For the past five years, adobo has never failed to assemble the greatest minds in design. This year was no different. As the adobo Design Series officially concluded last March 30, 2017 at the Mind Museum Special Exhibition Hall at Bonifacio Global City (BGC), Taguig, delegates were served with nothing less than the very best of their respective fields. With six revered speakers and a workshop conducted by D&AD’s finest trainer, we look back on the talks that ignited a spark in every single one of the 100 attendees.
Bruce Duckworth, president of D&AD UK, kicked off the design series with his talk on the science of good design and its implications to shifting societal views: “Design is becoming less about selling stuff, and more about creating,” says Duckworth, “If you really believe in creative excellence, now is the time where people in this industry who are doing design could really make a difference.” To him, the world is a fantastic place for designers right now, where the opportunity to design in vast and theirs for the picking.
Patrick Cabral, a Multidisciplinary Designer, shaped his talk all about the hardships of the creative world and how to go far regardless of one’s initial background, “In my family, art wasn’t important,” shares Cabral, “What was important was manual labor—my parents have been working since they were kids. Art wasn’t encouraged.”
Ending the morning session was Wawi Navarozza, co-founder of Thousandfold & Wawi Navarozza Studios a contemporary photographer and artist by day and a singer for a punk-rock band called “The Late Isabel” at night. She talked on the origin of most of her works, which were the struggles of her career as a creative. “Like everyone, we [the speakers] followed a path to self-actualization by just doing a lot of the work we love and a lot of disappointments at the middle, and having to live with our decisions,” she relays to the delegates.
At the end of the first day, Alex Lampe gave a summary of what he would be teaching in his workshop the next day, called the “Internet of Things,” how agencies should be marrying the idea of human experience and digital technology to create products that can be utilized in the future. On the second day, delegates were treated to a workshop, where they were split into groups and were asked to come up with a product based on his talk.
CJ De Silva-Ong highlighted the importance of having truth and sincerity in our ads. A good ad for her needs to come from the heart, and should never steer away from what it actually is. “Real creativity comes from problem-solving, zooming into what humans need, what the world needs,” was her advice to the delegates of the event.
In his talk, Quark Henares, Director of Globe Studios in Globe Telecom, stressed the need for the Philippines to have its own original quality content, especially during this digital age. For him, it was a bad idea for the Philippines to churn out episode after episode on a daily basis, as this stretches the story and leaves little to no room for development. He also encouraged everyone to do original content, sharing Globe’s story on becoming the number one telecommunications company in the Philippines as of March 29, “They call it the ‘TelCo’ cliff,” Henares says, “Where call and text are going down while data is going up. […] [This is why] Globe decided to focus on the next stage of communications.”
And the perfect end to this series was Harvey Tolibao, the noted artist for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Dark Horse Comics, whose talk not only was infectiously hilarious, but no less educational and inspiring. When sharing a story about a former classmate stealing his work, he shared a motto that stuck to him for the rest of his life, “He told me, ‘It’s not your talent that was stolen, but the product of it,’” he reiterated, “’You can always start with something new.’”
(The main photo was taken by our intern, Jerico Mojares)
