Graphic Design Festival Scotland - TopForm 2019
Last week, some of the FanDuel UX & Design team attended TopForm, a 1-day conference held as part of Graphic Design Festival Scotland in Glasgow, where creatives from around the world come together through a series of talks.
Below are some notes taken from a few of our favourite speakers:
Kelly-Anna is a freelance illustrator and designer based in London, whose bold figurative works were born from a childhood of rapid sketching with her father — an artist and keen ballroom and Latin dancer. After spending some time in shoe design, the experiences drawing at her father’s competitions led her full-circle to live-sketching at London Fashion Week, live-painting her (first ever) mural for a luxury gym, and rediscovering a way of working she felt very comfortable with.
She impressed upon the audience the importance of side projects which she believes are a useful way of helping you reach your own goals, personal or professional, and can be a catalyst for pushing your career in the right direction. As product designers, we often second-guess ourselves when it comes to doing things we’ve never done before, but she encouraged us to forget about experience, if you want to do something, doing it and putting it out there can be the first step to making it what you’re known for.
Pentagram’s Angus Hyland gave us insight into his process, citing techniques like the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio while walking us through three pieces of work. He discussed a book jacket for a fictional piece about Martin Luther King which was strikingly simple — a combination of photography, typography and a circular cut-out which symbolised the bullet wound that would mark the end of his life.
The Eurosport rebrand, which illustrated the challenges of aligning with a new parent brand and showed us his process of isolating and distilling the core qualities of the original brand into a new one without loss of essence. His last piece, a rebrand for Cass Art, touched on the importance of recreational hobbies (in his case painting) to encourage personal growth and help prevent creative block. With this project, a hobby met professional work and next year he’ll see his own paintings exhibited in-store, showing that spending time on work that isn’t necessarily directly related to your craft still has value in the long run.
Stefan Sagmeister was the most anticipated talk of the day for many of us. Sagmesiter spoke about the beauty in what we create, that humans have been making things beautiful long before we were ever considered homo sapiens. From a functional point of view, a traditional hunting spear has no need to be symmetrical, but it was created as such because it is more beautiful. Sagmeister instilled in the audience the need to strive and make things beautiful as well as functional.
As humans we have a fairly standard idea of what is beautiful and what is not, which Sagmesiter proved to us through an experiment. He had the whole auditorium agree that a brown square was the ugliest shape and colour in the world! Sagmeister has done this experiment across the world and the results were the same in every place.
And, in a surreal moment, we ended the day in chorus, with a Sagmeister sing-a-long and smiles on our faces.
The whole day was brilliant, with others speakers such as Emmanuel Rey & Maxime Plescia-Buchi from Swiss Typefaces, Eike König from HORT and Ieva Blaževičiūtė from VICE.
The benefits of stepping away from your desk are pretty well-known. Immersing ourselves in activities and interests, whether separate or related to our day jobs, often inspire us and help tackle creative block when it strikes.
FanDuel believes in learning and development and all staff are given the opportunities and resources to pursue these goals regularly. This can mean attending courses (online, or offline), using ’10% time’ (where we work on non-project specific work every other Friday), or attending design talks and conferences.
It goes without saying that we’re super excited for next year’s TopForm and would recommend it to anyone in the design industry in general as a great conference to get inspired by others talking about their work.
