Jeff Bridgforth :: Webcraftsman

Front-End Design Conference 2010

August 2, 2010

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I attended the Front-End Design Con­fer­ence in St. Peters­burg, Florida. I had attended the inau­gural con­fer­ence last year and was look­ing for­ward to this year’s event. I won a free ticket to this year’s con­fer­ence from Fuel Your Cre­ativ­ity blog.

As part of the con­test, I had to answer why I attend con­fer­ences. Here was my response:

I attend con­fer­ences to learn, to be inspired, get away for at least a day to dream, and to meet other Web pro­fes­sion­als. Con­fer­ences pro­vide a great venue to do all these things, espe­cially con­nect­ing with peo­ple and expand­ing your per­sonal network.

This year’s con­fer­ence did not dis­ap­point. I enjoyed the con­tent and had the chance to meet some sharp Web pro­fes­sion­als. I also got to fur­ther many rela­tion­ships with peo­ple that I had met at other events like Word­Camp Orlando.

Kick­ing off the day

One of the things that I really like about this con­fer­ence is that they pro­vide a great venue for get­ting to meet peo­ple right off the bat. They pro­vide break­fast in a very casual atmos­phere that makes it easy for an intro­vert like me to begin meet­ing peo­ple. This is great because I don’t have to face a large room of peo­ple try­ing to fig­ure out where I am going to sit in the midst of a sea of strangers. I made a lot of con­nec­tions last year through the break­fast and was able to catch up with a guy I met at Word­Camp Orlando this year.

Besides some new rela­tion­ships, here are the three main things I took away from the conference:

No one is a blank sheet designer

I believe each of the first three pre­sen­ters made a com­ment about the value of con­straints. From a career test I took sev­eral years ago, one of the obser­va­tions is that I am not a ”blank sheet designer.” I work best by hav­ing some­thing con­crete to start with. I am really good at mod­i­fy­ing things.

One of the take­aways from the con­fer­ence for me is that there really are no blank sheet design­ers. As Larissa Meek said, “we need con­straints to be successful.”

The suc­cess of a project is really shaped by the defin­ing stage where you get to know the client and get to know their audi­ence. The more you know about the client’s busi­ness goals and know about the pri­mary audi­ence, the more suc­cess­ful your design solu­tion will be.

Con­straints begin to define the project and give a place to jump off from as you cre­ate a solu­tion. Larissa encour­aged me to dis­cover the story to tell through my design solu­tion. “What is the story to tell?” is a ques­tion I will be ask­ing myself as I take the dis­cov­ery research and begin try­ing to solve the design problem.

I am really excited about my new job with Rise Cre­ative. We have a user expe­ri­ence per­son and a con­tent strat­egy per­son on our team. Together they cre­ate a thor­ough dis­cov­ery doc­u­ment. Work­ing on my own within a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion for so many years, I did not have the time and resources to really dig into the dis­cov­ery process. I believe the processes at Rise will take my design work to the next level because I will have such a wealth of infor­ma­tion to pro­vide a solid foun­da­tion to build a design solu­tion on.

Larissa’s slides

Be con­sis­tent

Lea Alcan­tara dis­cussed self brand­ing. I became famil­iar with the sub­ject through the book, Career Dis­tinc­tion, and through the Reach Per­sonal Brand­ing web­site and audio resources. The take­away from Lea’s talk was to be con­sis­tent. Does the design of my web­site match my brand? I have wanted to redesign my site for awhile and this talk really gave me a place to start as I begin think­ing how I want to rep­re­sent my per­sonal brand online.

Lea’s slides on Slideshare

Process, Process, Process

Mea­gan Fisher’s slides were awe­some. She talked through her design process. She reit­er­ated some points from the other speak­ers in the impor­tance of know­ing your project and then com­ing up with a strat­egy. I liked her idea of mak­ing an inspi­ra­tion board. It is sim­i­lar to a mood board and is a place for you to put together a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas and inspiration.

Frank, a designer at Rise, does a very sim­i­lar thing. I really like the idea and look for­ward to using it in my next design project.

I also liked Meagan’s last point of mak­ing it shine. This is where you go in and add some tex­ture and light­ing to really make your design come alive. She was begin­ning to go into some tech­niques she uses in Pho­to­shop by tak­ing pub­lic domain illus­tra­tions or tex­tures and mod­i­fy­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, she was not feel­ing well and had to end her talk early. I look for­ward to review­ing her slides when she makes them available.

Work flow

It was great to hear about CSS work flow and see some prac­ti­cal exam­ples of how Jina Bolton imple­ments it in her work. Work flow is an impor­tant topic to me as I get my feet wet on a new job. I need to firm up my own work flow process and firm up my stan­dards for how I name files, how I struc­ture my stylesheets, and then inte­grate that into the exist­ing work flows at Rise Cre­ative Group.

Jina pro­vided a lot of great ideas. She men­tioned Mod­ern­izer, which is a javascript that allows you to tar­get dif­fer­ent browsers depend­ing on their CSS3 capa­bil­i­ties. I have seen oth­ers men­tion Mod­ern­izer but had not made the time to check it out. I did take some time to look at it on Fri­day night.

I sat next to Jina at lunch. I enjoyed lis­ten­ing in as she dis­cussed some dif­fer­ent top­ics that related to her talk includ­ing frame­works and object ori­ented CSS (which I really don’t under­stand yet).

Jina’s slides

Final thoughts

The day wrapped up at the after con­fer­ence party. I enjoyed hang­ing out and talk­ing with dif­fer­ent peo­ple. One of things I enjoyed was get­ting to meet Andi Gra­ham, the prin­ci­pal of Big Sea Design and Devel­op­ment. I have been work­ing with her as a con­trac­tor since the end of April. I finally got to meet her in per­son at the con­fer­ence and I enjoyed hang­ing out with the Big Sea crew at the after party. I also really enjoyed meet­ing Stu­art, Sarah Parmenter’s fiancee. We talked for sev­eral hours about a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent things.

Dan Den­ney and his crew did another awe­some job at pulling off the con­fer­ence. The venue was even bet­ter this year as we were in the mid­dle of down­town St. Pete with plenty of restau­rants around. This con­fer­ence is such a great deal for the price, the venue, and the qual­ity cast of speak­ers that Dan assem­bles each year.

Sketch Notes

I have always been impressed when I have seen peo­ple do sketch notes at con­fer­ences. I decided to try my hand. My owl did not turn out well for Meagan’s talk (I for­got what owls looked like). I am glad I tried my hand at some­thing new and look for­ward to doing more of it in the future.

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