180 participants, 25 countries, 5 continents, 18 languages – all on one campus. This makes the 24th IFVP the first conference to be held on university premises, at Montclair State University. Pretty convenient, as the students were on summer vacation and the participants could stay in their dorms this year. You wanna know if the International Forum of Visual Practitioners was as exciting as in the previous year? We’ll tell you.
Of course, we could take the easy way out and write something like “yes, it was exactly as exciting, what else?” But we want to provide you with as many impressions as possible by uploading some pictures, so that you can imagine how it was. We’ve already covered the location, the campus was great. What else can’t be missing at such an event? The people, exactly. Just like every year, we’ve met so many amazing people at our booth. And this is something we really love about these kind of events: fans visiting us, giving us feedback and enjoying the time together. And then there were the speakers as well. There were three very interesting speeches on facilitation, craftmanship and leadership, and the so-called Business Panel of Our Peers, featuring eight leading figures that exchanged views on “business”. So, everybody indeed got his money worth.
But as an extremely popular conference, the IFVP obviously had even more to offer. This year, there were also various workshops on the four main topics mentioned above, held by renowned personalities. And since some of these said personalities happen to be Neuland Ambassador®, we invited them to do a few Mini Workshops for us. They took place at the Neuland booth and, therefore, the participants had all material they could ask for on hand. Needless to say, we had already been thinking about which products to bring for a long time before crossing the Atlantic. We decided to take a good mix of new stuff and familiar favorites with us. We knew we couldn’t fly all the way to Montclair without the TwinOne, Orbits and Hexits, but also Estatics and different markers. And we could never leave you high and dry, so we packed enough refill ink, too. But one product was definitely a surprise to everyone. ‘Cause we had neither announced the new myWorkBoard in advance, nor had we uploaded it to our online shop. And at Sam Bradd’s workshop, the participants could even test our new product and give us some feedback.
Mini Workshops, Mega Success
We have to admit that we’ve started off pretty well when our twin Ambassadors Renatta Algalarrondo and Donatella Pastorio presented our new twin marker on the second day of the IFVP … twice. You see, we are extremely creative when it comes to the Neuland TwinOne®. But all kidding aside and back to topic: The workshop “Marker SPA” basically consisted of two parts. Oops, we did it again. But this was the last time, promised, ’cause while the first twin workshop was about how to store, refill and clean your material, the second workshop focused on travelling with your equipment. Now, one might ask why we didn’t divide this by the magic number of the second day but this would be a bit much, right?
To keep the balance, we will now sum up the next two workshop days in one paragraph as well. Although, or maybe because Renatta and Donatella did such a good job, our Ambassador Filippo Buzzini upped the ante and showed us four creative ways of adding some spice to your titles in just 20 minutes, with the AcrylicOne and the Neuland ChalkOne®. And he passed on the latter to Sam Bradd, who finished the week with an amazing workshop about helpful hacks to increase productivity. Of course, we know that by now you are probably a bit disappointed if you missed this year’s IFVP. But there’s a silver lining: We filmed every Mini Workshop and will upload the videos soon. So, follow us on social media and stay tuned!
