The day after

Ok, London's first Portfolio night is over. It was good. It was strange. It was amazing. The pizza was tasty and the beer was cold. We've met a bunch of very nice people. Hello & thanks to everyone! We had the chance to glance at some books but missed others.

We arrived at the venue in Covent Garden at 7pm and signed in. Upstairs was already filled up by a group of young creatives – waiting for the event to begin, every minute more and more kept arriving. The review were handled in three groups which were announced upfront, we belonged to the first group, scheduled to begin at eight. It started a little bit late, which was expected. Not all of the announced creative directors attended the event, but there were more than plenty really excellent and experienced creative directors there – only two or three were missing (although replaced by other people from the same agencies).

Every participant were to see three creatives. Since we brought a second copy of our book we seized the chance to split up and see three each. It went by way to fast. But it was well worth it. It went like speed dating and after 15 minutes you had to change the table to the next creative director – but time was stretched here and there. 15 minutes. That's way to short, but possible. We got really good opinions on our stuff. Like most of young creatives know who have book crits a lot, opinions vary a lot. This was even more obvious in such a short time between the opinions. 45 minutes, three creative directors, six for both of us. The outcome for us: four options/offers for a creative placement.

Afterwards we stayed on to meet more young creatives and left only at the very end, maybe to late – the bad things came afterwards: Both of us were having nightmares this night about posters chasing after us and creative directors bombarding us with opinions – it was a proper portfolio review overdose. Thanks a lot ihaveanidea.org, we'll come again next year.

Young creatives from all over London

Snacks, cold beer and a very relaxed atmosphere were all present

Introduction & some rules before the start

David & Phoebe from What if... didn't want their faces to appear on the internet,
we found a compromise

Anna & Iain, our friends, the little team from the guardian

The third group is lining up for their turn

The creative directors move in

The young Gladiators are entering the review arena

The venue was stylish – very noisy at times though

The Tigers
Others call them Creative Directors

Andy Sandoz, former Creative Director at Agency Republic and man behind sandoz.co.uk

Richard Hale, Creative Director at Agency Republic

Graham Fink, Creative Director at M&C Saatchi

Dave Bedwood, Creative Director at Lean Mean Fighting Machine

Russell Ramsay, Chief Creative Director at BBH

Just before the event we placed beer-mats on every review table, if you would turn them around you could see us. Not many people did, but the ones who did, liked it. Fun.

One bad thing about the portfolio night: a lot of people who stayed till the end didn't get the promised goody bags, so no portfolio night t-shirts for us :(