Last days of Hyper Island – for now

Friday was the very last scheduled day of Interactive Art Direction 2010 at Hyper Island. After the agency module was completed the class came together once again to reflect on our last months at Hyper Island and to evaluate them. After that we were to share four things in the class:

1. The greatest challenge so far during my time at Hyper Island

2. My greatest insight from my time at Hyper Island

3. One sentence to sum up my feelings about the internship

4. Two feelings right now and here

Many great insights were shared and it turned out quite sentimental as we all realized that the time in our little bubble has come to an end. Now, all of us 54 are about to leaving the school for our internships in different corners around the world. Next up: a list of where everyone's going to.

Counting the days

Since I'm leaving London on Monday to work for IKEA we had a little Swedish farewell party last Friday which was awesome! Cheers.

James & James hired

Sweet, our good friends James and James just got hired yesterday on their first advertising job. We've been sharing experience with those guys for ages, and after two year of placements they made it. So here's a happy happy from us – do well guys, we're sure you will.

We'll try to catch up that and get ourselves a job in the new year as well :)

Bad Taste

Speaking of Rock Stars. Last week was pretty though, we got lots of stuff done so the weekend was crying out for some fun times. And fun times we had. Friday night was the Bad Taste House party at Wal's flat, everyone dressed his or her worst and rocked out. What a great end for a hectic week, splendid!

Wild Thing

A good friend of ours is looking for an Art Director in London. If you are a writer on the lookout or know anyone, let him know – creativepartner08@yahoo.co.uk

AHA!?

Sorry for reporting back on this so late but the weather has been to good to be inside – right.

This AHA! was great, lots of people, different people, more people than last time, thanks everyone for coming around! Thanks to my dear friends from creativistan namely Reinhard, Christos, Sara and Oksana for organizing this together with me!

Besides mingling, chatting and drinking we tried this time to find the ultimate answer on how make life more meaningful. We asked everyone to tell us their secret wisdom of life on an AHA! fortune cookie paper. They did. While people were reflecting heavily about their contributions to what is now know as the 'AHA! way of life', sadly, someone nicked Charles' bag and Lauren's iPod. Have a look at the pieces of wisdom they sacrificed to write:

• 'It's all about the people' Renee
• 'Don't scream at a deaf person' Camilla
• 'The path is hard, but the butterflies are flying' Julien
• 'Star today what you've planned for tomorrow' Christos
• 'Stand on the steeple and piss on the people' A.J.
• 'Always try to remember peoples names, it's just polite, sadly I remember no ones!' Damien Knowles The Kiwi
• 'Going down every little helps' Juliana
• 'Don't get caught in the shower when a fire alarm goes off...' Ann
• 'You are going to have lot of sex, but no tonight!' Anonymous
• 'Don't shit where you sleep!' Agatha
• 'Your shoes will watch your shadow so polish them,
  otherwise you will lose your shadow.' Sara
• 'Arts Lunga – Vita Brevis. If you can't do the best why even bother with the rest?' Oksana
• 'A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.' Ray
• 'Peace still works.' Nina
• 'The yellow snow is the tastiest. Don't listen to the rest.' Peter Brown
• ' A Jelly Baby walks into a bar – bar keeper says what's that smell?
  Jelly Baby says 'Oh Fucking all sorts!' Will
• 'To thine own self be true.' Lauren
• 'An idea is like a leaf that needs rescue from the wind' T.C. Jeeves Basu
• 'You can't always get what you want.' Charles
• 'Don't take yourself to serious! Seriously.' Marco Warstat
• 'Pigeon, oiseau à la grise robe, Dans l'enfer des villes, à ma vue tu te dérobes.
  Tu es vraiment le plus agile' Jann
• 'What if OK isn't OK? If this was true, no-one would ever be happy.
  Strive for everything, but there is value in being content' Ant
• 'The Picture has a moustache. It's how you perceive it.' Matt
• 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' Tam
• 'A book tightly shut is nothing but a block of paper' Ray
• 'The path is long indeed, but the door at the end is not Blue.' Wal

Enlightened? We hope so. We can't wait for the next one! See flickr (or facebook) for more pictures. And come along to the one in august. AHA!

Continue, don't stop

This is for a good friend of mine. He chased his dream, but he failed to grasp it at the last second. I hope he gets his thoughts together and won't give up. Learn from failure. I do. I had a bookcrit at W+K on Thursday, it went okay. Okay in a bad way. If you're there you don't want it to be OK, you want it to be fucking great. No one can help you with that, it's up to you, and you have to sweat for it.

Hey, Life's too good to be sad about. There are always opportunities. Everywhere. Whatever you do, it's a step forward. Only when you stop doing, that's when you move backward.

AHA!?

Above, random notes from yesterday's AHA! – a meeting, full of Eurekas.

A whole lot of interesting people, mostly young London creatives, attended without knowing what it will be like. Neither did we. Frankly, not that many big ideas were born. Friendships were. Thanks everyone for coming. Hope to see everyone in July at the next AHA! Anyone has suggestions to improve this thing?

from left: Reinhard, Wal, Renee, James, James, Katya, Gareth

from left: Josh, Nick, Kyle, Oksana

Designer like boring pictures

Ray competing with the decor

from left: Christos, Oksana, Marco

from left: Constantin, Gareth, Stavvy, Nick, Julien

Commercial Tavern is one of the nicest pubs in London

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 :(

Colossus of Athens

On Wednesday we've met Christos. He's a great guy with good sense for advertising and he's the type of person who likes to do things, organize things and make something new happened – we like this. Together with him we're thinking about an exciting project for young creatives in London. It will be fun, and it will be good. More on this on another day when things have a shape.

And yes, he is quite a big person, and he's from greece. Our fingers are crossed for his WK side application.

Creative Linkage

In the last couple of weeks, we discovered a lot of blogs from creatives. Before we mainly were reading planning blogs. It's like buying a red hat, suddenly you see so many people wearing one, and it's not like they weren't people with red hats before - now you just pay more attention to it. We like most of these blogs and read them on a daily base so we would like to share with our readers (who probably know most of these blogs).

We want to make sure that our blog is not a dead end which leads only to agency website - most of them are way less interesting than blogs anyway. Enjoy the new links on the right side and also underneath:

Ads are boring
Alice in adland
David & Pheobe
Gwen Yip
Fake it until you make it
Freddie & Hollie
Niazipan
Scamp
WHATamIdoing?
wowee, wow.

First day at JWT...

...has been quite so far, we are waiting to get briefed. We are very excited about being in such a big known agency. Major backlash: all blogspot websites don't work here, it seems like they are blocked. Why? Are the people reading too much blogs? Typepad works though. Well maybe it's only for the placement IP's? I should ask IT sometime. At lunch we met Jamie & Chris who are on a creative placement with RMG connect, the integrated part of JWT. They graduated together with me from the ad course at Bucks university in 2006. Everyone is very nice so far and the atmosphere is relaxed. We cannot wait to get our hands on the four briefs we were promised today, after the long holiday break we're full of energy and don't understand the term 'January Blues'.

Julie

Thursday evening we went to for a few drinks with Julie Wright, my former tutor at Bucks university. She was the one who teamed us up, but that's another story (where Rick is also involved in). She is a lovely person, no wonder she knows every important creative person in town. Thank you Julie!

From left to right: Val, Rick, Julie & Kris

Who is who? We should call ourselves hairycreatives