WMC Fest 2012 Wrap-up!
Whew! This past weekend was fun & exhausting. If you live in Cleveland & didn’t attend WMC Fest, then you missed out & better attend next year. WMC Fest is an art, design & music festival held in historic Gordon Square district on the westside. I got to spend Saturday & Sunday volunteering, attending the fest & meeting some great people! I worked the ticketing booth at the Reingberger auditorium where all the great talks took place. I blogged earlier about what I was looking most forward to seeing at the Fest, so here are the things that I loved the most!
Rachael Novak: ‘Side Hustle’
Rachael Novak, a local Clevelander, works as a greeting card designer at American Greetings & runs her own side business she calls Shore Society. She talked about the importance of doing what you love, even if you have to do it on the side of your 9-5 job. It’s a great way to get creative and lay the foundation for possibly becoming self-employed one day. She showed some her great work from greeting cards to whimsical pet portraits. As someone who is trying to do my own ‘side hustle’ as a freelance designer, she definitely inspired me to keep going & when I’m ready, take it to the next level.
Friends of Type: ‘Good, Bad & Ugly’
The Friends of Type are a group of 4 guys with one passion in common: typography. They are spread out across the U.S., but maintain a blog together where they create and post beautiful lettering. They talked about how this project of theirs got started & the good & bad they’ve had to go through. However, they don’t just create this stuff themselves, they get their awesome peers of designers to help contribute. Their talk was really entertaining and they seem like a fun bunch of guys. Erik Marinovich works in San Fran in his studio to which the other half is Jessica Hische….my favorite designer! I hope Erik tells Jessica how awesome WMC Fest was, so she’ll come & speak next year!
Signalnoise: ‘Design Renegade’
James White of Signalnoise in Nova Scotia, Canada gave an awesome talk he calls ‘Design Renegade.’ He talked about his career in design and gave us a run down of his work, ending on the type of work he was doing today. His main point was that to be successful in design, you can’t just be different…everyone claims to be different. You have to do drastically different things & new design directions, to get noticed. He doesn’t want you on the beaten path, he wants you to be ‘out in the woods.’ That’s the philosophy he’s been using the past few years, and the work he’s created as a result is great. I had never heard of James White before the fest, but I had seen his awesome poster for Drive. Let’s just say I’m aware of him now & he’s awesome…does anyone else think he looks like a cross between Christoph Waltz & Jon Hamm? Maybe it’s just me..
Kate Bingaman Burt: ‘8 Days a Week’ but should have been titled ‘Creepy Cute’
Kate Bingaman Burt is a designer, illustrator, professor & more living in Portland, Oregon. Her talk centered around a project she gave her design students to pick 5 THINGS that resonate with you and influence your designs. She shared with us her 5 and reasons why she loved them so much. Apparently she has a love for erasers and ribbons and in general loves collecting things. At her talks, she collects people’s passwords on a piece of paper to illustrate and add to her vast collection. She also talked a lot about her struggle to get out of debt, and to help her through it, she illustrated every one of her credit card bills and daily purchases from 2004 to 2010. She still does daily drawings of the things she buys, because she loves taking something boring and mundane and making it into art. She was quite interesting and fun to watch and above all wanted to inspire us to stop ‘lazy looking’ and THINK when we’re looking at the world.
Designer: Alonzo Felix
The one souvenir I bought myself from the fest, was an ampersand poster by designer Alonzo Felix. I love ampersands & think that this will look awesome near my desk for design inspiration. Alonzo said he sketched over 300 ampersands before deciding on these to use for the poster.
SO all in all WMC Fest was a huge success. Kudos to Jeff Finley & Go Media for all the hard work organizing it! I can’t wait for next year…I’m sure it will be even bigger & better! (if that’s possible)
- Elaine
*speaker photos pulled from www.wmcfest.com
