I returned to Nottingham again this January for what will most likely become an annual trip for as long as Simon Collison and gang decide that their efforts are worth the rewards, or at least worth all the hard work.
Arriving the night before with Ben Coleman, Peter Coles, Rick Hurst, Stefan Goodchild and Micheal Mckelvaney we had a great time at the Erskine organised pre conference bowling, stayed in the delightful if slightly misleading Lace Market Hotel.
For me their efforts are really worth it. This year the talks were amazing, especially Dan Mall who kicked everything off in fine style with words of wisdom for all designers working on client work. Make the clients part of your team, wise words indeed.
Dan was followed by Naomi Atkinson with a talk titled 'Going Beyond' which delivered a helpful reminder on how we can all move our own careers forward, its good to rememebr that what we do for our clients we can also do for ourselves and we often aren't the best at selling ourselves, which is weird. Well personally speaking I think we can all brand ourselves but continuing that brand into our daily lives is probably where we fall over. What do you say when someone asks what do you do?
Third up Travis Schmeisser with We Used To Build Forts. This was a good talk, one which I agreed with, but hadn't thought about before. Basically we used be to children on the web, playing, experimenting and beaing creative. Now we build products that only allow our users to theme and very rigidly modify templates. Consider what users needed to do to achieve their desired results in My Space compared with what we allow users to do today. Once upon a time we encouraged users to learn and experiment and now we force them to bend templates in order to get creative.