Tonic | Design and Brand interaction consultancy

I was lucky enough to attend this year’s OFFF, the International Festival for the post-digital creation culture, which took place in the beautiful city of Paris. With its amazing line up of speakers and workshops, this is one of the creative industries most forward thinking and pioneering events.

Now, in their tenth anniversary, OFFF curators have truly established themselves as trendsetters in the international design and digital communities.  They are a self-described “enthusiastic celebration of new visual culture … a synonym for modernity, both aesthetic and technological”.

The three-day festival showcases top digital artists, web, print and interactive designers, motion graphics studios, and new music adventurers. OFFF festival provides insight into all culture media platforms.

There was some great work in the form of Sponsor titles created by the multi-talented, Montreal based Julien Vallée
as well as some stunning work from the always impressive The Mill for the Festivals main titles. From The Mill’s press release:

“This piece is a debut creation from The Mill NY’s integrated design and animation team, commissioned by OFFF, International Festival for the Post-Digital Creation Culture.   Under the creative vision of Jeff Stevens, Rob Petrie and Kim Dulaney, a team of Mill designers, animators and compositors have collaborated to take the viewer on a journey through a world of enigmatic creatures and a trance-like soundscape. Forty-five titles come up throughout the piece to credit the speakers participating at this year’s OFFF festival in Paris ”

Amongst some ground breaking design, advertising and creative talks, by agencies such as Universal Everything, my stand out would have to be: the very young and talented British typographer Craig Ward now based in NY city; Wooster collective, with their interesting journey through public art and site specific street art,  and Non – Format with their  “witty and clever talk”. If you haven’t seen it yet I would recommend Kjell Ekhorn’s talk on you tube.

The festival also managed to feature a few great people who I had not heard of before, such as Grady & Metcalf the two creators of the publisher adventures Gum and Lemon Megazine, and the very young and creative interactive studio Dvein from Barcelona.

A panel of French interactive design agencies (Upian, Soleil Noir and Uzik) spoke about how interface is becoming part of the content itself (not only serving it) with examples such as Upian’s web documentaries Prison Valley and Gaza-Sderot. They showed how the interface can tell a story in a purely functional environment such as the contemporary art guide for Paris, Slash.fr

The only drawbacks for me this year, compared to the previous events, was the lack of an overarching theme for the whole festival. The OFFF Lisbon 2009 talks were true to the theme “Fail Gracefully”. The audience were drawn inside the process of the different artists and agencies, discovering what were behind the final outcomes. This year the theme of the event was “Nostalgia for a past future” however, only a couple of speakers referred to it in their talks. I felt there was a lack of synergy and alignment throughout the event.

See more photos from the event on the Tonic Flickr page.

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Having recently launched online financial magazine International Adviser, we have spent a bit of time looking at changes in the commercial models around online publishing. There appears to be an interesting shift from news publication to news service. As a result ‘utility’ and ‘functionality’ start to play as important a role as ‘content’.

See our small presentation on trends affecting online publishing.

Visit International Adviser website

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I’ve been gathering some statistics for clients recently. Assembled together, these are pretty impressive. A fantastic argument for digital budget allocation if ever you needed one!

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours!
• Twitter now has 100m user accounts with around 15m posting more than 3 times per week.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images.
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status every day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that its 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices.
• Users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

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The term ‘digital’ is not broad enough to describe what we produce for our clients. As an agency we add value by knitting together people, devices, media and content using design thinking. We call this Brand Interaction and the diagram above illustrates our approach.

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I attended a very insightful talk by Professor Wendy Hall on the future of the web and her progress in the creation of a new academic discipline – web science.

Her presentation contained many challenging ideas/concepts that will affect how web communications are delivered in digital media over next 10 – 20 years.

She categorised the internet as  3 distinct phases

-        Read only web (1991 – 1996)
-        Read/write web (1997 – 2003)
-        Social web (2004 – present)

One concept explored is that the future lies in a web of linked data. For example Wikipedia represents a global collective intelligence and an underlying human desire to share data. Tim Berners-Lee explores this in his presentation on Ted

Exciting questions about trends that are shaping our world
What will happen when the developing world starts coming online? Will they use existing popular digital social tools and platforms? Mobile is already prevalent in many developing countries.

The web is becoming a social environment, however not all of the biological social trends apply. Are we aware of the social environment that we are creating digitally? How will we address issues of privacy, trust, morality… in the longer term?

With more and more of our information being hosted in environments that we do not own e.g. cloud servers. What are the implications for identity, ownership and legacy 30 years from now?

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