Waking up early was an absolute misery to be honest. I had to wake up by 6am so that I could go volunteer for the Future of Web Design wasn't the best feeling I've ever had.
Nonetheless, everything changes when you are the youngest of about 300 people who all talk about the very thing that you do.
And even better is when you get professionals in the area who not only stand up and talk about it, but tell you what you are doing wrong. At the age of 20, its a very nice and gratifying feeling to hear. Hey kiddo, you are wrong. You are doing this wrong, and by the way here is how you do it RIGHT.
There are a lot of things in Web Design that I have most definitely been doing wrong, and a lot of things that I have been taught, that I know find it extremely difficult to express the gratitude I have towards Cat @ Carsonified who has allowed me the opportunity to volunteer as part of the film crew for a conference which, in contrast to many other conferences I have been, changes the way I think.
One of the best talks that I had today by Aral Balkan really changed how I look at things. I had previously taken a course called Human Computer Interaction taught by Wendy Newstetter in Barcelona, Spain. Learning about HCI for devices was truly eye opening, but when Aral gave the talk at FOWD, and applied everything that Donald Norman, in his book, The Design of Everyday Things, talks about to Web Design, it all made sense.
It's hard to remember any other events throughout the day when you have one event that has such a ridiculous impact on the way you think.
After spending months designing a website, I want to change everything, I want to take everything I have done and re-do it to make it better, and easier, because I had forgotten the one thing that everybody in this conference was here for, design. I knew the web, but I was most certainly missing the design .
It takes a confident speaker to change your perspective on things and Aral was just that. He was focused and concentrated on what he wanted to talk about and his words truly marked the way I look at things.
Now, I am truly thirsty for knowledge, and for that, I have a few resources which this conference has given me that I will look forward to using, to hopefully become a better and stronger web designer.
For those of you that don't know me, I am a Computer Science major at Georgia Tech. I've never really done web design as a profession, which is what everyone in this conference does. Web design is my spare time, and I am glad to have been lead in the right direction for understanding how it works, and the things you have to do to truly change the user experience
UX is legitimately what it is all about, and I will have to change my perspective to focus on exactly that.
Until tomorrow where I'll report updates on how tomorrow's conference goes.
Daniel.
Oh and, I am really getting tired of hostals and I was about to book a hotel today but I went in to the one closest to where I am and it was all booked so i'll survive here for two more nights, and then fly back to ATL, where I'll hopefully spend a night in a nice hotel.
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