FORWARD FESTIVAL

Just got back from Forward Festival Berlin. Wow. I’m fully charged and ready to rock ’n’ roll again.

There’s something pretty special about being surrounded by people from completely different creative disciplines and backgrounds, all obsessing over their craft and giving it their best shot. It’s infectious.

It was also my first time in Berlin, which felt like the perfect excuse to finally get myself over there.

The festival itself ran over two days, packed with talks, studios, designers, artists and plenty of inspiration. I went mainly to support my mates at FLUORO, who were speaking on the Forward Stage, but obviously ended up catching as much as I could.

Here are some of my highlights.

First up, FLUORO.

I know I talk about FLUORO a lot on this channel, but I don’t care!

You should support your friends in this industry.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty lonely place out there.

Not only that, I think what they’re doing is incredible.

They took a major risk eight years ago, set up a studio and essentially said, Let’s see what happens.

Fast-forward to now and they’re sharing a stage with some absolute legends of the game.

For anyone who came through university around the same time as us in the 00s, Stefan Sagmeister was THE name. So seeing FLUORO up there alongside him was pretty fucking cool.

Tim absolutely killed his talk, titled Magical Thinking, built around three simple ideas:

1. Fuck the Narrative
2. Make it about the feels
3. Magical Thinking

It was a great reminder that there isn't always a logical path through creative work. Sometimes you have to trust your instincts, follow the feeling and make something that doesn't necessarily fit neatly into the expected narrative.

Loved the bit when nowadays we have such little time to sell or communicate a compelling idea to someone as attention spans or crammed calendars, he cited the infamous film ALIEN being pitched as essentially it's 'JAWS in SPACE'

And speaking of Sagmeister…

Wait until the end of this article.

MR BINGO

Before the FLUORO talk, we were backstage dropping off our bags when I randomly bumped into Mr Bingo. Who I've been a fan of since uni days!

We ended up chatting for about ten minutes about all sorts of stuff.

We talked about his Hate Mail project from back in the day, which he said was definitely one of his biggest successes. We also got onto comedy and how much that landscape has changed over the years.

But the thing that really stuck with me was something much simpler.

He said he’s 'never really had a plan'.

He’s just intuitively moved through the creative world, following whatever felt interesting at the time.

I loved that.

There’s so much pressure these days to have a five-ten-fifteen-twenty-retirement-plan, a personal brand strategy, a niche, a content calendar, a business model and probably a fucking Notion board or CRM system explaining all of it.

Sometimes it’s nice to hear from someone who just followed the work and is having fun with it along the way!

FUTURE DELUXE

HOW THE FUCK DO YOU WIN WORK?

Another highlight for me was Raj Davsi, the ECD at FutureDeluxe.

He took us through a mixture of client work and R&D projects, including some of the wins, fails and everything in between.

He had moved from the UK over to their New York office, with a big part of his role being focused on building up that side of the business.

And the first section of the talk was all about one of the biggest questions facing pretty much every creative studio:

How the fuck do you win work?

That’s the thing, right?

No matter what size or scale your studio is, or how much amazing work you've already done, there seems to be this perpetual battle of:

How do you win the work you actually want to do - while still keeping the lights on?

Cold DMs?

Cold emails?

Speaking on stage?

Self-initiated campaigns?

LinkedIn Posts or Podcasts?

Networking...!? 😂🤢

There’s no right or wrong answer.

And there’s no cheat code ⬆️ ⬇️ ⬅️ ➡️ ❌

FutureDeluxe have obviously found ways of killing it and making it work right at the top level, and the work they showed was seriously impressive particularly some of the Beats and Ferrari Yacht projects.

They also had a bit of fun with AI throughout the talk.

An AI version of the speaker would randomly appear between sections wearing different ARIES hats, speaking in different accents and appearing in increasingly ridiculous forms. At one point, he was absolutely jacked. Having fun whilst highlighting how you can use it but also the limitations it has. It was cool to see though the Ferrari project they worked on has a bit of AI incorporated into it to help create the ocean waves, I think that level on usage is cool, when it can solve a problem like that, but it could never do the whole thing.

Even the ARIES logo on his hat changed typeface every time.

It was basically a little AI palette cleanser between the serious case studies, and it worked really well.

Then, just when we thought the talk was wrapping up, he dropped a banger DOECHII track as he walked off stage.

Entertaining, insightful, progressive and a tough act to follow.

DINAMO.
OH, THAT’S SAD!

The next day felt a little more relaxed.

Tim had done his talk. Any anxiety around that was gone. We could actually just enjoy the festival.

I really enjoyed the Dinamo Type talk (Johannes Breyer) particularly the work they did for Are.na and their reworking of Arial, which became Areal.

The story behind the typeface was brilliant, particularly the moment where they realised Arial was essentially the perfect starting point for what they wanted to achieve. The least snobby choice. Helvetica was the first font they saw become 'very cool' and then cringe in a very short lifecycle. In a way Arial has always been cringe! ...and you gotta embrace that!

To be very honest, the level of detail and the relationship designers like this that have when crafting typography blows my mind. I love typography personally, but I've never designed a face. Wouldn't even know where to start. 

Next level!

...but my favourite moment wasn't actually anything to do with the work as such.

Halfway through the talk, the keynote crashed.

The screen went down.

And rather than panic, the speaker just looked at it and calmly said:

“Oh, that’s sad.”

That was it.

The crowd loved it.

Someone came over to fix things. It took about 30 seconds and they were back on track.

And honestly, it was a great little reminder.

Things are going to go wrong.

No matter how prepared you are, something will inevitably break, crash, disappear or refuse to fucking work.

And ultimately, it’s how you react in those moments that matters.

He made the joke, the crowd laughed, someone fixed the problem and off we went.

If anything, it became a human moment.

And the audience are generally on your side anyway.

They want you to win.

They don't want to watch you fail.

SAGMEISTER

And then…

Sagmeister.

I was buzzing for this one.

We managed to get some decent seats near the front, slightly over to the right.

Then, halfway through the Dinamo talk, I suddenly realised Sagmeister was sitting literally a couple of seats in front of me.

Just casually watching the talk before going on stage himself.

Which was slightly surreal.

I knew his talk was going to be good.

I just had absolutely no idea what it was going to be about.

Then he walked on stage.

He essentially started by saying:

I've got a big exhibition coming up in Paris next month. If you're around, come and check it out.

But I'm not going to talk about that.

Instead…

I'm going to tell you about 'The single worst job of my life ever.'

And immediately, everyone was hooked!

What followed was a nine-act story that just kept escalating and spiralling.

Each chapter introduced another problem, another disaster or another completely unexpected turn, with each one ending on a cliffhanger leading into the next.

It was an absolute masterclass in storytelling.

Of course, we saw the work and the design development along the way, but the real story wasn't the design.

It was the insane downward spiral of the project itself.

The project was Aerosmith's Nine Lives album cover.

I’ve tried looking online since getting back to see if there are any other recordings or talks about this story, but I can't find anything.

So I’m probably going to butcher it here. So apologies but....

But essentially, it started with an amazing die-cut concept.

The problem?

It was something ridiculous like $0.16 over budget per unit and after a few internal sackings on SONY side, the new PR person wanted to put their stamp on things and said $0.16 was completely untenable. 

So they went back to the drawing board.

And remember, this was the 90s.

There was no Google.

There was no ChatGPT.

There was no YouTube tutorial.

A huge amount of the work was still being done physically and by hand.

What followed was revision after revision after revision.

Every new solution seemed to get further away from the original idea.

Eventually, they landed on this bizarre image of a cat dancing on a snake with nine heads.

And then it got published.

Except…

That wasn't the end of it.

It resulted in copyright lawsuits.

Legal letters.

Even Bomb threats. No Joke!

And after two and a half years of insane amounts of work, graft and stress…

Sagmeister wasn't paid.

Instead, he ended up with an even bigger insurance bill to protect against something similar happening again.

Imagine dealing with that today.

Now imagine dealing with it before Google.

Before ChatGPT.

Before you could type a question into your phone and have some AI explain what the fuck a terrifying legal letter actually means.

At one point, Sagmeister had to travel all the way to Mumbai to physically research books and texts in libraries to establish whether the imagery was actually protected by copyright.

And what he discovered was that variations of the same imagery, cats, snakes, people dancing on snakes, snakes with multiple heads, had existed in endless forms throughout history.

His analogy was essentially:

You can't copyright Santa Claus!

And the whole story just kept getting crazier.

Until eventually…

The talk ended.

A track from the Aerosmith album started blasting through the speakers.

Sagmeister reached down and threw 3 physical copies of the CD into the crowd.

The place went absolutely fucking bananas!

And honestly, after two days of talks, case studies, R&D, AI, typefaces and creative philosophies…

It was the perfect ending.

The festival host came back on stage, thanked everyone, invited all of the speakers back up for one huge group photo and then announced the after-party details.

I couldn't forget...  I also bumped into a fellow creative, who I worked with yeeeaaaars ago and still to this day one the most talented and humble people I've met throughout my time in London João who I've not seen for years, which was an awesome moment!

Flew home the next day and my fantastic Ryanair flight was delayed 6hrs (a whole other story).

Put it this way the saxophones got louder and louder... 🎷🤘

P