Back in September of this year, our digital team attended the popular event ‘Reasons to be creative’ in Brighton. The event is there to share inspiration with like-minded designers, developers, coders, artists, animators and more. It offers the chance to not only inspire but educate and network with others, leaving you pumped with ideas and eager to get creating!
Our Web Developer, George Anderson summarises his experience of the event with his favourite pieces of inspiration, including excerpts from the ‘elevator pitch’ – 20 speakers, with 3 minutes to present on a topic of their choosing.
Opening credits:
“It was my first reasons to be creative and after hearing a lot of good things from the rest of the team, I was sitting in the Brighton Dome on the Monday morning in anticipation of what the next 3 days will have in store for me.
The lights dimmed and the opening credits began to roll, bringing the room to absolute silence and me in complete awe of how brilliant these titles were. I was excited before, but this pushed me up to a whole new level!”
“The people behind the video are FromForm who showed more of their fantastic videos in their talk. The effort they all put in and the passion they had for their (usually unpaid) work was very inspirational.”
Mr Bingo:
“Another highlight from the conference was on the Monday evening, when the much hyped Mr Bingo was speaking. An apparent favourite of the conference from previous years, Mr Bingo’s talk was engaging, motivating and hilarious.
His hate mail work was particularly funny. Though this started out as being casual fun and for a laugh, it has now transformed into a business for him.”
The elevator pitch:
“The elevator pitch on the Wednesday morning consisted of 20 speakers talking for 3 minutes each about a subject of their choice. My personal favourite of the 20 presentations, was from Gareth James, who was using technology in ways that were so simple, yet completely genius.”
“These included a Secret Squirrel, which was essentially a stuffed squirrel in an exhibition you could whisper your secrets to. However, this squirrel was then linked to a Twitter account and used Google Voice to take the secret and tweet it!”
“Gareth James also presented on his project Skypeframe. He told the story of how he always Skypes his Mum and as she has her PC upstairs, it is only if she is at the PC that she would see him online and be able to Skype him. This was a problem he was going to solve himself, by creating a picture frame that lights up whenever he is available on Skype.”
“It doesn’t stop there… the frame also has a knock gesture inside it, so if it is tapped 3 times by his mother, a text message invitation is sent to him telling him his mum wants a Skype call. The frames knock gesture has different sensitivity levels, so the harder his mother taps the frame, the more assertive the text message is. Messages can range from “I’m ready for a Skype call” to “Get your **** on Skype now!” Lovely!
“Overall ‘reasons to be creative’ was a perfect mix of both creative and coding talks, which can easily cater for anyone working in our industry. I left Brighton on Wednesday evening feeling inspired and motivated to get home and start my own personal projects. Now I just need to unsubscribe from Netflix and I will have nothing to stop me….”
