OFFSET - Aaron Duffy

Aaron Duffy is a creative director and visual communicator. He has produced adverts for big companies such as Google and Audi - these adverts have been highly well received, earning awards and accolades.

For his offset talk, Aaron talked about the statement "Do it for the meal or do it for the reel" - meaning you can create work to be paid and earn a living, or you can create personal work, out of passion and love for your subject. Aaron came up with 12 steps in order to close the gap between these 2 options.

1. Why are you creative?

2. Remember where you started

3. Rethink art history

4. Give credit

5. Ease up on personal style

For Aaron this was very important. His personal style was beginning to shape his career very definitively, so much so he almost turned down an opportunity to create an advert for Google. This advert was not his usual style and he only took the job on the advice of friends. Taking the job lead to one of Aaron's biggest pieces of work, reputation wise. Before this advert, Google had never advertised on a television basis, and when the advert premiered during the Superbowl, it quickly earned the title of being one of the best Superbowl adverts of all time. This case shows exactly that by stepping out of a comfort zone, you may be able to make the best piece of work you ever have.

6. Turn creative problem solving into creative problem making

7. Help develop new technology

8. Consider illusions

This is a personal passion of Aaron's and perfectly exemplified by his work on OK Go's music video for The Writing's on the Wall. The clever illusions mirror the lyrics of the song - where the people in the relationship spoken about think that they understand eachother, but are always surprised - hence the illusions.

9. Forget the meal and the reel 

Sometimes work is done under neither of these premises. Aaron helped to create the movement #asktransfolks for anybody to be able to ask any trans people questions they have, and for these people to directly reply to the questions in the form of a short video. This movement was created not as a career move or for a personal reason, but it was a project Aaron felt he needed to create.

10. Create new business models

11. Keep making stuff
By keeping on making things, anything, you can keep your creativity flowing and your mind fresh.

12. Know that it will be hard

This advice really resonated with me. I think when I first came to uni I really underestimated how hard the the work would be and how massive the workload is. I have now realised and really upped my game, I had to learn how to be more motivated.