Five takeaways from OFFF festival that you can use in your work today.

Last week thousands of agencies, artists, founders and creatives descended onto Barcelona for OFFF festival, one of the largest showcases of contemporary visual creativity and design in the world. After sending a small team last year, we were eager to get even more of the HAA team back this year to soak up knowledge and inspiration from some of the best in the business.

The fantastic lineup of talks covered a broad range of topics from an even broader range of speakers, but one thing that struck our team was the focus on action. Our designers, strategists and copywriters left the city eager to start putting what they’ve learnt into practice. 

We wanted to share some of our favourite takeaways that we’ll be using to challenge our own creative practice straight away.

1. Don’t be afraid to admit defeat.

What would you do if you spent a year and a half working on a rebrand, and had to tell the CEO you’d got it wrong? This was the question posed by Patrick Duffy , ECD at DICE , who found himself in exactly this situation shortly after joining the company. Rather than pushing through work the team enjoyed but Duffy felt missed the mark, he retraced his steps and convinced the team to try again. The result? A truly distinctive brand that set the path for Dice’s rise in the world of ticketing and events. Duffy’s talk was a masterclass in sacrificing ego and trusting your gut. Love might mean never having to say you’re sorry, but we learnt that the same doesn’t apply to truly great creative work. The team at weareseventeen doubled down into this idea, suggesting that our very human predisposition to doubt ourselves is what leads to special work of genuine value and is something AI can’t replicate. Failure can be a scary word in the world of work but our team left feeling energised by the idea that sometimes getting it wrong is just the first step to getting it really, really right.

2. Push for the point of difference.

“Technology enables conformity, and the algorithms reward it.” Max Ottignon, Ragged Edge

Ragged Edge founder, Max Ottignon , spoke passionately about the power of ‘different’ in a sea of branding sameness, challenging the idea that "conformity converts". It was a rallying cry for the audience to push clients to embrace the opportunity that being different can bring. Whether it’s increasing memorability, establishing status or slowly but surely winning audiences over, difference is the way to give businesses an "unfair advantage" through brand work. It was a refreshingly critical eye on a creative future dictated by the algorithm and our team loved the thought of leading with ideas and bringing "anything but design reference" during the start of the creative development phase to help avoid falling into the trap of conformity.

3. Embrace a DIY mindset.

When Cotton Design founder, Talia Cotton , was growing up she didn’t know how she would ever find a career that brought together her love of maths and creativity: so she invented it. Her work during her time at Pentagram created a demand for code-led design that empowers users to create, makes space for new types of creativity and blends passions and professions to build truly unique and exciting digital experiences. It was a demand that businesses didn’t even know they had until they were shown the value of it. This theme of blending passions was also something that we heard from Patrick Duffy at Dice and digital fashion artist, Stephy Fung . All of their talks served as a wonderful reminder that you don’t have to wait for others to catch up or create opportunities for you. If you want to do something, just try: you will learn something and you might just create something new.

4. Be your own client.

“Create more of what you want to see.” - Vasjen Katro, Baugasm

The topic of R&D was a hot one and multiple speakers spoke about the value of creating without a brief. No one better embodied the success of that approach than the artist and designer Vasjen Katro of Baugasm. Katro set himself his own brief of creating a poster everyday for a year, and he’s now made 977 of them. The brief he set himself has forced evolvution, learning and experimentation at an incredible pace. The skills he’s learnt through this and other self-set briefs have opened up a world of opportunities to him in his commercial work. In a world that heroes the 'hack', it was a celebration of the value of just doing the work, doing it again and pushing it until it can’t be pushed anymore. 

5. Lead with optimism.

“If you want to avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” – Dan Witchell, Koto

It’s not hard to feel optimistic bathing on the warm steps of the Disseny Hub listening to talented creatives speak about their work, but even the most optimistic of us know it can be hard to carry that through when the work gets tough. Ideas of joy and optimism came up often, but it was Dan Witchell and James Greenfield at Koto who reminded us exactly why it’s such a powerful approach in a world that often feels like it errs towards cynicism. This call for optimism carried through conversations around pushing through a lack of inspiration, a joyous approach to experimentation and right through to a reframing of the client-agency relationship. We’ll be approaching our projects sunny side up from now on.

Until next time, OFFF!