Wrap Up of the FOWD Presentations

I’ve started reading all the FOWD write-ups around the net from both presenters and attendees. As I said, there is a tonne of reading … and much of it very interesting.

Beckley went along as an attendee. He’s written his perspectives on many of the speeches, showing that he was not impressed with the ‘sales pitch’ style of some speakers, selling their business rather than teaching about their field of expertise.

This is the best thing Beckley wrote about the event:

It produced one of the great quotes of the day, from a brilliant and successful designer:

I don’t have an hour of 
formal [design] education. 
I just have five years of 
winging it.
                    Ryan Sims

I could definitely relate. I’ve been winging it since the 90s.

I’ve heard that same quote from quite a number of the worlds best designers. Like Beckley, I too have been winging since the beginning of this millennium, learning from books, online and some guy who taught me how to change the backgrounds on emails about ten years ago. The rest of it is a blur. I really need to read these books a bit more! (Image below is a bookshelf in my office.)

Next I found M. Jackson Wilkinson’s impression of the event. This time we have another perspective on the various speakers. Firstly, the photograph he’s put at the top of this article scares me: It appears everyone was staring in the sun! Who set that up?!

While he doesn’t exactly say it, he seems to have the same impression of the day that Beckley had, but only in regards to the venue, the sound and lighting. But MJW says a lot more about the speakers, saying they all gave a myriad of great information about their chosen field of expertise. He mentions a few new faces, at least to him (and me!) who gave interesting talks:

• EJ Stocks of Carsonified, made his case for abandoning some of the trendy design motifs we’ve seen in the Web 2.0 space.
• Jeffrey Kalmikoff at SkinnyCorp answered questions submitted by users.

MJW doesn’t mention any of the big names. But I guess he doesn’t need to, they all get plenty of publicity around the net from groupies (like myself!) and they would have been rewarded greatly for attending the event!

Christian Montoya wrote he was going.

Jonathan Snook has been talking about his impending speeches at FOWD for a few months now.

There’s no follow-up article from either of these web-gods as yet (that I can find), so I’m guessing they are both still recovering from the after-party! Let’s hope they both find a moment to tell us what they thought of the event.

My google-search for more “FOWD” references is coming up empty … anyone else going to tell us how it was for them? At least I have their blog to read the pre-interviews of the FOWD speakers. Yet I’d like to read what others thought of the event.

I’d love to go next year, but we’ll have to see how many of you buy my photography. Papa wants a plane ticket!