Last week was Cut and Paste time in Amsterdam. During the whole evening, the battle was on at amsterdam’s most traditional club, Paradiso. Back in 2006 I briefly wrote about the Cut and Paste design tournament after seen a video done by the guys from Cool Hunting. Last Thursday I got the chance to see it live.

On 3 Design Categories: 2D Design, 3D Design and Motion Graphics, 4 designers battle each other in front of the crowd for the most WOWing images. Except for the Motion graphics category, the designers have 15 minutes for each assignment. The assignments range from creating an LP cover on the 2D category to the designing, well, sort of… lets say, visualizing a spacecraft on the 3D category. On the Motion graphics, the 4 contestants had to come up with a video on theme, “Show me the Money”. They had more time than the other categories (8 hours, finishing up on the end of the event) due to the complexity of working with large animation files etc…

On the first place of the 2D category, was Jordy van den Nieuwendijk, which came up with an amazing LP cover with the theme “change”, where he painted modified (scratched) versions of his face on the LP, leaving a “cut out” on the cover, which blended one of this faces to the cover, all in a nice rough cartoon style. The “runner up”, receiving the honors for the second place was from guess where, R-I-O D-E J-A-N-E-I-R-O B-R-A-S-I-L ! Yep, Representing! It was Martin Holzmeister, a graphic designer and VJ from Rio, who now lives and works in Amsterdam. He made a awesome intervention on the assignment “poster with the theme: Icon”, mixing the symbol of the city of amsterdam (the 3 X’s on top of each other) with the crossed arms done by supporters from the most famous soccer team in Brasil, Flamengo.

The 3D category left me wanting to join next year…I had an impression that most of the 3D Designers that were participating came actually from the character design scene rather than the industrial design scene, due to the software that they were using, Zbrush, Softimage and Maya, there was no one was using Nurbs modelers or parametric software. Industrial designers, step up!

The event was packed with people from the dutch design scene and was a blast to check. I definitely recommend!