Five Questions with CXI Conference

Neon Moiré sets out to interview festival organizers and tries to find out what motivates them to organize their events and what they are most excited about. Interview with Prof. Robert Paulmann, Bielefeld School of Design. About organizing the biggest corporate and brand identity conference in Europe: CXI conference in Bielefeld, Germany.

Why are you organizing CXI Conference?

The idea came in 2008 when I attended a conference where different agencies presented corporate identity case studies. After one of these presentations one of the attendees stood up and revealed himself as the client of the respective project and gave some additional insights. These comments were extremely enlightening and made the whole situations which led to the branding process and the result even more understandable. That was the impulse for CXI and that’s why the cases at CXI are always presented by the client and the agency together.

What is the biggest challenge for CXI this year?

The biggest challenge is the organization of the conference parallel to our activities and duties at the university.

Is the conference a side project?

No, it is in fact an university project which is organized by some of my students and me. Therefore all the revenues go directly to our faculty and can of course only be used for faculty-projects – which is very good because German universities normally do not really have any money for special projects.

How do you curate the program?

Our goal is to show the entire bandwith: large and small corporations, two-people design offices and big international agencies, cultural and commercial projects etc. It doesn’t work every time but we always try hard ;-)

What do you want your audience to take home after a CXI visit?

Our two main target groups are design and marketing students and practitioners from agencies and corporations. Speaking about the design and marketing students: They should be aware of the context they work within, which means: design is not the sole impuls for a company to start a branding process, but design is an extremely powerful tool to support and develop a brand. As for the practitioners: hopefully valuable insights. and for all of them: fun memories and inspiration!

All speakers work on amazing projects but we, Neon Moiré, look especially forward to the story behind the collaboration of Darren Bowles (Moving Brands) × Sascha Weisshaupt (Swisscom) and Marco Spies (Think Moto) × Stéphane Pingaud (Flyiin) who launched their new corporate identity a few week ago.

Speakers

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