Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

truth in advertising

Sessions at SXSW can be wildly different in quality, depending on the host’s (or hosts’) presentation skills and level of preparedness. So my experience has been a bit topsy-turvy over the course of this conference. For me, Sunday was generally rather disappointing.

My biggest pet peeve, beyond the hosts and their respective presentation skills, was the matter of expectations. Only rarely, it seems, do sessions actually map to their descriptions. A couple particularly frustrating examples:

High Class and Low Class Web Design (a Saturday panel) was, I thought, going to be about the relative success / merits of the low-fi Web design of sites like craigslist and Google vs. more “designed” sites. However, the session focused more on questions of design and socieoeconomic class — interesting questions, to be sure, but once the questions were asked, no one really answered them. (Mani wrote about this session in more detail.)

Design Workflows at Work actually kind of infuriated me. I had hoped to hear about the panelists’ design processes, from project assignment to the finished product, and how they tackled creative problems. Instead, there was a lot of rambling around the subject, like their attitudes toward instant messaging or personal productivity.

Updated: The Web site they put together for the panel does offer some interesting interviews and links, particularly on the subject of workflow as it relates to personal productivity.

Best Practices in Teaching Web Design interested me because we’ve had struggles at work in finding good, well-rounded designers just out of school who have a good sense of graphic design, coding and interaction design. The session provided some guidance in the coding department, but it failed to address the other two.

Finally, Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design was billed as being about the union of “Data (HTML), Style (CSS), and Behaviour (JavaScript),” but at the session, the panelists framed the discussion instead around business, users and development. I suppose it was interesting from a top-level organizational standpoint, but I’m coming to this more from a “peon working in the field” point of view and honestly was more interested in the session as originally defined.