Creatively Speaking

Inspiring” is a word that often makes an appearance when you talk to Peter O’Dwyer, one of the three men behind OFFSET. Speaking several weeks before the conference takes over Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, bringing 24 of the world’s finest creative minds to an Irish stage, he smiles at the “organised chaos” of the build-up.

It all started in 2008, when O’Dwyer teamed up with Richard Seabrook and Bren Byrne.
“Richard is a designer and creative director, Bren’s an illustrator, while I have a background in photography and design as well as street art,” he explains. “So we all come from very diverse creative backgrounds. We didn’t really want OFFSET to be a design conference, or an illustration conference. It had to be about the creative arts.
“Our first one was in Liberty Hall and there were about 500 people there. We sold it out in a matter of weeks. It was a huge undertaking but we always wanted to put on something of world class quality in Ireland and have something that people would want to come to from all over the world. Even in the first year, a guy came from Colorado, there were people from all over Europe. We realised it was something special.”
Year two saw an ambitious leap to the then-Grand Canal Theatre, quadrupling its size. Needless to say, it suited the scale.
“There’s a huge amount of energy in the creative community in Ireland,” notes O’Dwyer. “They’re incredibly supportive of everything we do.”
Developing OFFSET against the background of recessionary times has made it all the more challenging.
“We’re losing our intellectual bank of knowledge through emigration,” O’Dwyer observes. “Ireland has always been renowned for its educated, young population. We want Dublin to be successful, we want Ireland to be successful. We don’t have coal resources, we don’t have diamond mines that I’m aware of! It’s our people. They are a massively important resource and creativity is what differentiates us. When you think of Finland, when Nokia was set up, suddenly that turned them into a world power. These big companies can suddenly change a country very, very quickly. We need innovators and insightful thinkers to create the future Ireland.”
As O’Dwyer puts it, the discussions at OFFSET inspire these people. When you ask him about his own highlights over the years, he confesses that it’s like choosing a favourite child.
“Someone like Daniel Eatock, who designed the Big Brother logo, was a revelation because people were expecting him to be a designer and he was actually quite conceptual. Last year we had Stefan Sagmeister, who is another incredibly inspiring speaker. He’s done TED Talks and the room was absolutely jammed for that. If somebody is coming as an illustrator, it’s the graphic designer that’s before or after the person they’re coming to see that inspires them more. As soon as you see people talking about the crazy stuff they’ve done, it just blows your mind.”
As for this year?
“From a technology point of view we have Iain Tait and Ji Lee coming this year. Iain is famous for being involved in the Old Spice campaign. He was then head-hunted to go work as the creative director of Google Creative Labs. We met him a couple of weeks ago when we were in New York. What he’s doing at the moment is just astonishing. He’s working with the head guys on projects such as Google Glass and really seeing how Google can make people’s lives easier. Speaking to him, it comes from a very wonderful, positive place, it doesn’t seem like a big, evil corporation. Olivieri Toscani, who is famous for doing the Benetton campaign, will be an inspiring talk. He’s an incredibly passionate person. He doesn’t mince his words.”
All set – I mean OFFSET – then?

OFFSET takes place at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, from April 5 - 7.