Mar 23

SXSW

SXSW interactive was last week, and boy did I have an amazing time. I was inspired, met tons of new people, got to know some amazing people a little better and overall had a blast and it went by way too fast.

Some of the highlights from some sessions I attended during the day were:

Blake Mycoskie, otherwise know as TOMS shoe founder. He’s an entrepreneur, a really good, inspiring speaker and obviously good at what he’s done. He spoke about the history of TOMS, the challenges he faced and revealed that this summer, TOMS will be growing significantly.

Mike Kruzeniski spoke about “How Print Design is the Future of Interaction”.
What I got from this session: Regardless of the debate whether print is dead, print design is not.
You can see notes from this presentation here: http://alturl.com/azokg

One of my favorite sessions was with Sarah Nelson (@sarahbeee) “Creative and Effective Leadership in Design Environments”
She started with the statement “normal people don’t do this”, as in, normal people don’t get up in the morning and try to do creative problem solving and then try to manage others that are doing this also. She gave tips on the best ways to start projects to avoid “time bombs”.

I also attended Lynn Teo’s “Designing iPad Interfaces”
She pretty much did a slideshow of cool iPad interfaces, but as an expert pointed out what does and doesn’t work and also gave us some tips and tricks. For instance the thing that is great about the iPad is that it’s supposed to be more interactive than a website, so you can design to make the app intriguing. Give users an interface where they can learn as they use it and are discovering things along the way. What I thought was intersting is that she had commented at the beginning of the talk that the iPad content is more shallow than a typical website, but is more engaging, which I thought tied into the previous session I attended who’s claim was that print design is the future of interactive.

Of course every night there was some sort of sponsored ummm, networking opportunity. My favorite evening events were the AMODA laptop battles and the Funny or Die party that was held at the Highball Bowling Alley, which, btw was amazingly vintage, and we had to order a round of white russians (see my pics here: http://alturl.com/pr8m8).

Oh and I can’t forget to mention that the entire weekend I was checking in at places using Gowalla and one morning I checked into the ACC and found that I had won a Southwest Air round trip ticket, awesome!