New Adventures Conference 2012 Wrapup

Photo by the talented Kitty Crawford

I haven’t been to a design conference since SXSW 2007. I got tired of the same old speakers talking about yesteryears technology which they still were catching up on.

In that respect, New Adventures greatly surprised me. It was fresh, on-point and absolutely fantastic. Like any conference there was a mixture of quality. My favourite talk was Dan Mall’s. I have a bias towards Dan as he’s one of the nicest guys on the web. He’s worked on some amazing projects but it wasn’t the Star Wars or Crayola site that he worked on that impressed me the most during his talk but the fact he showed some of his less lacklustre work too. Too many designers speak as if their first design is the perfect final image and the reality is that we work iteratively, creating new with the old elements. It takes someone very humble to be able to be so proud of the bad work, as it helped lead to the good work.

I also loved Robbie Manson’s talk. I’ve known Robbie from Twitter for a while now and have been super excited about seeing his talk. He utterly blew me away the fact that this was his second talk. I will definitely go out my way to see him talk again.

Travis Schmeisser’s talk was great also. I’ve worked with Travis in the past when I was at Hashrocket and he was at nGen Works. Not only is he a super smart lad but a very talented designer. I had high expectations walking in and wasn’t disappointed.

I won’t touch on the talks that I didn’t like as I don’t want to be too negative. The one thing I will say is; don’t listen to people telling you to be a ‘celebrity.’ Forget trying to be popular. Just do the best job you can and let your work speak for itself.

Simon Collison put on an absolutely fantastic event. Another one of the humble few with great skills and a natural born conference organiser. A top notch gentleman who definitely deserves the praise he’s been getting for the event.

I am going to aim to go to next New Adventures. If it’s anything like this year I will be happy. I’m not sure if I plan on going to any other design conference yet. I will judge it on a per-event basis.

I met and saw so many wonderful people. I am very glad to know and talk to the people I do. There’s a lot of great people in our industry. It provoked love for the community inside me that I haven’t felt in many years.

Being surrounded by the beautiful buildings that Nottingham had to offer, the people – both inspired and inspiring and inhaling the knowledge that was offered has enlivened the spring in my step.