Topic: Events
Design Share: Dinner Party Edition
For the past two years we’ve hosted an event series we call Design Share at our Falls Church location. It’s proven to do everything and more that we set out to do. Namely:
- Connect with the local design community.
- Learn from each other by sharing behind-the-scenes looks at design and process.
- Provide a forum for people who are new to speaking to get experience in front of a low pressure audience.
Over the two year period we hosted 4 events in which 17 talented designers graciously shared their stories. Among them:
- Brian Talbot, National Geographic
- Jay Moore, AOL
- Eric Lohman, AKQA
- Rob Soulé, Viget
- Ari Kushimoto, CaviarFrenchFries
- Jason Garber, Ficly
- Elliott Muñoz, Edge Media
- Corey Greeneltch, Ironworks
- Ali Felski, Sunlight Foundation
- Dawn Sword, Serendipity Creative
- Owen Shifflett, Viget
- Stefan Poulos, Pappas Group
- Phil Gossier, Threespot
- Lee Costic, Lee Costic Design & Creative
- Gregg Glaviano, Grafik
- Katie O’Brien, Fleishman Hillard
- Sarah Sampsel, Washington Post
The format was simple. Share a short 5 to 15 minute presentation about a project and discuss further with a live audience. We archived many of these presentations at designshare.org.
AIGA Studio Open House
Viget's Durham office was recently invited to participate in the AIGA Studio Open House event. Along with eight other studios in Durham and Carrboro, we opened our doors to network with the local design community, and show off our space. With slideshows of our work running and refreshments in place, we were ready for the crowds to come. And wow, did they ever come. We estimated that a total of 300-400 people walked through the office during the entire three hour event.
We met with students, recent graduates, freelancers, other design professionals, and even non-design professionals who were just interested in seeing the various studios. There were many remarkable moments about the night, but here are a few things that really made impressions on us:
- A graduate student in the midst of changing careers was interested in Viget's work/life balance compared to many agencies. We talked about how hard it is to find the right agency fit when you're older and have more responsibilities. This is one of the things that makes Viget a great place to work, and it's nice that people recognize that.
- A group of East Carolina University students asked questions about how relevant their typography classes are to web design. This was a perfect opportunity to tell them about web fonts and responsive design. They left feeling stoked about the web, and that felt awesome.
- A children's book publisher came from Chapel Hill to talk with us and learn more about the design industry in the area.
- We talked to a photographer/filmmaker who used the experience to show his 9-year-old daughter, an aspiring illustrator, that there are lots of designers doing great work in the Triangle. By the time that we were done talking, she was sketching out her latest masterpiece on our whiteboard.
- We had an opportunity to answer some great questions from several Meredith College art students who were curious about our design process, and the extent to which a background in print design might help or hinder a career in web design.
- Viget has been developing a relationship with NC State's School of Design over the past few years. We were finally able to make a face-to-face connection with one of the design professors, and she filled us in on her sense of what current students are looking for after graduation.
We owe a big thanks to AIGA for asking us to be a part of the open house festivities. Another Studio Open House will be help in Raleigh/Cary from 5:30-8:30pm on Thursday, March 10, 2011. Mark it on your calendar and get out to see Capstrat, Creative Associates, Fabrik Agency, Fragment Labs, FWV, Hesketh, Mellonaid Creative, New Kind, Ninth Floor, Red Hat, R+M, and Signal Design. Watch the AIGA Raleigh website for more information.
Photo courtesy of Charles Gupton
Design Share 3 Recap
With another Design Share event in the can we thought we'd share a taste of the evening's amazing talks for those who couldn't make it. Our format mostly stayed the same featuring 4 short-format talks (roughly 10 minutes each) ending in a panel-style round-up with all the speakers at the end. This time around we saw and heard about how design can lead the charge for grassroots campaigns, how design wishes can become scary (but awesome) realities, what it's like to start designing for the iPad and similar devices, and how to rise above negative feedback to extend a rebranding effort.
The Talks
- From Mood Boards to Manhattan: A Love Story by Katie O'Brien, Fleishman Hillard
- Running with a PUMA by Owen Shifflett, Viget Labs
- Designing for the iPad: Approaching Application Design by Sarah Samsel, Washington Post
- Brand Experience: A Syfy Story by Stefan Poulos, Pappas Group
To see an archive of these talks plus talks from our previous events go to DesignShare.org and follow @designshare on Twitter for updates.
Special thanks to our intern Joseph Le who designed the title sequence and produced the video from this event.
Design Share 2: More With Less
Delivering on our promise to make the Design Share into a series we recently wrapped up the second event. We stuck with our original format… mostly. Each presenter was still tasked with a 5 minute limit on their presentations with just under 10 minutes slated for question and answer. In short, we rotated speakers every 15 minutes. Based on feedback from the previous event we reduced the number of presenters from 6 to 4 resulting in an hour worth of presentations. At the end of the hour we added a 20 minute, panel-style Q&A. All in all, making for a nice sampling of work in a single evening.
Design Share, an Event Series
Let’s face it. 2008 was one of the wackiest years on record. In America, we witnessed a roller coaster presidential campaign make history by electing the nation’s first descendant of Africa, Barack Obama, as President. We watched financial markets worldwide tumble exposing scandal and corruption at many levels of society. Gas prices rose to unbearable heights only to fall more than half in less than a six month period. All this and more leading to widespread belt-tightening across the corporate spectrum where friends, loved ones, and -- sometimes -- we ourselves were left wondering what job opportunities await.
So what can we as designers do in such periods of uncertainty? It's not always clear. Do we compromise standards established during healthier times? Do we freelance when we might not have done so otherwise? Do we take on controversial spec work and hope that others won’t notice or call us out on (be careful)? All good questions. One thing we can do is to learn from each other.
DC Design Talks Recap 2
As a designer and presenter at this year’s DC Design Talks, I couldn’t have been happier with the way it went. It was full of great speakers, great people to meet, and it was on my home turf not just at our office but in the DC area itself. 
Based on the overwhelming popularity of the one-day conference (90 seats sold in a few weeks), it is obvious that talks like this one are important to the community. The day started with Viget’s own Samantha Warren speaking about web typography.The topic came easily to her; as a self-proclaimed “font-geek,” she at one point actually confessed “I could talk about fonts all day.” She urged us all to think about which fonts to use and why to use them beyond stereotypical, “because they look cool” reasoning. Later in the day Robert Goodlatte gave an inspiring talk called “Justifying Design.” He emphasized the notion of using the grid for making layouts more effective and distinguishing designers from decorators; decorators are the ones who make the site look “pretty” while the designers make the site as a whole more usable. As a first-time speaker at one of these things, I was happy with the reception I received. My thanks to organizers Jackson Wilkinson and Jason Garber for successfully creating an open and receptive vibe for everyone involved.
DC Design Talks Recap 1
This past Friday, Viget Labs hosted DC Design Talks, the first of a conference series called DC Talks that promote collaboration and creativity in the web community. Jason Garber and Viget’s own M. Jackson Wilkinson did a fabulous job of organizing the event, which was smaller than Future of Web Design, more organized than Barcamp DC, and as inspirational as many of the panels at SXSW.
With an entire day of first-rate speakers, the amount of information I absorbed was overwhelming. “Coming to Terms with Sociality,” the talk given by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, was fascinating. He referred to “online interactivity” as being the engagement amongst participants in an online community, rather than the interaction a user has with the site. “Finding Design Inspiration” by Alex Giron of n’clud reaffirmed my belief that investment in creativity and inspiration will pay off in the quality of design work produced.
In “Speaking in Styles: The Importance of CSS for Web Designers,” Jason Cranford Teague (of AOL) articulated the importance of CSS through a humorous demonstration that both dispelled its myths and illustrated its advantages. He compared a web designer who knows CSS to a print designer who knows press specifications and explained that a designer needs to:
- understand the limitations of her medium.
- take ownership of her design.
- create accurate specifications.
- be able to talk to developers.
- triage problems.
Viget’s own Erik Olson spoke on “Sane User Experience in Flash,” during which he said, “just because you can make it move, doesn’t mean you should make it move.” Many people don’t realize that anything that movement in peripheral vision dominates awareness. Too much animation on a page can distract the user from making the decisions necessary for her to find a site useful.
Overall, DC Design Talks was a marvelous community event that brought together very talented designers. It’s fantastic to play host, and I look forward to attending (or maybe just peeking into) all of the DC Talks in the future.
2011