31

{7.01.09}

But what a hot 31 he is.

Happy day of your birth, lover. We're all so happy to have you in our world. :)







(yes, this is super late. We're catching up, people. Someday I'll once again be posting in present tense.)

HOW Design Conference {6.23-27.09}

My work finally sent me to the coveted HOW Design Conference in June which I've been interested in attending for the last 4 years, ever since I've been there. It's probably the biggest graphic design conference in the country and this year it was in "Weird Austin", which I quickly learned was its nickname.







1. AUSTIN TEXAS
The city was definitely a little strange, granted we only hung out in the main downtown area of Austin which brings out the crazies. Probably the two weirdest things were the "Weird Austin Museum" that we went to on the first day and saw all kinds of two-headed animals and shrunken-headed men, I didn't include a photo of this place, a little too weird. The second thing that was weird is that there are occasional cross dressers that walk the streets, I saw a kid about my age in a dress looking all dolled up acting nothing was weird at all, and there's even a famous street walking cross dresser who's about 58 years old named Leslie Cochran, if you don't believe me look him up on Wikipedia.

One of things to do there in the evening is go to a certain bridge and watch millions of bats fly out from under bridge to fly away and go catch their food for the night. The bats were coming out in swarms and kept coming for 10 to 15 minutes.





I did like all the art on the walls of buildings as I walked around the city, it wasn't just ugly graffiti but pretty creative designs. I also liked the capital building there, it's a cool looking one.








Since the moment I laid eyes on this beautiful, blue-tiled wall, I wanted to have a photo shoot at it, which we did.




While we were trying to get this jumping photo we had to keep jumping because there were so many cameras on timers taking pics at different times. I put my camera on video without telling anyone and I caught everyone busting some sweet moves :)



2. HOW DESIGN CONFERENCE
I made the most of the conference by attending every possible event that was offered, taking copious notes as I enjoyed the classes, meeting as many people as I possibly could each day, and making a point to meet every presenter that I enjoyed. Two of the best presenters were LDS designers from Salt Lake City. Some of my favorite classes included "Good vs. Great Design", "50 Ways to (Almost) Get Fired", "The WOW Factor: Developing Strong Presentation Skills", and "Visual Story Telling".


I was interviewed by the HOW conference peeps and now I'm famous.


One really neat thing we did before the conference was a thing called studio tours where they take us on a tour of 6 different design firms located in the Austin area and we got to see how their business functioned and what kind of design work they would do. It was amazing to me how different each of the firms were with what type of work they took in. I have a couple photos of those firms below.




This is an inspiration wall inside the company Milkshake, since I saw this I made myself an inspiration wall at work.


Another cool thing at the conference was a typography exhibit that had a bunch of amazing posters, I could have spent all day looking at those posters. It would be fun to work on a poster like that some day.




I attended the "Keep Austin Weird" closing reception and dance where we lit up the dance floor! I donned some sweet white spectacles and some glow sticks as a belt buckle and shoe laces. It was a good time, as you can clearly see for yourself in the photo.