A Portfolio and blog for Mustafa Kurtuldu

Reasons to be creative

Brighton conference featuring Erik Spiekermann, Stefan Sagmeister and many more

Updated

Article was updated to include extra styles for me to experiment with.

I got the chance to head to Brighton for the Reasons to be creative Conference, held once a year, bringing the very best of our industries finest together to 3 days of talks on various topics.

The highlight moment for me was the talk by designer hero Erik Spiekermann, writer of Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works and designer of many fonts including FF Meta and more recently Fira Sans.

Having graduated in the late 1960’s and a master of the classical process of design using letter presses, seeing him up on stage talking about the agile development was inspiring and again shows that you can never stop learning.

Other note worthy talks were from Brad Frost’s “Death to Bullshit” and Eva-lotta Lamm’s “Kickstarting your Sketching and Visual Thinking skills”.

Screen Shot 2013-09-12 at 14.17.27

I also attended a workshop with Stefan Sagmeister which to begin I wasn’t too sure about but with some reflection could see the points he was making, in that we quite often use our communication design skills/language for commercial purposes, but they can also be extremely powerful tools for making someone we know (not necessarily personally know) happy.

I also won a Microsoft IE dev challenge using their new tool modern.ie and got this cupcake as a thank you for participating. Adobe also gave me a bean bag for coming up with an inspiring tweet, although carrying it on the train back to London, looking like Santa, made me question whether my winner status.

This was the first design based conference I have been to and although I was some what sceptical about the value in attending events like this I have had a change of heart.

Being around other people in our industry and hearing what they have to say is probably one of the best ways to learn, especially for those of us who have been in the design game for longer then 10 years. Can’t wait for next years #ReasonsTo.