The long, arduous wait is over.  We’ve completed the HOW design 2007 comic strip.  Look, read, enjoy.

Since we spent Tuesday evening after the Descender’s Ball hanging out in someone’s hotel room until 3:00 am, we awoke tired again on Wednesday morning.  Fortunately, the organizers thought of this and didn’t start the first session until 9:45 am.  I attended “How to rule the web with flash and humor” by Matthew Richmond and his business partner Tom from The Chopping Block.  (Raffi and Kelly had seen it the day before and recommended it.) The session was an exploration of the group’s own web sites along with a few of their clients, showing how they’ve used interesting Flash dynamics to set themselves apart from other design shops.

After that, we all attended the closing keynote by Sheila Campbell, entitled “Balancing the work you love with the life you want”.  Sheila talked about getting away from the laptop and cell phone and spending time on other hobbies in order to avoid burnout.  She also suggested finding one thing you really like to do and focus on that, instead of using vacation time to do different things all the time.

After the keynote, we had lunch with a group of departing (from Atlanta) friends and then slept a whole lot.  We spent the evening at a great, trendy restaurant called Two Urban Licks, and then hit a very interesting bar called the Clermont Lounge.  We wrapped up the night with talking too long and too loud in a greasy diner with our new friends, convincing our server that he too could be a Broadway Star. We’re getting ready to head back to St. Petersburg.  We’ll post our interpretation of the whole conference in comic book format shortly after returning.