I was at the FOWD yesterday with Matt, Spence, Wojtek and Dean. It was great to see so many leaders in the field gathered in one place but it didn't inspire me as much as FOWA back in February. There was too much Flash, graphics and animation for my liking. I would have preferred more down-to-earth design ideas.
Like Dean, I enjoyed the Adobe talk about Apollo. It's gonna be cool to write proper programs without learning C++! Nat Hunter from Airside gave a great little talk about design across different media with reference to her work with Lemon Jelly for their CDs & live shows. Rei Inamoto from AKQA showed off some incredibly creative promotional work while tying it in with 5 sound design principles:
- Have a point of view - being everything to everyone leaves you with nothing
- Be who you are - don't pretend to be someone that you’re not
- Let them engage with you – give them something meaningful to do
- Be relevant - prove yourself worthy in whatever medium you work with
Simplify Simplify Simplify
I would have liked to hear more from Ryan Singer of
37Signals who did a short and sweet talk on signup forms. We've greatly improved our signup process but there's still room for further improvement. Another brilliant but sadly truncated talk came from Steve Pearce of Poke but as the end of the day grew near, much of what he said went in one ear and out the other... It made me laugh on the way though :)
All in all a very worthwhile exercise.
