Last week Wes, Isabel and I finished a project we’ve been working on for almost 9 months: the new OFFF website. 

It started off in the autumn of 2010, where us three plus Laura and Pieter started as a concepting team to work on ideas for the new website during many many evenings and weekends. Once our final concept was done, Wes, Isabel and I took over and started wireframing and designing the website. A long process with a lot of trail and error. But we managed to design all the pages for the features we wanted to have. Development took over and started coding the website. Unfortunately, in this part, we had to loose a lot of features due to timing and budget. It gave us a lot more work than we thought in the last months, which lead to even more long nights and weekends. But we got the site live, although we had a lot more ideas we wanted to put into it.

But we didn’t stop there. Héctor, the organizer of OFFF, invited us to speak at OFFF as well. This was a huge opportunity for us which we didn’t take for granted. We decided we wanted to explain our concepting process to the folks at the festival, so we made a basic version of the presentation and presented this at OFFF Atelier and at Multi Mania. All presentations went great, but we needed it to be a bit more entertaining to satisfy the OFFF crowd.

So in the last couple of months, apart from the work we had on the website, we started to make some movies explaining each step of the concepting process. 

Wes and Isabel did an amazing job in making these movies, and we got a lot of help from friends, colleagues and family as well. The result were 10 beautiful movies we could add to the presentation, which you can see here.

And then came the big day: we left for Barcelona to attend OFFF. The festival took place from Thursday June 9th to Saturday June 11th. We were speaking the first day at 5PM. Coming back to Barcelona and meeting Héctor and the people from OFFF Atelier again was a blessing. We got a lot of love and support from these people which gave us a lot of energy to get on stage (although we were really really tired). So eventually, we sat down in front of a crowded roots room.

And it went great! Apart from the fatigue which made us spell words wrong, or loose ourselves in our sentences, we pulled it off well! We got a lot of applause and laughter, many tweets full of love and appreciation and even some interviews and interesting new contacts at the end of our session. It was a very exciting experience to be standing on the OFFF stage so early in our careers, and we couldn’t be more thankful to all the people who have helped us in getting this far.

The other days at the festival were very relaxing and inspiring. After months of hard work, we were finally able to chill a bit, and listen to interesting lectures from Nick Campbell, Hello Monday, Lernert and Sander, Jon Burgerman, eBoy, and many many more. There was a lot of love, respect and appreciation from the audience towards the artists, and it gave the whole event a special feeling. It made you realize what’s important in the industry we’re working in. 

Apart from the website we’ve made, the awesome movies we shot, the presentation we gave and the inspiring lectures we saw, the most rewarding part of this whole project was without doubt the fantastic team that I had a pleasure to work with. Wes and Isabel are one of the most interesting people I have worked with, and our team became a lot more than just three colleagues. It was so much fun to work with these people, and I’m immensely proud of the results we’ve made.

Most of the pictures in this post were taken by Wes. Thanks for that!