Billups Design

Being involved in the web industry, one event always comes to mind when talking about big conferences, South by Southwest. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to attend this event to see what it had to offer and to experience what all the commotion was about. I have to admit, SXSW was my first real conference, so I don’t really have anything to compare it to, but from what I have heard and what I experienced, it’s hard to compare it to anything in the first place.

Before heading to the conference I did not really know what to expect. I was very prepared with a full list of lectures and talks and knew exactly who I wanted to hear speak. On top of the learning I also really wanted to network and meet new people in my industry.

To begin, SXSW is held in Austin, TX. Austin is the capital of Texas and from what I gathered a pretty laid back and gorgeous town. Downtown Austin, where the conference center is located, seemed to be the perfect size for a downtown area and had a wide array of various restaurants and bars. Our hotel was about 10 blocks north of this area, so everyday (usually several times) we would make the hike back up to our hotel and get to see many of the awesome venues that make Austin the “Live Music Captial of the World.”

Ok, enough with the fluffy stuff, down to business.

So after we arrived on Friday and checked into our hotel we went straight to the conference center to pick up our registration badges. This was our first experience at the “hub” of the conference, and everything looked perfect. All of the talks and lectures were spread between 3 hotels and the conference center, which were all within a half block radius of each other. Inside of each building was littered with small “charging lounges” and table filled areas where people would congregate and refuel their various portable devices.

My first talk on Friday was Simple Steps to Great Webdesign, and featured Matthew Smith of Squared Eye. Matthew gave a great presentation showing subtle things designers and developers can add to sites to really make them stand out and be unique. He touched on simple things like grid layouts and typography, but also showed various javascript techniques and subtle flash animations that enhanced the site experience for the user. This topics of this lecture were fairly general, but it was great being in a learning environment and hearing someone show me good and bad practices, instead of having to search them out and find them on my own.

Unfortunately, because of a late check-in requirement at our hotel, this was the only lecture I was able to make on Friday, but I had a full schedule of events and talks scheduled for the rest of the days left, so after the talk we did some exploring around the Convention Center area and then went back to our hotel to get ready for dinner and a night on the town.

Flash forward to Saturday 8:00 am: Headed south on Red River St toward the events sporting my “hackpack” (basically my backpack which holds all necessary hacking gear: Laptop, Cell phone charger, camera, notepads, plethora of flash drives, etc..) My talks on Saturday included:

• Re-Inventing the Wheel: Sketching your own IA Process
• Pen & Paper Tools to Get From Research to Design
• CSS3 Design with HTML5
• Third Coast: How to Be a Startup Outside of Silicon Valley

My favorites of the day were: Pen & Paper Tools, which was a very interesting way to conceptualize information from the client, and to visualize the data and turn it into practical useable wireframes, and Third Coast: How to Be a Startup Outside of Silicon Valley, which was a conversation curated by Ross Kimbarovsky and Michael Samson, the two founders of CrowdSpring.  This talk was different from most lectures as it was rather intimate (around 50 people) and Ross and Michael really pulled the crowd into the conversation by creating an open dialoge between everyone.  They focused on ways small businesses can foster and create communities anywhere you are and also gave great tips on how small business can leverage themselves and collaborate amongst each other.

Sunday brought more lectures:

• Beyond LAMP: Scaling Websites past MySQL
• Your Design Process is Killing You
• Interactive Agency Workflow

After the weekend was done I had gotten a pretty good feel for how the rest of my time left in Austin was going to go, and I was already exhausted!  Between hustling to get to the next lecture, staying as focused as possible in each lecture, and lugging around all of my various necessities, I was beat!

One thing that was somewhat surprising, but I guess I should have expected it, was the amount of shameless self promotion. Stickers everywhere, flyers everywhere, tshirts, coozies, every form of sponsorship imaginable on a cheaply made drinking accessory.  It was annoying, but being surrounded by this much technology and geek-dom everywhere made it OK in my book.

As the conference went on, and I would meet more and more people, I started on seeing two obvious types of people who are at SXSW.  Group A would be people there to learn and grow as professionals.  When I would talk to these people they would discuss all the lectures they had gone to and new concepts they have learned and were excited to apply. Most of these people you could tell had a real passion for what they did and were at SXSW to meet new likeminded people to possible collaborate with in the future.  Group B was very different.  Group B consisted of people who were there to talk about themselves and their new latest startup or amazing idea.  Most of these people (who I talked to) did not really attend many of the lectures or talks, and many of them even joked saying that they should not have gotten a pass in the first place.  Group B should not be confused with anyone at SXSW who was promoting something, as many of the people who were promoting were actually passionate about their product and I enjoyed talking to them about it.  Group B people usually were not promoting anything specific, but were there promoting themselves and would reference startup X which was a “location based social media aggregator that was crowd sourced on an iphone app.”

After I found this clear distinction in groups of attendees I did everything I could to attend events that featured Group A type of people, because these people actually were there for the same reasons I there, and after talking when them I felt inspired to perfect my craft even more.

Monday came and went with more talks:

• Results Only Work Environments (ROWE)
• Expression Engine 2.0 : Total Domination
• Object C Crash Corse for Web Developers

Tuesday, the last day, I went to possibly my favorite talk of the whole conference.  It was titled Getting Better: The Designer’s Path from Good to Great.  Similar to the Third Coast talk I mentioned above, this session was an open dialogue between all participants and the two guys curating the talk, Ian Coyle and Duane King.  Ian, who I was familiar with from my time in the Denver web scene, founded (and recently left) an agency called FL2 and Duane has his own agency called BBDK.  The two both talked about their carrer path being a designer and various times in their career where they each felt like their work had been taken to the next level.  It was great hearing from both of these guys and seeing how they developed and matured what they loved into successful business endeavors but still maintained great integrity and passion in what they both do.  The topics they covered ranged from very generic questions such as, how to handle bad clients and also more complex questions like, being so involved with what you do – do you find that it distracts from other areas of your life?   All in all it was a great talk to end my SXSW experience on, as I felt inspired and invigorated, ready to create!

All in all SXSW was an amazing experience that I hope to attend every year.  The benefits of learning so much are obviously there, but the intrinsic benefits of meeting new people and being so excited to love what you do, made it all worth while.  I would highly recommend  to anyone in the wide interactive industry to attend and take it all in.

Words of Wisdom

• Don’t expect to attend every lecture your planning on, you just can’t do it.  At most I’d say 3-4 per day is do-able.
• If you really want to go to a specific talk, get there early, they fill up quickly.
• “Hackpack” is vital.  A solid bag that can hold all of your gear is amazing.  One of the best investments I’ve made.
• If your trying to get into a big sponsored party, get there early! Like 7:00-8:00…Yeah its early, but you’ll appreciate it when its an open bar.
• Pick a hotel that is not right next to the conference area.  We were about 10 blocks away and it was nice to get a good walk in to start the day and it let us see a little more of Austin than we would have not gotten to see otherwise.
• Bring business cards!
• Twitter, Foursquare/Gowalla, Facebook are awesome and are your friends. (I wish people everywhere used these like people were at SXSW)
  • With that being said, the aforementioned are great TOOLS, don’t be on them 24/7 or you will miss interacting with all the cool people that are there.
• Go to a variety of panels and discussions, not all from the same category (ie: design, development, business, social media).  Go there to expand your knowledge-base, not to become a master at one.
• Eat as much mexican food as humanly possible.

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