Adobe Live

On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week. Tricky, Simon and myself headed up to the Business Design Centre in London to Adobe Live.

Our aim was to meet and interview as many exciting people as we could, check out CS3 and come away feeling inspired!

DAY 1
On our first day, we met Richard Dobson who started his career as the front man for a punk band before becoming a music presenter and finally a film maker. We also spoke to Michael O'Neal, Ben Forsyth, Greg Rewis, Adrian Myers, an action photographer who travels to work on a pair of ski's, Mark Bonner, Chris Petty of Blue Sky North who design Flash Lite games for mobile phones. The illustrator Jon Burgerman gave an inspiring talk and also showed his rendition of the 2012 Olympic Logo which can be seen on Tricky's blog.

I made notes throughout the day at various talks. Here are some bits and pieces that may be of interest-

Use Information Technology, Jakob Nielson
www.useit.com

www.beck.com - really cool website!

www.etsy.com - a unique shopping experience, pick colours to determine what you might buy.

Top tip from Adrian Myers, (action photographer represented by 'Hmmm') - 'If you are worried about your batteries getting cold, stick them down your pants!'

Adrian is also 'Paranoid about digital failure and the end of the world!

DAY 2
The second day at Adobe Live proved to be a very exciting one in terms of speakers - which meant exciting interviews for us!

We managed to catch up with Hillman Curtis, Brendan Dawes and Neville Brody. All of their sessions can be viewed again at www.adobelive.co.uk and our interviews with them will be uploaded soon.

One of our favourite questions was 'If you were a dalek, who would you exterminate and why?' As there are no daleks in the US, Hillman pretended he was the termintaor instead.

His talk was very insightful. As I did not previously know Hillman's work I was really looking forward to hearing what he had to say. Some notes I got from Hillman-

'Get rid of the technology that doesn't make sense'

'regeneration of your creativity'

Hillman likes the Scottish band Moguai

Check out his book 'Creating short films for the web'

Hillman never looks in the viewfinder when filming his subjects.

He likes to work with limitations, for example just using day light, shooting close up and keeping the length of his films to under seven minutes.

Hillman encourages us to make time for personal projects.

www.pentagram.com

www.emusic.com

Brendan Dawes gave a great talk. It was funny, entertaining and thought provoking. He is one of the founding partners of Magnetic North. He described mN - 'they like to break things'.

Check out the website www.diesel.com/submityourself/ a very exciting experience, especially if you are a lady!

He ended his talk with a story about falling asleep on the train and upon awakening saw some litter on the seat infront of him. On closer inspection he saw that there was a reciept for two dictionaries with 'P.T.O' written down the side. He turned the receipt over and on the other side were scrawled the words 'please take these swones' with an arrow pointing down. As he looked down, what he had origionally thought was merely litter, were two origami swans. What a wonderful surprise!

All in all Adobe Live was a great couple of days. And thanks to the Adobe team who were extremely helpful and lovely people!

p.s. You must try the rubber in Illustrator CS3
p.p.s. Beware of John Davey!