Day 7 - FOWD Part 2

It becomes very difficult to even explain how grateful I am for this opportunity that I had to attend and be a part of FOWD 2011. I find it difficult to name all of the things I learned because I could probably go on forever, but amongst the best ones were these:
1. Design for your user.
2. Learn how not to burn out as a freelance webdesigner.
3. Amongst those lessons, have a start and end time to your work even if "you make your own hours" so that you don't find yourself working at 3am because you felt you didn't accomplish enough during the day.
4. It's not about the money.
5. Etc.

But I think the funner and more interesting part of what I did today happened after I left the conference and constant thoughts of designs and the concept of 'empathic' design went through my head. I was trying to understand the different things that I could accomplish now that two worlds in my head had merged.

The first part in my mind was that of psychology and understanding human beings. That is a huge part of what I do and Psychology is a field that I truly find fascinating.

The other part, which seemed to me completely unrelated, was making websites. I made websites, and I loved understanding people. Now, although naively those seem unrelated, in depth they are one and the same. At the end of the day, it is people and people only that use websites. You must design websites for people. Suddenly it all made sense. I still had a lot to learn about making websites, but a huge barrier had been cleared, and I had at least taken a step in the right direction to understanding what it was that making websites was, and how to make them in a smart and justifiable way.

I often found myself just cramming in my head for randoms spurs of creativity, but two completely separate thought processes in my head merged today, and I am pretty ridiculously glad for that, because now I can truly understand the inner workings of web design, and move towards designing, to put it simply, much better websites.

I have also written an article titled, The 'World' Wide Web, which I will submit to A List Apart. I will not publish it on my blog until it gets accepted / rejected haha, but it covers interesting ideas of designing in such an interconnected world.

I will now play with ThinkVitamin to see if there is something I can learn from their membership, as I have high hopes that it is this design that will truly teach me everything there is to know about a well designed web site.

In travel updates, I leave for Atlanta tomorrow at 1pm, arriving at 5pm (although its a much longer flight :P). Then on Friday its hopefully to Australia!

So excited and so many great things are happening in my life right now, cheers.
Daniel.