The best event I've been to so far — three days at one of Europe's leading festivals for creativity, design and branding.
- When
- Where
- Frankfurt, Germany
Three days in Frankfurt, at Forward Festival 2026. Talks, workshops, an Adobe evening — and the part I hadn't planned for, which was the talking. Designers and studios from all over Europe, in a building where nobody had to be sold on why any of this matters.
It's the best event I've been to so far. I want to be precise about why, because "it was so inspiring" is the kind of sentence that has stopped meaning anything by the time you're back at your desk on Monday.
A programme you work through, not sit through
What separates Forward from a conference is that it doesn't only put people on a stage. The three days ran as talks and workshops, and those two formats do completely different jobs.
A talk hands you someone's conclusions — the finished argument, the case study with the dead ends edited out. It's useful, and it's safe. A workshop makes you produce something badly, in a room full of people who do this for a living, with no time to polish it first.
Only one of those changes how you work.
The Adobe evening
A separate evening of short talks and an interactive session, which turned out to be the format I got the most out of all week.
Short talks are honest in a way long ones aren't. Cut a speaker down to a few minutes and they have to lead with the thing they actually believe, because there's no room left for the warm-up. And an interactive session does to an audience what a workshop does to a schedule: it stops you nodding along and makes you commit to an answer.
The hallway was the programme
I run the studio alone. I'd make that choice again, and it has exactly one real cost: there is nobody in the room to tell me I'm wrong.
Which is why three days of talking to designers and studios from across Europe is worth more than it sounds. Not networking — other people's cards don't interest me. Just the ordinary shop talk you can't have on your own: how someone else prices a rebrand, where they draw the line on revisions, what they do when a client falls in love with the wrong direction.
Half of what I took home didn't come from the stage.
That's not a criticism of the programme — it's what a good programme is for. Get the right people into one building and give them a reason to still be there at six in the evening.
