Sunday Recap At South By Southwest

By Randy Jensen | Mar 12, 2007

South By Southwest Logo Well, this was of course the new daylight savings time day. We made it, just a little late :S. No problem though, we were still able to sit in on some great panels.

10:30-ish

We started the day off with me making my own waffle at the hotel’s little breakfast room. I’m now considering a future in waffle making rather than technology…but that will be a new post. After my waffle-making adventure, it was off to the convention center.

11:30 pm – Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic

Our first panel was called Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic. The panel consisted of Kelsey Ruger, Veerle Pieters, Bryan Veloso and Jeff Croft.

Two of the points they brought up about the anatomy of a web designer were that they have to have passion for what they do and they have to have a hobby outside of web designing. I’m just going to post some quick bullets I typed during the presentation, take it for what you will.

Jeff Croft, at work, do more html, css, not so much creative stuff and no music. At home, he does more creative work at home. Logs in im as invisible, feels like he has to answer immediately.
Veerle, needs music to work but not while coding css. Started as a print designer and once she became a web person, her job included everything.
Bryan has to have music and distractions. Background is in business and always thought of design as a hobby.
Kelsey likes the collaboration for everything including twitter and im. Uses GTD. GTD is a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done. All about productivity and task management.

After this we broke for lunch and went to the sports place across the street. It was raining at this point and we didn’t feel like walking around in it so we just wanted some place quick. After that we headed back to our next panel.

2:00 pm – Keynote Conversation: Limor Fried / Phil Torrone

Limor Fried and Phil Torrone

Sorry the image sucks, it was the best one I could get…I’m a web designer not a photographer dammit. If you can squint out the two figures, Limor is on the left and Phil on the right.

South By Southwest Screen This was one of the best panels we went to. Since it was a keynote, they had it in the ballroom at the Hilton across the street. There were two giant screens on either side of Limor and Phil with two HD cams shoved in their face so we didn’t miss anything.

If you’re not familiar with either of these two. Phil is from Make Magazine which is an amazing place for all you DIY-ers out there. Limor runs ladyada.net and works with Make as well. These two are doing some really crazy stuff with Make including a scrambler the size of a box of matches that will kill any cell phone signals, bluetooth, wi-fi, etc. within range.

They also made an iPod charger out of an Altoids box and a couple other parts that runs off two AA batteries. You can check out all their stuff at the Make Store. You can buy the kits for 20 bucks and up depending on what it is you want to build.

They talked about much more than just what they were doing, but that’s what really stuck out to me.

4:00 pm

We ended up not going to the other panels since there wasn’t a whole lot to choose from. We walked around the convention center to check other things out, like the movie stuff and any other attraction that caught our attention.

Oh, we also found out that we missed Wordpress’ little party they threw which really bummed me out since I love anything and everything Wordpress does and I was looking forward to listening to Matt speak on Monday.