Last week I spent the entirety in Glasgow for Graphic Design Festival Scotland. GDFS is a week long design festival filled with workshops, conferences, panel discussions, exhibitions, short film nights, and, of course, drinking! Before I went last week, I had planned on publishing a blog post of my expectations of what I wanted to takeaway from the event. Obviously I never posted that so this post will kind of share what I did take away instead.
A little summary first, what did I actually get up to in the week? As I don't have uni and only working part time I thought I'd spend the entire week there as I didn't have anything to lose. So I went to all the events, including: the New Worlds talks, was mentored by Freytag Anderson for the Live Project, watched short films, 3D Printed a spiralled hashtag with MAKLab, did some experimental photography with PutPut, and listened to the views of several studios, agencies and collaborative groups brought up within the Panel discussion.
Now what did I take away from the week? To put it simply, a lot. In a few more words, I had one of the best weeks of this year so far while I was there.
And in a lot more words, I think each expectation I had originally thought of was met and went above and beoynd further than what I could have ever imagined it to be. First off, from the live project workshop, I now have a placement in the New Year with Freytag Anderson. I got this through the project concept I worked on in this workshop and the execution of the idea- but I’m planning on sharing the details in another post.
I also made new connections with other event goers and grew other ones I already had. From the one person I knew that was going, I made so many more connections through it and know more about what's going on locally. I also pushed myself out my comfort zone to speak to with industry folk- including one big advertising company that has studios all over the world (still need to do follow up emails though). The week was filled to the brim with having conversations with so many creative folk that I honestly now feel so inspired and driven to get my ass working and start producing more things, including for this blog, YouTube and my graphic design work.
On a whole my week was exactly what I needed to get driven to do things again. The past few months have been a bit of a burnt out period for me but now, from this week, I feel like I have something more to prove, not to anybody but to myself. Within the live project, I created SO much work within about a 14 hour period that I now need to see how much I can do if I put that effort into doing things much more often and continue to be so focused on the things I want to achieve.
Have you ever been to a week long festival that was really full on? What was your experience like, did it help you out?
