Austin, Texas. I’ve heard so much about it being a great place for art, music and design — a hub of creativity — that when Sarah and I got permission to go to the 2009 HOW Design Conference we were stoked. Then we stepped off the airplane and realized we’d have to be careful not to end up stroked.
Ausin, in June, is H-O-T. Like, 104+ degrees. Yowsas! (Did I mention that we had a 10 block walk from our hotel to the Austin Convention Center?!)
Luckily for us, we were given the big Texas welcome, the venue was air conditioned and we were treated to an array of PowerPoint presentations that weren’t put together by engineers. (One of the recurring topics discussed was how so many business people are unaware how great design can affect their successes — and failures. I wish that Sarah and I could run an instructional forum at our workplace to get people to understand that there’s really something substantial behind the time and effort put behind good design, and how a well-crafted presentation makes a world of difference to the viewers.)
We took our between-session breaks outside — a temporary baking of our bones before the chilly numbness of hour-plus presentations, barely padded seating and sometimes rambling, side-tracked speakers. Several of the sessions were as-expected; well-done with familiar scholastic information (Jenn & Ken Visocky O’Grady’s Information Design Dissected) or thoroughly littered with examples amidst a light explanation of why certain things worked and an emphasis on working with your client (DJ Stout’s Variations on a Rectangle: The Art of Magazine Design).
A few presentations were exceptional — Michael Osborne’s Design That Matters; Cameron Moll’s Good vs. Great Design. Von Glitschka’s Living a Creatively Curious Life may not have told me anything necessarily new… but his presentation was fun and interesting, threaded with great real-life examples and repeatedly encouraging all of us to investigate our curiosity to find inspiration (and even leading to an impromptu dance session at the end!).
Some, unfortunately, were crap. An explorative, explanatory review of the process behind logo design turned into a self-indulgent and ill-prepared portfolio review. One session on Open Type (fonts) didn’t even begin to live up to its program description, so we walked out and slipped into another session that was discussing how to market yourself (or your company) using social media. We weren’t being rude: session-hopping was encouraged so that all attendees would really feel like they got the most out of their three conference days.
Our last session on Friday was a bonus one — Germany’s Tobias Meyerhoff gave a presentation on his company’s software, Font Explorer X. Sarah and I were dutifully impressed — as only Type A, OCD organizers and perfectionists can be — with the cababilities of said software (currently only available for Mac, but coming soon for you PC users!). Basically, to steal Tobias’ line, if you use fonts on a regular basis, Font Explorer X is for you. The biggest draw is its ability to let you manage your entire font library in an iTunes-like window, and to activate/deactivate fonts based on the programs you’re using. (For any designer who has a decently large collection of fonts and who’s ever had to wait for FOREVER for Illustrator to load its font libraries, you know what this could mean for your productivity and system resources!) Basically, Sarah and I were impressed and I believe we’ll be downloading a free 30-day trial of the Pro version for home use within a week of returning home.*
Late Friday night we realized that Saturday’s single session was based off of an article in the last issue of HOW Magazine (subject: copywriting), which we’d both read… Looking back through the issue, provided to us in our conference goodie bag, we could practically envision the speaker’s presentation slides based on the bullets in the article. So, we made an executive decision to skip the session and spend the day checking out Austin.
This, as you will soon see, was a most excellent judgement call on our part.
* Jenn — Conference goodie package coming your way later on, with coupon(s) inside. *BUG*
