It's no secret that I am a big fan of Under Consideration's Brand New- I regularly link to their brand-review articles. They held their Brand New Conference at the beginning of September and they released the video footage of the conference, for purchase, a couple of weeks ago.

I was familiar with several of the speakers so I decided to download the videos. Whilst I enjoyed all the talks, the following were high points for me:

Simon Manchipp of Someone gave a really entertaining talk, loaded with animated GIFs, and some very interesting ideas. He spoke of designing a branding system, rather than a branding mark (logo). His example of the figures used in the London 2012 Olympics were very clever.

Yolanda 'Yo' Santosa of ferroconcrete gave a great talk about, amongst other projects, branding Pinkberry Frozen Yoghurts, Hustler Sex Toys (that should improve my Google hits) and her own project Fruute.

Aaron Draplin was as entertaining as ever- I still want to see the part that they cut out of the recorded presentation. I may have to visit Belfast to see him live.

For Massimo Vignelli, it was more of a chat with the host Armin Vit than a presentation, but it was still very interesting and informative. Vignelli is one of the old masters of branding and design, with work going back to the sixties.

Mike Rigby of Interbrand Australia gave a great presentation and touched onto a similar thread as Simon Manchipp, where they design branding systems rather than a brand mark. He went through a case study for the work they did for Alzheimer’s Australia how they used a branding system rather than a simple logo.

I thought the eight videos were well worth the $30 fee. The production was fine, the speaker and slides were both constantly visible, which is great, better than jumping between the speaker and slides. I had seen Aaron Draplin give his talk elsewhere online, but I was unfamiliar with the other speaker's talk.

Recommended.