After a truly refreshing day of sessions on Monday, we headed to the YUPO paper rooftop party at the Glenn hotel, and then on to a pubcrawl put together by the handsome, charming and witty “Smitcat” from the How conference forum.  While the Yupo party was fun, we were follwing directions they sent us that were printed on YUPO paper.  When it started to rain, the ink began to rub off their “water resistent paper”.  I thought that was a bit interesting, but the Mojitos were excellent.  The pubcrawl totally rocked.    Needless to say, it was a late (or rather early) evening and we headed bleary eyed into our sessions Tuesday morning.

I attended a session called “If they come, you will build it” by Jim Coudal.  Jim talked about a time just after 9/11 when his firm lost a lot of clients due to cuts in marketing budgets.  At that time, they turned their attention to a lot of things they thought were missing from the web.  They built those projects themselves and now draw 60% of their revenue from their own projects.  It’s a great way to supplement the often fickle client income and something I aspire to do for R-Design.

After that, I attended “Managing creatives for the first time” by David C. Baker.  I probably could have taken a lot more from this session, but the tiredness got in the way.  I did pull out a few gems, though.  Overall, I think the best thing David gave me from this session was a change in perspective.  Often within design firms, the norm is to promote the best designer to some sort of managerial position when the firm grows.  While this often results in a pay raise, the firm’s best designer is no longer designing and in many cases is not very happy anymore.

There’s really no reason a designer can’t receive a pay raise without becoming a manager.  There’s also no reason a manager has to make more money than the designers being managed.  This way, you can reward good designers with pay raises without taking away their passions for design - and you don’t lose your best designer.  Think about the situation like a professional baseball team.  Usually, the manager doesn’t make as much money as the star players, but he still manages them and they listen to his instructions anyway.

Slightly recharged after a nap, we all attended “Designer’s Anonymous: a 12 step program” by 3Dogz‘ Chris Elkerton and Dave Gouveia.  This fabulous session examined everything about design from dealing with burnout and keeping things light in the office to finding freelance help for large projects while getting bigger and better clients. 

The final session I attended was “Can you hunt while you farm? How to build business while minding the store” by Sheree Clark.  The astute reader will notice that this was my second session with Ms. Clark, and it was much more informative.  Sheree covered ways to make the time to find new business even while working hard for current clients.

After the sessions (and another nap), we all headed to the Georgia Aquarium for the Descender’s Ball, sponsored by Neenah paper.  The theme was Typography - come dressed as a font. See our pseudo costumes here. The party wasn’t as fun as last year (ended early and odd food choices), but the whole aquarium was open and it truly is a magnificent display of aquatic life.

After an exciting networking opportunity on Sunday evening at the HOW Design Conference in Atlanta, we were all ushered into a large ballroom at the Georgia World Conference Center to the sounds of The Alabama A&M gospel choir.  What a fabulous and energetic performance!  It was a great way to start things off.

Echoing the eclectic nature of the HOW conference, we went directly from christian gospel music to a self-named “ballsy” Jewish woman.  Karen Salmansohn gave a great presentation on stirring up opportunities through uniqueness and persitance.  That brief description doesn’t do her talk justice, but I’ve got a rooftop party to get to, so I’m only giving you the highlights.

Monday morning, we attended a great opening session with Chip Kidd, entitled ‘The Spaces In Between’.  It wasn’t particularly informative, but it was definately funny, entertaining and inspiring. 

I then moved on to “Inspired by our passions: The pursuit of an enriched life” by Sheree Clark.  We were supposed to learn a bit about taking personal things we’re passionate about and enriching our business life through them. It was a lot of “Here’s Bob, he’s a desiger and he likes to play music…here’s some of the stuff he designs.”  I wasn’t too impressed.

After some lunch and a walk through the Olympic Centennial park, I attended a good session called “Everything I wish I knew before running a design studio”.  Fortunately, I knew most of the things Daniel Schutzsmith said, but I did pick up a few tips. 

Later, I hit “Self promotion in the digital age” with Dave Werner.  I enjoyed it immensely.  If you haven’t seen his online portfolio, you’ve got to check it out.  I have some SEO issues with it, but it’s beautiful and it accomplished its goal of getting him numerous job offers, so it was obviously effective.