Generate London: The Good Shit
After attending the latest Generate conference in London I decided to give a brief view of my insights from the conference. These short summaries seek to show my highlights of the conference and what I have personally taken away from my experience that I can now apply towards developing my creative skillset.
Seb Lee-Delisle
Seb Lee-Delisle is Digital Artist who uses lasers to create interactive artworks and games. He spoke a great deal about the different kinds of works he’d created and his inspirations. It was good to see a unique kind of design considering the nature of the conference. It was great to see how Seb’s designs took many different forms. These ranged from shooting games to interactive firework displays. This was a fun start to the day at generate ending with a crowd controlled game of flappy bird.
Zell is a designer, writer and course leader. He discussed his passion for coding in an easy to understand format, showing how he is giving people the knowledge and confidence to build awesome things. With coding being one of my weaker points in my designer skill cabinet I took particular interest in the talk. Zell shared his approach to building responsive, reusable components. He even went deep into design principles and how they can shape the way your CSS flows. Not only did this talk give me a great resource for learning, I also feel more confident in how I structure and code my CSS to produce better, more responsive web experiences.
Espen Brunborg
Espen Brunborg is a creative director who had been working in Primate Agency based in Edinburgh which he helped co-found. This was by far one of my favourite talks from the day. Espen urged the importance of story telling within good design. Espen questioned design trends and gave an emphatic talk on how emotional design helps create a connection. Personality always shines through in any body of work. He also explained how comedy is much like good music it has rhythm. Music sets expectations and meets them. Comedy sets expectations and breaks them. Good story telling relies on both.
Good Designers tell good stories.
Chris Gannon is interaction designer who took us through a whirlwind tour of some of his work. He spoke about the effect that micro interactions and animations can have on brand enforcement, and how it shows that a brand can care by keeping you entertained in every little click or tap. Perhaps what was most interesting was seeing the range of tools that he used to produce his work. Chris showed that you don’t have to be a total whizz with code to produce beautiful online experiences.
Anton & Irene
This creative duo really stole the show for me. After breaking away from agency life and having gone independent, Anton & Irene are treating their Brooklyn-based studio as their long-term passion-project. Now in its third year, they finally managed to find the perfect balance between working on client work. They shared their experience and how to successfully have a good work/life balance while producing creative work for both. While talking through their journey in design they shared some of their life lessons they’d picked up along the way which really resonated with me. It was great seeing how these all came from great experiences.
I thought I’d sum this short summary up with posting some of these little “notes to self” that Anton & Irene shared that I think are worth taking on board for any designer.
