SXSW So Far
With Sunday's panels all wrapped up, I'm now halfway through SXSW 2007 and am thoroughly enjoying myself. This is my third time at the conference so I'm doing a better job managing my time by getting to see the people I want.
Most of what makes SXSW great is the face-to-face conversations that happen between everyone here. We read each-others blogs but nothing beats sitting down in the corridor between panels and hashing out what we thought about the one we just attended.
Here are some themes I've noticed so far:
- Although the audience seemed to really agree with the ideas in the Ignoring Your Users panel, everyone I talked to found the distinction between personas and activities to be a false dichotomy. Really looking at who your audience consists of and what they want is a valuable tool. Making sure to pay attention to the mental model of what they are doing is essential too but neither precludes the other.
- Moderating a panel by putting up a slide and then riffing on it isn't very effective. By contrast the better panels are presented by speakers who have arrived with something to say. The two best examples of this so far were panels that touched on many of the same ideas, essentially reminding us that to be good designers we have to love what are doing and have fun. Jim Coudal leads the pack, in my opinion, as a speaker who knows what he wants to say and is truly comfortable enough in his skin to get his point across with humor and wit.
I've also had some great chats off to the side about design education and the importance of knowing the craft of design. Everyone seems to endorse the same idea, that knowing typography through setting manual type is an experience without equal. I've wanted to do the letterpress and typography classes at the Art Center for a while now and these conversations have made the decision for me. This question of filling in the holes in my design education is something that seems to resonate with other web designers who come from backgrounds that don't include formal design training. I'm glad to see a number of panels this year that really try to tackle these issues. I just wish they would be given more time. Cramming the Designing with Grids panel into thirty-five minutes didn't do the subject or the presenters justice and merely whetted my appetite for more.
For now, I'm off to bowling. I'll blog more panels tomorrow.
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