Events
This Saturday rather than enjoying the rest the weekend had to offer I jumped in the back of a car and headed to Leeds for Think Visibility (or ThinkVis for short).
ThinkVis follows pretty much the normal conference mould in that it gets experts to speak in front of an audience about stuff that earns them money, in the case of ThinkVis this centres primarily on the world of search marketing.
After writing about Conferences yesterday it reminded me of a post I came across the other day. Paul’s post talks about design conferences being too safe, many of them going with the same old faces, speaking frequently about the same old things. I have to agree to a certain extent with what he says but I also agree that it’s difficult to strike a balance as well as to get people to pay to see complete unknowns, no matter how fantastic they may be.
But it’s not just the faces that should change it’s also the content. Too often you go to a design conference and learn about HTML and CSS, maybe something about design theory or how to survive as a freelancer. But all too often our jobs require more of us, Paul Boag’s session at FOWD this year highlighted this simple truth. For myself working at Bronco I feel means I’ve had to develop further than if I was at any other company. Not only do I have to know about the bread and butter of design and development but I also have to have an understanding of SEO, being that this is what Bronco is best known for. Yet at design conferences this is hardly raised, the concept frequently seen as evil and anti-user.
I’ve not exactly been in the business that long, only 4 years, which is depressing when you discover more talented web geeks that have both more experience and happen to be younger than me.
Any way I digress.
In these four years it’s been pretty apparent that although there is some excellent work coming out of web design studios around the country that the main hubs of web types seems to be in the south, namely London, Brighton and Bath for whatever reason. And because these cities are where the web design ‘scene’ is at these cities are where most upcoming designers flock to, either working for the high profile agencies in the area or simply there to try and make connections with other web types.
Continue reading “Thankfully Conferences are coming up norf”
Future of Web Design (FOWD) 2010 is the third year I’ve attended the popular web design conference and this year quite a bit has changed. For me some of the changes were a little hit and miss but overall I’ve come away having learnt a lot and more importantly come away inspired to jump back into the job I love.
Rather than mess around reviewing all the individual sessions of the conference I thought I’d stick to highlighting some of the good bits and some of the crappy bits; but first the good bits: