Saturday 25 September 2010

#crtweetup (Can't we just call it the Creative Review Twitter Meet up?)

Well life proceeds and I'm keeping busy.
Just finished my second week interning with The World of Interiors magazine, another two to go. It remains fascinating, and a lovely place to spend my days at the moment.

On a slightly more blogworthy note, on Thursday night I was persueded into going to Creative Review's inaugural 'Tweetup'... Or 'Meet up of people from Twitter'.
I'm not entirely sure what it was in aid of, I think both to celebrate the release of their photography annual, the fact that they have over 180,000 followers on Twitter, and generally to try and initiate a meeting of likeminded creative people in a creative space, to do creative things.

 The event was based in the design museum, a brilliant venue for starters. Upon entering, (free entry!) everyone was gifted with a free moleskine notebook and name sticker, plus a free drink voucher! I mingled for a bit until my friend arrived, and I must say, people were remarkably friendly and approachable. People just started up conversations randomly, and there were a lot of very interesting people there. Much helped by various activities, including a big table covered in a sheet of paper for drawing. In some ways, super fun, in some ways, quite intimidating, considering many of the people sitting at the table were very talented illustrators! I went for a selection of items relating to the evening. Mainly wine, beer, pens and magazines. (Oh, and Tower Bridge)



As the evening proceeded, we drifted upstairs, where everyone was gifted with a fairly decent sized bag of LEGO and instructed to build their dream house, inspired by the current John Pawson exhibition which at the design museum. This was probably the highlight of the night for me... a whole room of adults intensely concentrating on the structural integrity of their lego creations. There were even two Lego representatives there who had travelled all the way over from Denmark for the occasion! Our lego creations are now on display in the design museum alongside the John Pawson exhibition.






At the beginning of the night, everyone who wanted to had handed in a piece of their work, and after our lego creations were complete, it was downstairs again to see an exhibition of all our work that had been put together by some of the CR team. This was EXCITING! A piece of my work on display in the Design Museum! (Albeit only for one night...) I kind of wish I'd chosen something better, but it was based on what I had already printed at home. It was lovely to see everyone's work, plus projections of work submitted to the meetup's Flickr group, by people who couldn't be there. There was also a live feed of tweets using the #crtweetup hashtag. Technology, eh? (The first picture is stolen from CR's blog... I hope they don't mind!)







On my way out there was just time for a quick look around the amazing Brit Insurance designs of the year exhibition, and to pick up my 'goodie bag' containing a free copy of the Creative Review photography annual and this week's Design Week. (Plus any lego that we hadn't used on our houses - which was actually a pretty worthwhile amount!)




It was a beautiful warm early autumn evening, and I enjoyed my walk across Tower Bridge to get to the tube. A thoroughly worthwhile event, and very well organised. Great choice of sponsorship from Moleskine, Lego, and iStockphoto (Who provided the free drinks) too!

If they ever hold another one, I'd totally recommend going. You have to be on Twitter though, so if you're not already, get on over there! Some remain cynical, but I can honestly say that because of Twitter I have obtained some well paid freelance work, had curry with Brian Eno, and made new real life friends. You should give it a try too. Who knows where it might lead! (Yeah, I totally <3 Twitter, in case you didn't know :D)

1 comment:

Claire said...

THESE ARE NICE PHOTOS. You should put them up on facebook so I can star in lego photos.