Out of the list of speakers are a few icons / idols of mine (they’re italicized), and getting to listen, speak and even just shake hands with them was exciting. I definitely felt like a groupie next to some of them. For the most part, the presentations were great. There were one or two that I thought fell behind in quality in comparison to others. But overall it was an excellent conference, and I was disappointed to find out that there weren’t a lot of college students there (at least, undergraduates).

There were a few highlights I wante to share with everyone:

• Designers and Developers must work together. Instead of designers handing off a photoshop’d design and hoping that the developers will keep the design intact, developers and designers should collaborate together. (Ryan Singer states that the “waterfall” hand-off effect should be replaced by designers and developers having a shared iteration of the source code.)
• Designers need to explain their choices. A lot of times, designers make choices in their design that aren’t made for a specific reason other than the fact that it looks pretty. Designers need to ask themselves “Why?” when adding an element, choosing a color, etc.
• Progressive Enhancement. Designs should start off simple and be able to support everyone. Once that’s achieved, elements that will enhance the user’s experience should be added.
• Designers need to step away from the computer more often. The longer we are at the computer, the small the rest of the world becomes to us. To quote Nick La, “The internet is smaller than your environment.”

At the end of the conference I found out I won the ThinkVitamin contest =) We were asked to submit tips that would help other designers and developers. I was shocked that I won! I wonder how many people entered. The cool thing is that my tip is going to be featured on their new feature “Daily Dose”. As Ryan Carson said, “It’s good PR!”

Also, the next article fo the Blog series is being written!