SXSW ’08 – Saturday

Just like most mornings, I woke up and checked my Twitter. The night before put us at the Gingerman where we drank a couple of pints of Lonestar and conversed with several geeks – doesn’t get much better. Dustin Diaz, of JavaScript and Google fame, brought his big camera, to which I proceeded to make obvious “your lense makes me feel inadequate” jokes. Yep, that’s me – taking the obvious one-liners and using them for personal gain. It may have garnered a chuckle, I’m not sure.

Jeff and I got back to our room and I use the words “passed out” here, although it was somewhere between passing out and going to bed – do you know the difference? Anyhow, the alarm came quickly and we got up, showered, and headed down to the complimentary continental breakfast. We’re staying at the Hampton – shitty wi-fi, fantastic continental, take your pick. One more good thing about the Hampton is it attracts a lot of the industry “rockstars.” Shit, Jeff and I were there, and we’re pretty important. I jest, but the highly talented Shaun Inman was there and I did get to pick up the size medium American Apparel Mint T-shirts he brought. Thank you Shaun – it was an awkward moment, but it was never dull – my name is George.

After all this we made our way to the conference, what follows are my notes from the different panels/presentations, enjoy.

Design is in the Details

Naz Hamid started with many quotes, “Less is more”, and “God is in the details/Design is in the Details” Showed examples of design in details in many fields, cooking, industrial design, etc… Overall I think his presentation was really entry level. I wanted to be blown away and I was just kind of left with a, “well yea…” taste in my mouth. Oh well, not a bad presentation by any means, but definitely light on theory.

The one real world practice I took away was his use of different comps for different components of the site – this is something I will definitely try.

Checklist and Guide

• Experiment – Playing around with things in a few PSD files. Use the source files of the client. Play with color. Logo in one comp, background in another, navigation in another – don’t commit. Then start mashing up.
• Choices – Making choices on client needs, your styles, typefaces, and colors. Pick the things that are simple, most logical choices.
• Stay Consistent – Make sure homepages and subpages reflect eachother. Avoid minutae with clients.
• Completeness – Finish the comp and get it done done.
• Step In, Step Out, Step Back: Balance – Walk away for awhile – take notes when you get back about what is striking you – first impressions.
• Be your own critic – Address the things you may feel the people signing off will have issues with – compromise just a bit, it will go a long way.
• Complexity is Simplicity
• Obsession is Healthy – Dedication to the design, we put in long hours.

Thoughts, Breakthroughs, & Revelations – Let a design sit in your head and think about it. Not Billable Time.

Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing for Creatives

Derek Powazek comes across as very genuine. His presentation was pretty fun and he provided some great examples of the good and bad sides of crowdsourcing. Now following him on twitter – he seems like a seasoned pro of “growing communities.”

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” – Hunter S. Thompsen

Three lies people who don’t get crowdsourcing tell:

• Lie 1: Everyone on the net is an idiot – well they’re are some idiots, but some really smart people doing some really good stuff.
• Lie 2: Good stuff is too hard to find – traditionally has been human editors. It’s gone from traditional, to non-traditional, to moderators. Or it’s computers, text search, and Google. Now the interesting method is the hybrid model, Digg, flickr. Discussing leaderboards and how it encourages users to game the system. Show a random swath of “good results” to avoid the bad results of the game caused by leaderboards.Wisdom of Crowd – Selfish interests that increase the overall good. Says that if we all guessed numbers of beans in a jar, 99% of us would be wrong, but averaged out, we would be 99% right. Simple answers are the correct place for using the wisdom of crowds. Also needs to have diversity of viewpoints. Design for selfishness.Learning from Assignment Zero – Started by Jeff How – “Here everyone, write stories.” Nothing worked because nobody wrote anything. But increase the selfish motivation.

“Using crowdsourcings as a cost-saving measure doesn’t work. Communities must be cultivated, respected, and managed if they are to create economic value.” – Jeff Howe, who coined the term, “Crowdsourcing.”

• Lie 3: You can’t make any money. Threadless example – be the trusted middle man. How do they do it?
  • Contests – Ego, Winning, and Money
  • Fun thing on buyer end – The golden tag on a tshirt, Alumni Club.

Cautionary Tales:

• Yahoo Games Wii Sites: They pulled in flickr feeds tagged, “wii.” Flickr users rebelled and put in tons of “yahoo sucks” type images.
• GM Tahoe Apprentice Campaign: “Hey who wants to help us make a commercial for our SUV.” To make the commercial, all you could do was use their video and pictures and change the text. Chaos insued. “The Earth is now your Bitch”, “MURDER YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY.” They put the participants in a very narrow box. GM was greedy with their content – you couldn’t export it anywhere else, it could only work on the site. But it actually worked – drove more traffic to gm.com than google and yahoo combined.

Community is Grown, Not Built

1. Give people tools they want
2. Trust them to do good
3. Reward Good Contributions
4. Punish bad contributions
5. Expect the unexpected – Flickr Geotagging the word “Fuck” over iceland.

Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts

And this is where the crappy web connection killed my notes. I guess it isn’t so smart to post notes inside of WordPress while having an unstable connection. Either way – this panel was great.

First was Michael Lopp from Apple, he’s a product manager and seems to be a damn good one at that. He started off with some keynote issues, which was ironic, being from Apple. He proceeded to talk about Apple building everything like a present. From OSX being inside of their computers being inside of great packaging being sold at a great store being debuted by a great leader – yea, I could listen to someone from Apple talk about this stuff all day. He had some great anecdotes, which I wrote down – but alas they are deleted.

Are you comfortable being an asshole for the integrity of your design?

Then came John Gruber of the Daring Fireball fame. I read his blog pretty frequently and he’s always on point with thoughts on Apple. He continued to talk about the “blood, sweat, and fear” that goes into great design. In the end he stated that it’s ok to be an asshole as a designer – it means your more dedicated to your vision. Thank you John we all need that.

All in all this was a great presentation and I got to sit on the floor the whole time, which means it was a packed house.

A General Theory of Creative Relativity

You know how when you’re watching Die Hard and you just know that everything is going to be ok because badass John McClaine is on the job? You know, the bad guys are toast, he took a beating but won, and the girl who was in his life but couldn’t handle his badassnes when he wasn’t saving the world, comes back into his life? That’s like Jim Coudal – except he’s saving the world from shitty creative work.

“He’s a man’s designer.”

I would work for Jim Coudal, as Jeff said, “He’s a man’s designer.”

He framed his general theory as a spark between the known and the unknown, the variable or the constant – it was slow to start but then once he got going, he was on fire. I must say that his booking the band exercise was perfect for his concept.

At the end of his talk people had a Q/A round – this is where I decided how much of a badass Jim Coudal was. Again, I lost my notes, so I am going from memory. Small teams are better and meetings are bad news. That’s pretty much all I remember – sad.

Conclusion

First day wrapped up and it was unbelievable, each panel progressively better than the last. I must say with this year’s SXSW and the whole working for myself thing – I definitely feel a lot more happier in where I am at, it’s been a great year. I have also learned I need to take more pics at panels, doh!

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