Steve Doogan – OFFSET 2015

Something that I noticed straight away about Steve’s presentation was that he was one of the only speakers to leave the presentation podium and walk around the stage. His style of talk was quite interactive with the audience asking questions and having a bit of banter with some people in the front rows.

Steve opened his talk humorously by explaining some of the pranks he did whilst at University.

I really enjoyed his talk and would place it in my top 3 of the weekend for overall creativity, personality and engagement with his presentation. The talk was structured in two halves, first was all about his youthful life during his education, performing pranks following his first heartbreak from his girlfriend of 7 years (7 years in length, not 7 years old). The second half was about how his creativity had developed into professional terms and showed his illustrations and client work.

One of Steve’s pranks included dressing up as a chicken selling eggs on the side of the road. He sold no eggs.

Steve graffitied a large banner outside a church with the caption “not actual size” on a photo of a community worker.

Another of Steve’s pranks included riding a train round Glasgow sat underneath this advertisement.

Some of the pranks he had performed reminded me of the sort of work that Dave Gorman does. Doing public social experiments with people on trains and subtly adjusting large advertisement banners. It was all quite guerrilla and gritty, but hilarious nonetheless.

Instead of trawling through images of his work like some of the other speakers over the weekend, Steve showed a really well edited video of the pages in his sketchbook rapidly flipping past. It was much more effective than standard static images and he probably ended up showing more this way anyway. Unfortunately, I can’t find it online anywhere to share here so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Steve also gave a detailed breakdown of some of his illustrations from initial conception to sketching and through to final renderings.

Some initial sketching for an illustration.

To complete his illustration, Steve had to use a photo of his daughter sleeping.

The photo was then composited into his illustration.

The final rendered version of Steve’s illustration.

See some more of Steve’s work over on his website at doogan.ie

More from OFFSET 2015

Check out some other speakers from OFFSET 2015 with my roundup post that has links to all other OFFSET related things and keep checking back for more posts!

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