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.

This week, our posting will either be fast and furious or non-existant.  Raffi, Kelly and I are all in Atlanta for the HOW design conference.  One thing I can tell you is that you won’t get a “best of last week” post on Monday.  So, sorry for teasing you with the start of that little tradition last week, then skipping this week.

Last night, we hooked up with a group of “HOWies” who we met at last year’s conference in Las Vegas.  We hit a great pub crawl and hung out talking shop….and other things until around 5am.  It’s great to get a chance to network with such a fabulous group of people.  I know it’s shocking, but we’re not experts on everything, so we enjoy the chance to meet new people who can help us help our clients better.

After a little recovery at the pool today, we’re headed out to the official networking event this evening, followed by the opening keynote by Karen Salmansohn entitled, “Ballsy: Ways to score extreme business success”.  That sounds like it should be interesting.

Anyway, we’ll do our best to keep you all informed, especially since we know that some of our loyal readers were hoping to attend this year, and were unable.