Apes on Tour: Google SPAN 15

It’s been another exciting time for the designers at Space Ape Games, where myself and one of my colleagues, Adam, were lucky to be invited to one of the main design events of the year, Google SPAN ’15. The event took place in two locations, London and New York. We went along to the London event, hosted by It’s Nice That in a perfect location for it called The Yard. But most importantly it was put together by the Google Design team.

Google Span was a full day event, packed with workshops and presentations from top designers and creatives. There was someone representing each part of the design process, from design-thinking to creative tools and from traditional print to futuristic virtual reality. There was so much to take in and learn, while meeting cool designers from all over the globe. The theme of the day was:

Conversations about Design and Technology

I wish we could have gone to every workshop and every presentation during this event, but unfortunately it wasn’t possible in one day. So here are a couple of notes on the things we learnt from the talks we went to.

Luna Maurer came over from Amsterdam to enlighten us about her interactive design studio, Moniker. Moniker is a small but very powerful innovative studio that focuses on the influence of technology in our daily lives, as well as the impact of how collaboration can effect the final product. Their projects are super innovative and unlike any I’ve seen. We have taken inspiration from Studio Moniker and have decided to start participating in some group exercises that are promoted in the book, Conditional Design.

As UX/UI Designers, we found the panel ‘State of play’ on Design Tools, really fascinating. It was a discussion about how the tools we use can influence our design process. All four of us designers at Space Ape have used different prototyping tools over the years, and have different methods of how we create prototypes. The interesting thing is that each method works for different tasks. Design tools are vital in our everyday processes, and they change rapidly. At the Google SPAN conference, Chris Conover from Google hosted a panel with engineers, founders and designs from Pixate, Framer, Sketch, Zeplin and Form. The five experts discussed how successful designers always try out new methods and new software as it does move so fast, and it helps inform the actual experience that is being designed. Another discussion was about the importance of prototyping and how effective it is early on in a project, along with how you can share prototypes with team mates. It was also great to hear about the products from each of these great representatives. Catch the presentation here!

One of the highlights for me was watching the presentation from Colophon Foundry, a London & New York-based independent studio who specialist in type design. Edd Harringdon and Anthony Sheret talked about the full process of their typeface project, Castledown. This huge project entailed designing a font that school children can use to help learn how to write, and for Castledown Primary School to use for their brand. This fantastic presentation gave us an insight to the incredibly long and complicated process it takes to create a cursive font. We learnt there are tens of thousands of combinations to test. Imagine the time and patience required to achieve that! Very inspiring presentation!

Another highlight was the insightful talk by Ken Wong from UsTwo. As we are already fans of Ustwo and they are known for making cool apps and games like Monument Valley, we were really looking forward to hearing about their new VR title, Lands End. Not many studios have braved new VR technology yet so being in a room with the art director and asking direct questions was a real treat. Ken Talked through the experiences they had while it was in production, the type of limitations that come along with the hardware and software and how they worked around the interaction design. He asked the audience if anyone fancied trying it out, and our very own Adam was selected from the crowd! (see image above)
We were told afterwards that Adam made a great volunteer as he got to grips with it right away, making it a nice demo for the rest of us to watch. Nice one Adam! Lands end was so intuitive, he knew what to do on his first try. It is obvious that a lot of though was put into the on boarding and.
I was one of the first in line to have a go of the game during the after party. It was brilliant, I felt completely transported to a new world. I was so immersed that I felt like physically walking around, It was thrilling to feel like I could actually fall out a virtual cliff, but most of all I was curious to find out what happens next. The art style is beautiful with the stylized environment, sensational colour palette and the serene but mysterious atmosphere.

Overall an exciting presentation from Ken Wong, as VR is certainly the way of near future and this one of the first amazing examples of how to use the new technology to its potential.

The conferences ended with style. Music, cocktails and a cool take away present. I imagine people were expecting a cool t-shirt or a usb stick, but instead we got an amazing book! The Google Span book was designed to encapsulate the whole event about design and technology, with the idea being that most projects start out with book design. More details are found on the Google Design site. It’s a beautiful present to keep and remember the time we had.

Thank you Google. What a great day and hope to see you again soon :)