Having not been able to attend the Leeds Print Festival last year I made a conscious effort to make sure that I went this year as I thought it would be highly useful to listen to some of the industries most respected print makers/designers/creatives. I went into the talk pretty much blind, I knew of all of the speakers but I was very intrigued to find out more about what they did and how it could help me with advice about the design industry etc.
Ali Hanson - It's Nice That
He gave us a run down of his route into industry, which was interesting as he spoke about the work that he did at Rollercoaster magazine, Wonderland magazine and Man About Town all of which are fashion magazines. Ali spoke about how much he learnt from these places but he was not a massive fan of working for these types of magazines, this is why now he has taken over as art director for Printed Pages magazine. He spoke about what is role is and the design process is behind the publication, which was very interesting to hear speacilly about how It's Nice That works and Printed Pages long side. I was most interested about he fashion publications he worked for so I am now going to research into them and see what they have done and the sort of work he might have done.
People of Print - Marcroy Smith
This part of the talk was very much focused on the business side of the print/design industry where Marcroy spoke a lot about how he set up the People of Print and the sort of struggles and experiences he had to go through to get to the stage he is at today. After listening to him talk about all of this it made myself and Rob think about our collective (Blep) that we have created for studio brief 03. We decided to ask for some advice from Marcroy at the end of his talk, which he explained to us the best way of getting out idea off the ground. We also took his email, so that when we produce the first publication we can get some feedback from him and help us to build the collective.
Dr. Me - Ryan Doyle & Mark Edwards
This is by far the most engaging talk for me, not knowing a lot about their practice I was very interested to see what they do. They showed one project where they had done 365 days worth of collages everyday, which was amazing to listen to about the thought process and the challenge that they would have to over come with the pressure of producing a collage everyday on top of their other design work. But the point they were making from tell us about the project was that it is important to do self incited work as that is what is important thats why you are a creative the other work is just there to help you do the stuff you want to do.
I will be keeping up to date on their upcoming exhibitions and works as I think they are one of the most creative studios that I have seen since learning about design.
Leeds Print Festival was very informative and I was able to take away a lot of advice from the talks, advice that I can use when thinking about my future as a designer and hopefully it will help shape what I do in the future as the advice has come from people that I respect and hope to keep in contact with to get advice/feedback from in the future. These sort of talks are very beneficial to my practice and I will try to find more to go to over the next year as it is also a great place to meet people.
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