The idea for this blog came about when Mack and I went to Flash Foward San Fran back in 2008 with some other colleages. The over all experience was great; We were able to catch up with an old friend we hadn”t seen in a while and make some new friends within our Industry.
While I originally felt let down by the experience. I took some time before writing this post to reflect on this summers conference and to give Mack and I some time to get our act together. 2008”s conference was presented by Metaliq and there were some major differences between Flash Foward San Fran and other conferences like FF Boston. The location did afford some great speakers from the west coast and a very memorable performance from Zoe Keating. One of the major differences was the way the event was organized. Instead of pseudo workshops around an hour+ long with a great deal of overlap, the event was changed to shorter monologues about inspiration and what drives each speaker to do what they do. I feel this is a topic you discuss after the conference finished for the day and you head to the bar. There wasn”t enough time for some speakers to get into the nitty gritty let alone opening up Flash or writing a line of code.
Instead the conference was riddled with Infomercials in the guise of “lessons”, a few professional speakers that do not really care or have any involvement in our industry and a pretty big hole in the pocket of a small boutique design firm from the East Coast. I don”t want to portray the event as all doom and gloom. I give Metaliq and Beau a lot of credit for putting the event together and some of the speakers were truly inspiring including Grant Skinner, David Carson, Keith Peters, Erik Natzke and Stacey Mulcahy (who gave one of the best presentations of the entire event) to name a few. I think this was a great first step for Metaliq to help make Flash Foward even better in the years to come. I really put a majority of the disappointment I felt after the conference on myself for not really being an active part of the community.
Now that I think about it, in a way Flash Forward San Fran was a success. It was inspirational for me after all; it inspired me to create this blog and to put up or shut up.\r\n\r\nHopefully in 09 you will see Mack and I posting a lot more about the techniques that we utilize within some of our projects as well as some of the tricks of the trade we have created/developed or outright stolen to get the job done. So fly with me! FLY!
