Held on the last Thursday of every month, Glug Together, is a Lon­don based event for design­ers, cre­at­ives, cli­ents and friends. This event was star­ted by Ian Hamb­leton of Stu­dio Out­put and Nick Clem­ent of Pro­fero / Made Stu­dio. This Lon­don Digital Week Spe­cial edi­tion was held at The Queen of Hox­ton, a club-bar-art space in Shored­itch on Thursday Septem­ber 24th 2009.

Kana: So, what was your impres­sion of Glug? I wasn’t able to attend this one.

Nick: I hope you feel bet­ter now.  We didn’t have much time to attend all the net­work­ing events dur­ing Lon­don Digital Week. How­ever I man­aged to find the time to attend this one. The name Glug and the strap line “Cre­at­ive Drinks & Not­work­ing™” are very fit­ting for this event. There was a lot of noise, drink­ing and con­ver­sa­tion from around 400 attendees.

Kana: How were the presentations?

Nick: I arrived a little late so wasn’t able to get a front row seat, which made hear­ing dif­fi­cult. I saw a present­a­tion by Mer­lin Nation, a motion graph­ics designer. He showed some good work, espe­cially a piece that used super 8 foot­age inter­twined with some smart motion design. The presenter seemed to be bat­tling with the audi­ence to get atten­tion and like­wise I was bat­tling to hear him. I returned upstairs to join the people net­work­ing with beer in hand.

Kana: So it was more of a net­work­ing event, rather than a present­a­tion event? More people are hold­ing net­work­ing events recently in the cre­at­ive industry. Rather than net­work­ing online through the use of social net­work­ing sites like Twit­ter or LinkedIn, it’s more often as effect­ive to talk to someone face to face. Net­work­ing events can be very intim­id­at­ing for some indi­vidu­als. Provid­ing the oppor­tun­it­ies of net­work­ing in the envir­on­ment where people can buy drinks and have fun would make it easier for everyone.

Nick: When I was start­ing out as a designer I wasn’t aware of these type of events. I did go to some but they were of smal­ler scale and often held in more unwel­com­ing loc­a­tions. It cer­tainly didn’t seem to be as easy to par­ti­cip­ate if you’re were a young designer or a start-up com­pany. Stu­dio Out­put, Digital Gurus (a recruit­ment agency who organ­ised the Table Ten­nis Tour­na­ment) and the organ­isers have done a great job organ­ising this event to encour­age cre­at­ive people to net­work in a com­fort­able envir­on­ment. Cre­at­ive people are often intro­vert and can spend a lot of time work­ing in a stuffy office or home. Some of us some­times need a push to act­ively com­mu­nic­ate together.
Kana: So the organ­isers have taken an import­ant role in activ­at­ing young parts of the industry, which essen­tially leads to the fur­ther improve­ment and devel­op­ment of the Lon­don cre­at­ive industry as a whole. This form of cas­ual net­work­ing has been made easier by the pop­ular­ity of Face­book groups and other sim­ilar meet up websites.