Design Conferences
I have been to two design conferences since I moved to Reading—TypoLondon and St. Bride’s Critical Tensions (where I tried to live-tweet once more and lost steam after the first day). I was witness to some good presentations and some bad, and my appetite for attending these events is quite full for now. I’ll be happy to not go for any more and wait for the next ATypI conference instead.
Attending two in close succession reminded me of my grouse with most design conferences. It is those designers who present slide after slide of of their own work with banal descriptions and little or no context. To them, Robin Kinross offers some great advice—
“… those terrible lectures where a designer shows their work. But they can be interesting when the designer shows the project and tells the story. If they can step back a bit and give some idea of what was going on at the time, put themselves into some relation to other things.”
This sadly isn’t limited to design conferences. It’s even more infuriating when the title of the talk misleads you into believing that this one at least is going to be more than just a biography in slides.