular seal on every language it approaches.

OFFF 6 - Flight 404

10 may 2007 at 18:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

6. FLIGHT 404

Robert Hodgin is a co-founder and executive creative director at The Barbarian Group. Prior to joining The Barbarian Group, Robert worked as a freelance designer, and before that held positions at Arnold Worldwide and Circle.com.
Since co-founding The Barbarian Group. Robert has focused on pushing the limits of motion-intensive interactive sites. He was the creative force behind some of The Barbarian Group most visually compelling sites, and serves as creative mentor for the Boston office. He keeps an eye on creative production in Boston and New York, in conjunction with Keith, and has been delving deep into processing and java-based programming of late. Robert is also the creative force and programmer behind flight404.com - an interactive, experimental Flash site.
Cooperating with the The Barbarian Group, they started of with a small company in Boston but are spread thoughout in NYC and recently opened in SanFrancisco last week. Influenced by Sachiko Kodama, in looking for magnetism in processing. He designed a lot of cool projects in processing, investigating flocks and particle-movements. Focussing on picking the colorsets carefully and not letting maths take care of the picking. Check www.inthemod.com, but all this is "just in the frame of experimenting".
Magnetosphere is his most famous and coolest project, digg his blog for more. This shit is SUPERHOT!!

OFFF 5 - Stamen

10 may 2007 at 18:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

5. STAMEN

Despite of their long trajectory (the machine to paint in Flash Splatter is already a classic), the work of the Californian study Stamen has received greater attention recently thanks to their innovating projects for Web 2.0 in which they use all class of data flows, from the GPS coordinates of taxis in San Francisco to the 911 calls in Midwest USA. Lead by Eric Rodenbeck and with talents such as Tom Carden and Ben Cerveny, their most ambitious project so far is perhaps Digg Labs, the experimental zone of the popular news social service, where the frenetic activity of the members of its community can be followed in real time.
There's very few input from this lecture because I was broadcasting the whole session to Nathalik.

OFFF 4 - Quasimondo

10 may 2007 at 17:06 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

4. MARIO KLINGEMANN

From Munich, takes a great deal of fun in creating completely but random bitmap filters, like this one.
Symmetry the easy way; is always preferred but it is just another cheap trick. So don't use symmetry as being your style. any kind of picture no matter how dull, but flip it horizontal and it is cool or so called to be. Anyway an easy program to show how easy symmetry is you can see by viewing TRippr. Mario works with processing a lot, now. He creates so called swirls with the processing.
-Image foam and bitmaps; overlap-bitmaps-test was new in Flash 8, to see if curves conflict. Touch but no overlap and they fill like foam » But why stop with circles? » subversion
» Anavision (Greek for back-and-forth) a application that messes up visuals.
This guy urgently needs to switch working on a macintosh :) anyway randomness is his main focus, and within that lies the fantastic element of surprise - waiting for the moment when all the sudden the randomness creates this most heavenly divine visual, and than it's gone again...

OFFF 3 - North Kingdom

10 may 2007 at 16:00 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

3. NORTH KINGDOM

Founded in 2003, they started off with a Company presentation... Now they are working from in Stockholm. PASSION is there corebusiness, focussing on details - bieng satisfied with only perfectly finished projects, but having fun is big part of the deal too. Anyway they're working a lot for ABSOLUT vodka and Vodafone, they're the creators of that fantastic Toyota minisite, the Aygo decompile minisite, and the Get the glass - game, I allready posted on "Get the glass".
About Get the Glass, they were mostly inppired by the Stella Artois vault game, which was a blistering good onlline-advertising application. With this project they wanted to step away from telling a story nor getting another online tour. Anyway they created the idea of a boardgame and give the message thru the boardgame. (Creative directors and leading people within most advertising agencies are outdated and totally unaware of what is alive online so you can figure it was allready a backbraker to sell this idea to them in the first place). In this case they worked simultaneously with several designers, sending it back-and-forth, a workflow most advertising agencies lack to do, unfortunatly. Ad-agencies will have to change there point of viewing; f.e. they are used to work a copywriter and an art director into a team but they'd never let designers come and go in teamformation..and that's just — stupid. Companies are not fully (enough) integrated yet. For example, the casting of the castle for this project was a jail but the shooting was allready done simultaneously with the modelling of the boardgame... and they didn't match. And as always the modelling guy had to build a new fort overnight.
get the glass was treated as a fully new brand boxcard game for making the game more powefull, a logo the cards, the box itself, characters, the playground - facing the limitations with pattents of PIXAR and such companies, animating the characters, making the real modell into a filmed motion and 3D animation, sequenced into an online application-game that still runs on a standard/modest computer.
» an monstorous but amazing post-production marathon was added to compile the game in the end.

Jorge Calleja is focussing not only on how to work interactive projects but also how to think interactive. He agrees that advertising agencies should credit the designers who actually accomplished the work. Now he's working Goodby & Silverstein and e's convinced that they are the new breath of what modern webvertising is going to be. Remembering that there is always someone better than you, and also that there is no such thing as a group, you're always fighting eachother to get credited yourself but within that lies freedom - but off course how much time of your life and passion are you willing to invest in advertising world. Advertising, broadcast and interactive is leading the new world order within Graphic Design, therefor Sweden is the new leader and that's why they moved there Hyperisland contributes a great deal in this evolution.

OFFF 2 - Bestiario

10 may 2007 at 13:49 — Roots room @ CCCB - BCN

2. BESTIARIO

This guy (Ortiz) was speaking solo Espagnol and I didn't understand a spick bowl of whatever he was saying, except for "interfacias" and "graphico"...
Formed in barcelona in 2006, Bestiario is probably the first Spanish company dedicated exclusively to data visualisation and information representation. Under the creative direction of Santiago and Andrès Ortiz, with an ample network of collaborators and a strong multidiscipinary approach, their "machines to ferment intuition" serve such diverse aims as helping coolhunters map emergent tendenciesin the streets, or constructing the emotional memory of a community through its photographic archives.
Even without understanding a word of what was said I understood the principle workmodel of the project presented, and that off course is essential to the accessibilty and universal compatibility of the project.

OFFF 1 - Curtis & Sagmeister

10 may 2007 at 12:37 — Roots room, CCCB - BCN

1. SAGMEISTER & HILLMAN CURTIS

First bad news is that Sagmeister couldn't make it, bohoee... There was a video-message as an opener for the festival. Well, the thing i remembered from the talk was "worrying solves less". (and aw my ears, they should silence the audio... I've you've read MTIV you can figure a bit the mind of Curtis, he just got off the plain and dropped some acid so, i guess that brakes the ice. He works in SaFran for the moment. He writes books, designes websites and make films.
Hillman is the designer of the YAHOO! homepage, the MetOPera, the Adobe housingstyle 2 editions back
Curtis is here to talk about movies, he doesn't consider himself as a minimalist designer, but yet everything has to be there and do something. Movies are more overall his experimenting.
Started with: creating short films for the web, which is the title of his new book. Rememeber his portret-project, he shot all people who came into his studio and filmed them just blinkcing their eyes.

Project: Artist series
Stefan Sagmeister lives 7 blocks away from Hillman and they were on a shortfilm-travel to Texas. But within this project he also did, Paula Scher, James Victore, Milton Glaser, David Carson, Pentagram and Mark Romanek.
Herefor he'd never bring a list of questions, the meaning was to document the interaction, between, and the conversation.. And they couldn't exceed 7 minutes because it has to be compelling enough to play on the web and people there are on the move, litterally, with the mentals...
The project was meant to celebrate the work of someone that influenced him, but also because the camera gives instant access to the person, of who they are and how they work.
* And guess what; UDP status:Good remote: » perfect Skype webcam connection. if that ain't rock'n'roll. Wanna follow the OFFF on a distance? Skype me, and I'll give you a live few minutes of your fav-speaker :)

Add Grapplica on Skype.