D&AD festival was a great experience, for a bargain student price of £50 (and £6 return to London)! The three day event hosted at the Truman Brewery on London's Brick Lane hosted a wide variety of creative design professionals, all ranging in creative backgrounds and tools of communication. The program initially grabbed my attention when Stephan Sagmeister was announced, as well as others including Vicki Ross whom I've been following for a while, Mike Rigby, Craig Oldham and Marina Willer to name a few. The worlds top agencies had representatives to share their advice, with well stricter and highly considered topics of interest for them to all discuss.
The D&AD festival was over three days, all structured into individual days with corresponding talks. Tuesday's theme (25/04) titled 'The Earth Will Shake' is a day of questioning and responding to the big issues our world faces. Day 2, Wednesday 26/04 was titled 'Staring at the Sun', exploring the shifts in technology with this day dedicated to innovative thinking, with creativity predicting and adapting to change the whole sector. The final day's concept (Thurs 27/04) was 'Outrageous Magic', focused on exploring exceptional craft and "painstaking detail", which goes into the campaigns and design for maximum success. This day composes of designers, photographers and writers to all share their experiences from many different sectors, accumulating in a networking event and exhibitions at the end of the festival.
The festival had three main stages (Adobe, The Brewery Stage and Hub 10) hosting all manor of speakers, yet there was much more going on at the festival other than just discussions. Creative networks such as Sky+, Adobe, Instagram and Shutterstock all had their own sections, offering interactive elements, ways to engage the audience and be seen on social media. There were masses of companies there ranging from traditional graphic design and screen printing workshops, to workstations where we could experience Virtual reality or relax and watch movies about the creative industries. The advertising trust also had a stand and I managed to speak to lots of people there, getting many business cards I will follow up on when returning from London. As well as this, fringe events featured even more speakers in venues all across London featuring even more talks, workshops and Q&A's.
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Looking down on the Adobe Stage- the venues got extremely busy for many talks so to be sneaky, preplanning was needed to get to the front for those anticipated speakers. |
Three day ittinary:
The three days were not enough time to get around everything, and see every talk I wanted to, there was so much on offer and I would definitely go again! The whole atmosphere was extremely creative and engaging with discussions and opportunities for networking all around.
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