Break convention, break the rules, break the box, just break it! This was the overall theme for this year’s FITC Toronto Design & Technology Festival. Now in its seventh year, FITC Toronto is the largest event of its kind, attracting over 1,000 attendees internationally from more than 15 different countries. The festival includes the conference itself as well as a job fair, interactive exhibits and awards show. “The theme this year is about pushing the limits,” says Shawn Pucknell, founder and executive producer of FITC Toronto. "We want delegates to walk away from the festival with new ideas, new skills, new contacts and a new sense of purpose about their work."

Being a photographer and content creator for the web, I’ve always found it a challenge to create innovative projects for myself. It’s obviously important to create something that is visually engaging, but in recent times I’ve found that creating work that looks good is simply not enough, it should also be meaningful. So checking out the work of Brooklynbased Evan Roth at the Graffiti Research Lab seemed to be right up my alley. In his presentation he talked about the work he has done internationally, lasertagging buildings. Using large projectors and laser pens along with some handy code, Roth was able to draw temporary tags on buildings in an interactive way that brings the art of tagging to a massive scale. The code itself is open source, but Roth’s work is more about bringing art into the public space. He says that he doesn’t want to commercialise the process.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there was a lot of commercial work being shared during the various FITC presentations, but a focus was definitely placed on the challenges and how to overcome them. This was especially evident in the sessions by firms like Grupo W, based out of a small town in Mexico, and North Kingdom from Skelleftea, Sweden. Imagine using 90 per cent of your budget to hire a renowned animation company to get the job done right, which was the case for Grupo W. In the end, they produced an amazing campaign that put them on the map. And in the case of North Kingdom, they’ve helped form a collaborative community within their small city that has helped leverage their workflow. Both firms have shown that working in a world-class city isn’t required to produce world-class content; instead, it was all about hard work and innovation.

The keynote by Adobe’s Platform Evangelist Mike Downey and company definitely highlighted the various innovations in the industry. Downey, a self-proclaimed nonprogrammer, didn’t use slides but opted to share his presentation through an AIR application that he created himself. He then invited a few of his Adobe colleagues to share other innovations in the field, which included a couple of sneak-peek features that they are building into the upcoming CS4 release. Needless to say, the crowd was wetting themselves with anticipation as they applauded the various new animation techniques presented.

Of course, one can’t talk about FITC without mentioning the likes of designers Eric Natzke and Joshua Davis. What impressed me most about these two was their use of photography to capture inspiration, both in colour and design. They discussed the processes and methods that have led to their recent works, from initial thoughts to mistakes made along the way and finally a finished product. What’s really interesting is that both stressed the importance of making mistakes and looking at things in different ways and building on simplicity. It’s those unintentional mistakes that often lead them to the right path despite their initial ideas. It’s viewing something through the eyes of a child to realise the need to be more fluid. And it’s building up your process through a series of simple changes that creates the complexity in your work.

Robert Hodgin ended the conference with his talk about processing. His inspirations being projects that used numerous small objects to create a larger work, such as the art of Jennifer Maetre, who would create prickly sculptures out of a surplus of spare pencils. Hodgin also makes reference to the flocking methods of birds, whereby they randomly and collectively create various shapes and forms in-flight. In his presentation, Hodgin walked us through the steps he used to create random complexity through simplicity with the help of his processing methods. It definitely broke down the thought that complexity equalled difficulty.

Despite not being a Flash developer, I left FITC Toronto feeling inspired, armed with new methods of viewing my own medium. It definitely helped me break out of my own box, breaking down the complex into simpler processes in my head, making me question how and why I should work on various projects. All in all, mission accomplished.

In recent years, FITC has expended their programming on an international level. Look out for future FITC events happening this year: June sees it hit Chicago, Calgary in September, Korea in October, and Amsterdam again in February 2009. For full details on all the venues and ticketing, visit www.fitc.ca or be sure to watch Web Designer for further announcements.