Plus International Design Festival

Plus was an international design festival in Birmingham. It ran three times, in October 2006, October 2007 and November 2008, and I was one of the directors of Plus Expo Ltd, the not-for-profit company that ran it, from the start until early 2008. The work was unpaid: I wrote at the time that I was "a director working (again, voluntarily)".

It was a collaboration between three Birmingham design agencies - Clusta, Fluid and my own agency, 3form - working with Typevents, who ran international typography events.

The festival's own About page put it plainly: "The Plus International Design Festival is managed by Plus Expo Ltd, a company limited by guarantee (not-for-profit), with registered offices in Birmingham." The six directors it listed were Caroline Archer, Matthew Clugson, James Glover, me, Alexandre Parré and Lara Ratnaraja.

Plus 06 came first: a five-day showcase of work by Birmingham's design agencies, freelancers and students, in a disused industrial warehouse in Eastside, next door to the Custard Factory. It was seen by over 1,700 visitors, and had an industry debate, seminars, portfolio sessions and an audience with Peter Saville. It ran alongside the Fast type, Slow type conference, 16 to 18 October 2006.

The festival's site was 3form's work, and it's the bit I can still point at: every archived page is signed "3formed with Wordpress".

In June 2007, in the run-up to the second festival, Plus put Illuminate into Moor Street station: an interactive light sculpture of 125 vertical glow-lights in the shape of a three-dimensional plus sign, which pulsed or played a note as people walked past.

Typevents made it, with Bobby Bird programming the interactive side. My own part was mostly the new festival site, so I can't claim much of it. I said at the time that all credit went to Typevents, and that Alexandre still couldn't feel his fingertips from wiring up the lights.

Plus 07 is the one I have the pictures of. It ran 17 to 21 October 2007 at the Wild Building on Floodgate Street in Digbeth, a former steel-pressing factory.

The night before it opened I wrote: "After a year of work, we're all very proud to announce that Plus - the international design festival opens its doors at 10am tomorrow for five days of inspirational design events, performances, talks by leading designers, exhibitions, interactive installations, even a real-life version of Pacman played out by humans and cameras!" It wouldn't have happened without Alexandre and Caroline of Typevents, who relocated from just north of London to Birmingham to make it happen.

The conference theme was 'moving type', type as in typography, letterforms and fonts, and it drew around 150 international delegates. Jasper Goodall, Si Scott and Zip Design were among the exhibitors, and the Design Business Association brought Michael Wolff for its evening lecture on the Friday, a talk I chaired.

Alongside the stands were the agencies' own installations, including walls that visitors wrote and drew on, and Secret Wars, a live drawing battle. The live Pac-Man game ran for most of the five days, and a video of it front-paged YouTube.

That year I didn't take a 3form stand. I concentrated on photographing the event, and on the website and the online content. One thread of that was a set of 'found type' photographs from the festival and the streets around Floodgate Street: some of the work on show, some of the user-generated pieces, and some signs and objects that most people there would have walked past.

Plus 08 ran 5 to 8 November 2008 at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth on the theme 'hybrid', opened by Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic, with Jonathan Barnbrook and Steve Bell speaking and two commissioned pieces, Timothy Donaldson's plus + nonplus and WOKmedia's Between Lines. Eye magazine found the lectures "packed".

By then I'd stepped back. In March 2008 I wrote that Plus was "also a non profit, but I made the hard decision to be involved from the sidelines for now". Companies House records my directorship from the company's incorporation on 7 February 2007 to 1 January 2008, and PLUS EXPO LIMITED (company number 06087422) was dissolved on 3 May 2011.