Pecha Kucha, D&AD President’s Lecture

In a true Pecha Kucha style, each speaker had a fixed number of rapidly changing slides. 20 slides, each of 20 seconds.

This was an opportunity to put lots of designers on the stage; potentially little preparation was needed and the topic could be very personal, supremely general, or even a subject you talk about all the time.

Speakers included: Bibliotheque, SomeOne, ‘It’s Nice That’, Andy Cameron, MrBingo, Simon Waterfall, Graham Fink, Neville Brody, Kate Moross and Tomato Design.

The tube strike didn’t bode well but the walk from Charing Cross to Bloomsbury created a thirst for experience. Despite the travel issues, Logan Hall was packed with skinny jeans and tightly button shirts.

The format worked really well, the time limit forced people to plan and to stick to their allocated slot.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect was the way that each presenter adapted the form to their own style.

The most notable speaker was advertising’s Graham Fink. Who, Madmen style, came on in a silk gown, wielding a Samurai sword. I couldn’t tell you what he said I was too confused by what I was looking at.

Biblioteque were structured, scripted and controlled; Neville Brody was inspiring and ranty; Simon Waterfall’s slides were random and shambolic; MrBingo was eclectic and esoteric.

A young Kate Moross was a very welcome female presence amongst the laddy nature of the evening (and maybe the industry as a whole). She was charmingly self-absorbed.

But of course my favourite section was from (someone from) Tomato. They presented a visual thesis about cock doodles, including some terrific examples from Google Earth. This is a house in Teesside, the owners took a year to discover that their teenage stunt had been on the roof while they’d been on holiday.