Max Siedentopf

0:04[Applause]

0:19from Jamaica yeah hi my name is Maxine Hoff and today. I just want to show you some recent projects that I've been working on but before I do that I want to talk a little bit about my background and where I come from because I'm pretty sure that no one here has any idea who I actually am even though I have a German accent I'm originally from Namibia it's this country down here in case you've never heard of it it's most famous for having the oldest desert in the world a lot of beautiful animals and the latest Mad Max movie was filmed there.

1:05So I'm very proud of after school I went on to study in Berlin and since 2013 I work at the communications agency called castles Kramer vs Kramer was founded by Eric castles and yarn Kramer who you can see here and since this year I'm one of the creative partners of the agency that's me in the middle I started the first we have three different agencies the first one that I started working at was in LA in the beautiful Chinatown and from there on I'm moved to Amsterdam to work at our first office which is based on an old church it used to look like this and looks a little bit like this more and since last year I moved to London to work at our third office some of you might know it it used to be based at Hoxton square and we also had a gallery but we recently moved to London Fields mainly because it's a lot nicer to barbecue over there.

2:16I just cast crema we like to do a lot of different things for example we make advertising this is an old ad we made for diesel which pretty much shows you how you can live forever by drinking pee we do a lot of branding and identities for example this was for the city of Amsterdam and we also have a lot of hotel clients for example one of them is citizen M we came up with the naming and branding and communication for it and also our first ever client was a hotel it's called the Hans Brinker budget hotel in Amsterdam which is also considered by many as the worst hotel in the world. And we sometimes make things like this Hans Brinker budget hotel Amsterdam it can't get any worse ♪

3:18but we'll do our best ♪

3:28and I think that's very interesting because I think a lot of advertising but also design and photography and filmmaking I always tries to be as perfect as possible everyone is aiming for perfection.

3:39But I think as a creative that doesn't really make sense because I creativity is a never ending process so if you try to be perfect that's pretty much a dead end so also with Hans Brinker it could never be the best hotel in the world. So it was a lot more interesting to go the other way and be the worst hotel and I think in general that's often a lot more interesting the next project I want to show I use for graphic design first of all it's called we love graphic design and it's based in Copenhagen and they asked us to come up with the identity for that year's festival which I thought was really nice but I couldn't help but think about something like this when hearing the name but looking at the previous identities that other designers made at all they were always very trendy and very contemporary and it almost felt a little bit like they were trying to hide this association which I thought was quite a shame.

4:35And I thought that it's much nice that you. Actually embrace this.

4:39So we came up with this logo but I think just loving graphic design doesn't really make you a good graphic designer or doesn't it make your work very interesting I think you also need to love a lot of other things for example collecting vintage dams football ice fishing or listening to I ryebeck reggae because I think those things inspire you and make you work a little bit more interesting so we also had to make some posters for the different speakers and here we also asked them to tell us some of their other interests and the posters looked like this then.

5:19So Illya Jayhawks really loves graphic design but also cats and larger OSH Eric castles loves graphic design but also flower arrangements and tender massages Oh Tobias fünke Shania loves graphic design but also horseback riding and collecting navel fluff and yeah we also continued that branding of course for everything else so for example instead of just having festival wristbands everyone got a little tacky heart which looked like this and the great thing is they were blinking I thought that was really nice and then the next slide is probably the one that I'm most proud of as a graphic designer because the festival also asked us to come up with some festival banners so yeah in general I think this is really important that John drove over obsess about what you do I think it's good to also just do a lot of other things because they will always inspire you to make more interesting work. And I think at Casas Cramer we also take this really serious because next to working in advertising and design we direct documentaries and music videos children's TV shows we make products we make exhibitions and we publish our own books and I think in general does that's really the beauty of the time we live in because back in the day as a designer you could only design as a photographer you were photographer but through the internet and new technology all these borders are gone and you can basically make whatever you want as long as you have a nice idea so next week has this cream I also like to do a lot of other things.

7:18And I want to show you some of those projects for example sometimes I was a work as a family photographer where I make things like this and the series is called horribly happy holidays and it. Basically just takes stereotypical family photos and reenact them I was to work as a fruit sculpture some time.

7:41So I just combined the two sometimes I was to work as a music video director this is the new video I'm making together with the amazing production company riff raff for Dutch band called delict yeah yeah it's pretty mesmerizing to look at I can keep it on for a few more seconds yeah okay enough and yes sometimes I just really like to help strangers with what I do I finally found out something very sad like 10 years ago you would always see a lot of really cool pimped cars driving around but for some reason yeah you don't really see them anymore and it doesn't really make sense because we live in a time where individuality and self-expression is that an all-time high everyone wants to be special but for some reason no one really makes that hard special anymore so I decided to help a few strangers and always woke up at four in the morning with a lot of cardboard and turned a few ordinary cars and few super cars the series has also caused slapdash supercars because I basically just slapped it on took a photo and dashed away as quickly as possible I think we've reached the halfway of this presentation you can check your phones out ♪

9:41welcome back I hope you had a nice break so getting back to what I said before I think it's really nice if you can use what you do to help others and sometimes also try to just have you save the planet at least once a week may it be through recycling or actually using what you do to improve your surroundings my attempt at that was a set of instructions called instructions for world peace and was basically inspired by tutorials and online DIY instructions to achieve world peace well peace might seem very ambitious and really big but I think that's actually also something it's really easy to achieve because I think it's something very personal and if everyone just changes a little bit their behavior we would have world peace in no time for example if everyone would just stay in bed and sleep all day we wouldn't have any wars crime rates would also lower significantly and we would have world peace I think this one is also very important refrain from reading the news practice every religion at once and smile at strangers at this point it's maybe also good good to mention that I think will because will peace is something very personal I want you to use myself as a model but because I also had to take the photos I couldn't really do that.

11:15So I asked my dad it's my day so dad if you ever see this video on YouTube thanks for putting up with my or otherwise hide from your problems and then.

11:36I think the only thing you can use wait eventually we will have world peace next to photographing and directing I also really like making photo books and one of the latest ones I've made is a sticker book that are made in collaboration with the German sticker book published in Eclipse off magazine and they usually just make illustration books and they asked me to make a photo edition which I thought was really great because I don't think there's a lot. That's better than a sticker better but if you look at sticker books usually the stickers are really really huge and sweet and in general I think photography is always very pretty and beautiful and I think we're surrounded by so much beauty that we can't even take it in anymore we are almost a little bit numb towards all of this this amazing beauty so as a theme I came up with the name aversive adhesives and it's basically goes the other direction.

12:32And it really shows images that are aversive that are disgusting and we want to look away but because of their verse of nature and that they would come adhesive and you yeah they really got stuck with you. And it's also just a bad word joke joke on stickers and for this I worked with 12 really great photographers and I think it's really interesting tools to see how every one of them approaches the subject and the nice thing about the magazine is every single thing is a sticker even the cover even the title and it's over 200 stickers and but next to that I'm not only interested in disturbing images because I that might be a little bit just serving I'm also interested in in the everyday the things that surround us the the mundane the boring the things you don't really even know it as the ordinary two years ago.

13:41I founded the International photography magazine called ordinary together with a designer Yuki copper's and in short like every every issue is about one very ordinary object the first one was about plastic cutlery which you also get as an extra on the cover of the magazine because I thought as a kid it was really great that you always get a free toy so I really wanted my magazine also to have something that you get for free and it's also a really good guarantee that if people don't like the contents of the magazine well at least they got a freeze instead of plastic cutlery this ordinary object was then sent to 20 different photographers around the world to make it extraordinary and yeah these are just some of them the second one was about a sponge and I think it's really great to see because these are all objects that you use every single day and you really don't even notice them.

14:45But these are artists really achieved like an Auton really try to push the boundaries as much as possible and you see them in completely new ways the second one was the cotton a third one a cotton bud and then the sock maybe it's also good to mention about the art direction we try to keep everything as the ordinary as possible the dimensions are an ordinary a for the typeface we uses Arial the colours we use are the preset colors of InDesign and also we don't really curate all the images are alphabetical order and we don't have any text so we really try to make our job as easy as possible and this.

15:53This is the latest one which launched two weeks ago which we did in collaboration with Nike Italy for the mxj so we of course needed something that fits today. And we decided to go for one of the most ordinary things air so and the great thing about.

16:11This is you also of course got some free air on the cover and I think this was also a really interesting issue because we basically asked people to visualize something. That's usually invisible and I think the results are really interesting and this brings me to the end of my talk yeah the the issue launched two weeks ago. But it's almost completely sold out.

16:41So I have a few copies here in case you want to have a look or also buy one and so I wanted to finish off with saying don't take yourself too serious just have fun and most importantly surround yourself with nice people like all all the things I showed you today it's it's never me alone it's always a lot of really inspiring and tons of people and these are just a few of them Thanks [Applause]