Integrated 2009 – 22-23/10/2009

… was great. Together with 500 students, and another 400 designers Bram and I spent 2 days of inspiration and admiration at de Single in Antwerp, a congress of Graphic Design, organized by St. Lucas, Art school in Antwerp. Some of the greatest Designers of our time shared a stage with new talent, showcasing their work and passions.

J.P. Van Bendegem, a Philosopher, broke the ice and brought us from A to B with his lecture about logic. After this journey, we experienced that imagination brings you anywhere else.

Many of the speakers definitely belong to the happy few… Assigned to do work for the music industry, museums, governmental organizations, … etc. This category involves Mevis & Van Deursen, Annelys De Vet, Renaud Huberlant.

Some of the speakers get great assignments, just by mentioning their name, like Stefan Seigmeister, (who can close his agency for one sabbatical year without losing customers!) , Giorgio Olivero (todo.to.it – rolled into graphic design by  doing squat party flyers and is now developing graphical software for every assignment he gets), Storm Thorgerson (who made the most beautiful album covers for Pink Floyd, Muse, Mars Volta, Genesis, …), …

Stefan Sagmeister showed us the relevance between happiness and design. Especially as a designer you have to stay very happy. Only then you can bring good Graphical value to the market. When you start feeling like you’re doing a job, more than you’re answering to your calling… it’s time to close down the company, and get out for a year.

John L. Walters is privileged with his own Graphical magazine ‘Eye’ in which he and his crew can go wild.

When David Shirley was discovered, he was not aware of the fact that his scribblings, based on found stuff like shopping lists, droodles, road directions, …,  were of any graphic value. Publishers and the audience thought differently. So don’t be surprised when you run across one of his conceptual child drawings in graphical literature… and maybe even tattooed on your girlfriend’s hip!

What we heard many times, is how people love to design together. John Wilker (Karlssonwilker inc), Erik Kessels (Kesselskramer) and Gaetan&Roeben, … all swore to duo-designing. Great we’d all say, but then raised the question how they manage to spend 3 months designing a couple of record sleeves for a Jazz ensemble… do they get paid for these 3 months???

The people from Adbusters (who have lasted for  a long time already) have become a bit stuck in their Anarchistic design which, according to me, includes too many American flags and McDonald’s-like signs.

Beside all these rock solid design icons,  were these newbies, who could teach some of the others a thing or two about ‘how to make a 60 minute presentation   worth while staying awake for’. Under the flag of YONN (Young Ones – National Neographic) Gaetan&Roeben gave us a preview of what they work on while waiting for their real assignments, after graduation last year. They asked some big shots (Ed Fella, people from Eboy, Georgia Athanasopolou, …) to give them a mission to go for. This resulted in some great experiments, which can be followed on http://gaetanroeben.wordpress.com.

Siggi Eggertson demonstrated a nice vector, gridbased illustrations and animations. Despite of the fact that he’s only 25, he already became quite famous, partly with his roller coaster font.

Beside students, there was also a teacher of mine, presenting a project on which he worked ever since I was studying at St. Lucas (that’s already 9 years ago!). Together with some of his (ex-) students, Lucas Nijs created a code-based graphic amplifier. Nodebox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D images and animation using Python programming. Aaaargh, I hear the designers among you moan. But the 2.0 version gives us designers the opportunity to work with prefixed assets such as copy, grids, displacement-filters, … All these settings are represented by nodes, and these can interact with each other in many different ways. The results are astonishing and the creative ideas everybody had during the presentation filled the theatre with a humming buzz.

Last but not least I want to mention a project from Erik Kessels (KesselsKramers | KesselsKramers Publishing). This evokes his first assignment when he worked in his own studio. He got the request to do a campaign for a hotel in Amsterdam, The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. This was not the sort of fancy hotel for which he could go wild in corporate typography. This lousy budget hotel had nothing which could be used to promote the business. Therefore he decided to highlight all shortcomings of the budget hotel as being eco-friendly advantages. The advertising campaign took the direction of a spoof campaign, with baseline “accidentally eco-friendly”. The result (online / offline advertising, tv ads, …) hit the target audience like a bomb, and the bookings of the hotel ran like a train: mission accomplished.

This example proves Erik’s statement: A good idea can live in any medium.

Completely exhausted after 2 days of following lectures from 10 am till 8 pm, and a taste of coffee which lasted for the whole weekend, we returned home… impregnated with a creative mind.

All this is realized by Hugo Puttaert (Vision and Factory), and a whole crew of St. Lucas teachers and students.