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.

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.