EXPOse Yourself

If you want to know what it was like at the Moscone Center last week, read this list as quickly as possible

Twitter
Flickr
The Cloud
The Mesh
Love Apple – Hate Steve
Open ID
Oauth
Fire Eagle
Dopplr
UX
No more waterfall methodologies
Fix inbound links with poor language
Schema
“A Poem to my father on his deathbed (?!)”
Max Levchin is adorable
Flexible
Adaptive
Agile
Iterative

That’s one way I could sum up my experience attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. Another way I could sum it up is to say that if any of the items on the list above look unfamiliar, you might be falling behind. Save the deathbed poem, this list encapsulates just a small portion of the topics, people and websites discussed during the conference.

Noticeably missing from the list—at least to me—is graphic design. Although there was one presentation about graphic design, most of the design discourse focused on user experience design or the user interface. In some ways this makes sense since these two design specializations are critical in the creation of good online products and services but not necessarily more or less critical than good information and visual design. So I was left wondering why is it that at an industry EXPO—a moment where all disciplines are meant to convene together—graphic design was left out of the equation?

What I do know from Jennifer Pahlka, the conference manager and coordinator, is that the multi-disciplinary web world is open to hearing from designers. Jennifer said that there were a low number of submissions in the area of graphic design. I got a sense from her that the selection committee would have liked more submissions around front-end development and in specific visual design.

My suspicion is that graphic designers are struggling with how they can add value to emerging web technologies. By staying on top of new technologies graphic designers can learn how to leverage them creatively and take them further through visual design. Graphic designers must actively engage with web technologies – coding, blogging, tweeting, and mashing just as much as they make through visual form. We really have no excuse not to try these tools for ourselves since 3rd party applications and open source tools are accessible and easy.

I’m not entirely sure why graphic design didn’t have a larger presence at the Web 2.0 Expo, but whatever the reason, designers need to seize opportunities to understand, meet, collaborate and communicate with other disciplines in the web community.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:51 am . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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