BLOG: Mitch Wilson, Austin TX Web & Multimedia Developer – Austin, TX

First day SXSW Interactive 2009

I attended three interesting sessions today. The theme for today for creativity. Each session's discussion centered around how to be more creative in what we enable users to experience. Unfortunately, I did not get to attend either of the book readings I wanted that day about beautiful Web design and open source Flash projects. Regardless, I will discuss open source Flash at the end of this post, though, since the book reading presenter was Aral Balkan of osflash.org fame.

The first session was "Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong." Dan Willis (Sapient) had some great points that I have been saying for years. Glad to hear it! Web design, by and large, is based on Print design. He believes, though, that we are headed towards a shift where Web designers are moving away from the trappings of print design and towards formulating their own "grammer" of design, just as early filmmakers had to transition away from stage-based theatrics in the 19th century. Watch out for that tree! (If you were in the session, you get this one.)

The next session, "Oooh, That's Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)," was also full and great ideas. Paul Annett (Clearleft Ltd) showed us some truly clever examples of anagram logos and easter eggs in design and Web sites. I am inspired to go forth and have fun!

The last session I attended today was "That Doesn't Suck! Inspiring Creativity With Spore" presented by Caryl Shaw (Maxis). What an amazing game. Spore allows users to create their own characters and objects, even planets, that other people can play in Spore. In creating Spore and new features, the team actually follows the principle that a feature should be comprised of the following characteristics: 1/3 play, 1/3 share and 1/3 create (allowing users to create).

So the sessions were great. But I missed meeting Aral Balkan!!! I have been a Flash developer for years now and used his site, osflash.org, so many times I can't even count. So I'll have to say right now, "Aral, thank you for the great site." When I started using FlashDevelop IDE to create purely ActionScript 3 based video players, osflash.org was such a helpful resource.