Reasons to be Creative

Brighton,UK

1-3 September 2014

If you are familiar with Reasons to be Creative conference, you probably know that it used to be called Flash on the Beach and it was a very popular event among Flash developers. However to better depict the mix of art, design, coding and other creative fields it covers the name has been changed to Reasons to be Creative. It takes place every first Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of September in Brighton, UK.

Although this was my first time at Reasons to be Creative, I have been to many design conferences and festivals and seen many of the speakers before. After reading all the big names on the bill, I knew I can expect a high standard event with the top quality content. And indeed, that is what the audiences got. But there is much more that goes into making ‘Reasons’ such a unique experience.

Whatever your personal nerd/artist ratio is, you were guaranteed to find a talk interesting for you in one of the three theatres of the Brighton Dome at any time. The speakers included some of the most interesting web and game developers, creative coders, motion and graphic designers, illustrators, new media artists and other creatives, many of which are hard to fit into any category. Well balanced schedule and good organisation made it really easy to get the most out of the talks, although sometimes I wished I could be in two theatres at once.

For more technical members of the audience, Mario Klingemann made an industrial robot dance and Karsten Schmidt spoke about the history and philosophy of coding. Animators surely enjoyed seeing how From Form made the amazing hand crafted titles for the conference and how Cyriak Harris creates his surreal films. The elite of more traditional designers and illustrators was represented for example by Sara Blake or Tom Muller. Apart from a peak behind the curtains of their practice, the audience got a lot of good advice. The bits of wisdom that kept reappearing were especially the importance of doing personal projects and presenting your work online because ‘you never know where it will take you!’ Another illustrator who lives by these rules was James White, who is both an amazing artist and speaker. And to crown the great talks full of life advice who could be better than James Victore!

To make the whole conference even more interesting, even the format of the talks was changing. Apart from the morning keynotes, elevator pitch session and talks, there were the Inspired Sessions. This is when everybody gathered in the main theatre for the last talk of the day, delivered by the best of the best. Not only brilliant creatives but also killer speakers. Mr. Bingo’s talk was as funny and cheeky as his work. What else would you expect from a talk called ‘How to build a bomb’ with rapping in it. Kate Moross called hers ‘Anti-Inspiration’, brought her dog on stage and spoke about her likes and dislikes. And who else could we wish for to close the conference than Gmunk.

If you look at an event with this lineup, great venue and partners including Adobe, Behance, SquareSpace or RedBull, it is hard to believe that it’s all mostly work of one man. John Davey and a small group of his friends really put their heart and soul in this and thought about every detail. A lounge with free refreshments or a lobby full of partner tables with freebies were really pleasant to have a chat with other visitors, but also speakers. Perhaps to encourage those who were a bit too shy to start a conversation, John even put some money behind the bar each night so you could have a drink on him and enjoy the party. Serious business networking opportunities but also loads of young designers with fire in their eyes as they had a beer with their idols. Very relaxed atmosphere and great organisation. Technical insights and creative inspiration. Reasons to be Creative prepared a perfectly mixed cocktail of it all and got everyone drunk on inspiration and motivated to push their creative boundaries!

To give you a bit more taste of this cocktail, we will bring you more specific reports from individual days of the conference in the following weeks, so keep checking. In the meantime, mark your calendars for the next one-day Reasons to be Creative event in London on 20 February and follow @reasonsto!