Saturday morning, 10am
Presenter: Naz Hamid - Weightshift

Although this talk was aimed at beginners, I thought it would be interesting to listen to another designer share his experiences and reveal his creative process.

Naz was nice to listen to. You could sense he had that passion for his craft which we fellow designers share. His presentation focused on details, paying close attention to those finite aspects of a project which individually aren’t much but combined together form a complete package, a strong and elegant solution to a problem. His sentiments would be later echoed in a talk I attended given by Michael Lopp from Apple.

Naz outlined 8 key factors in his design process:

1. Experiment - play around with ideas, total creative freedom
2. Make the right choices - pick the strongest ideas, choose visual rules
3. Stay consistent - keep all comps neat and structured
4. Completeness - finish all screens, leave no open questions
5. Step in, step out, step back, balance - take a break, come back to it
6. Be your own critic - you need sound explanations for your design
7. Complexity in simplicity - less is more
8. Obsession is healthy - be dedicated, obsessive

It was interesting to me because his creative approach is very similar to my own. I like to concentrate on the details even at the early stages of a concept. In his initial experiment phase he mentioned that he didn’t sketch ideas onto paper, he collected assets and went straight into Photoshop to see what works and what doesn’t. I think our generation of designers (being much more digital) tend to do this a lot. I like to use the tools I have as much as possible, because you quickly arrive at a more finished look. Have a look at Gapers Block- a site Naz has created which provides entertainment and lifestyle information for Chicago. Good stuff.

After a pretty bumpy plane ride and what seemed like a descent into nothing but grid-like farmland, I touched down in Austin. The weather here is awesome - got to make the best of it before I go home to Boston.

I met up with molecular buddies: Brandon, Paul and Mac. We picked up the hire car and headed into town for some Tex Mex food and Margaritas. What else would you do first in Texas? Brandon went to college in Austin so he knows the place pretty well. As we drove down the highway to our destination, Chuy’s, I noticed a few things. Everything seems much bigger here. The roads are huge. The land around property is huge. Even more so than New England. Also, what is it with all the Piñata stores? There were loads of them. How many of these things do the people here go through?

Chuy’s was very cool, friendly service, massive portions of authentic Tex Mex and cheap booze. We headed off to the Austin Convention Centre in a lighter mood.

The Convention Centre was pretty busy, we joined the first line to pick up our badges. All around me I noticed a lot of different people, some drinking beer whilst waiting, others sat on their laptops geeking out. All just generally waiting in line.

30 minutes later, badge around my neck, I picked up my free stuff (it came in one of those cloth shopping bags with a huge Adobe logo.) I headed to my hotel to check in and relax before the first evening party: Friday night mix at six.

Like the newbies we were, we arrived too late to the party and the line was massive. Instead we explored downtown Austin. There are a lot of laid back bars here, all clustered together in a relatively short space. A bar crawler’s dream.

The coutdown begins for the South by Southwest interactive festival in Austin, Texas. I leave on Friday 7 March. Very excited. I have made a schedule using this handy online utility, Sched.org - check it out.

During the course of the festival I will be blogging at this usual place, but also myself and several Molecular peeps will be adding to our Molecular voices blog.

Open house.

Tonight I attended a lecture on Facebook development hosted by my company, Molecular at MIT. The lecture was held in the incredible Stata Center, designed by the architect Frank Ghery. I had driven past the striking building a few times and was keen to explore inside. Upon entering the juxtaposition of dynamic lines, curves and various textures, I wasn’t dissapointed. What an incredible space to learn. To socialise. To listen. To watch. If only all places of learning were this aesthetically pleasing and well equipped. Although I am not a developer and I have only a certain degree of interest in code, I found some of the lectures interesting. Particularly the introduction from Sandra Lui Huang from the Facebook development platform. She reported a few startling figures about the ever-growing social network phenomenon:

• There are currently more than 61 million active users.
• An average of 250,000 new registrations per day since January 2007.  
• Active users will double every 6 months.

This information is incredible, and reinforces the current trends in how people spend time online. As a Facebook user myself, I find the data easy to believe, practically everyone I went to school with is on it, even friends of mine I know rarely use a computer. The key to this increase in users is the ability for third party development of applications. These third party widgets are extremely popular and include games and applications like flickr photo browsing. Whilst I am not a subscriber to most of these applications (I find some of them quite annoying) I do find value in those that enable me to share pictures and images with my network.

Last night I went to the MITX awards at the Marriot Hotel in Boston. We had two tables representing Molecular, and we were up for several awards. I have to say the awards were extremeley well organised, and the rock and roll theme was excecuted with no expense spared. The booklets were designed like Rolling Stone magazines, they had a big MTV style stage with a live band, and really cool video skits inbetween the awards. I got to go up on stage for our Reebok award which was pretty cool - there were a lot of people in our group so we literally filled the stage.

Last weekend I visited my friend Shannon at her cool loft space in Brooklyn.

One of the most fascinating things for me about New York are the tall buildings. Not just the architecture, and scale, but the thousands upon thousands of windows. Looking out from my hotel on 37th and Lexington, I can see a huge building in front of me each of its windows containing different rooms with different occurances. Many people, each in their own apartments, their unique space. Preparing dinner, exercising, arguing, working watching television, cleaning and so on. I wonder who all these people are, what they do, what they like, where do they come from? So many people, totally insignificant in the grand scheme of things, yet in their own world they are the center of everything. Then I realise, someone is looking at me… are they thinking the same thing?

Up at 4.30am surprisingly easily, in order to catch the 6.15am Acela train from Boston’s South Station to New York’s Penn Station. It is always exciting to visit New York, this will make it my third time in the Big Apple. I’m currently leading the complete re-design for NikonUSA.com. It is a really exciting project, and it means I am collaborating with Molecular’s NYC office.Wow this train can move… I wonder if they realise how bumpy it is though, quite hard to type, and I am sure the hundreds of other single-serving business class passengers feel the same as me, as they frantically balance their excel sheets, or construct their boring powerpoints on their HP bricks. I must be the only guy on here with a Mac. I’m sure some guy gave me that ‘PC vs. Mac’ look of snobbery before. Oh well.So the train is very comfortable, much wider than our Virgin trains back home. Good seats, adjustable head rest etc. Tables and power outlets on every seat. The train guys wear those old fashioned hats like you see in the movies. They are so happy and helpful, what is that about American customer service? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like it, but being British I am used to people snarling at me and showing me the same amount of attention as a concrete wall.This train actually goes to NY, then onto Washington DC. It would be really great if I could just stay on the train and get off there. Acting spontaneously, visiting a city without planning it at all. As you grow older, everything must be planned, responsibility is a bitch.Ok signing off for now.

My very good friend Zoltan has just launched his t-shirt label the affair. I really admire the amount of work he and his buddy Dave have put into this little venture. I know it takes devotion to get something of this quality launched, especially around your day job. The site was built by the exceptionally talented Kamil Gottwald, another friend of mine from de-construct. I love the simplicity of the interface. Well done guys!