Thinking Creatively Design Conference Review
For the 3rd year in a row I have attended the Thinking Creative Design Conference held at Kean University. Each year I have been more and more surprised by the interesting designers who have spoken there. At my very first conference I happily enjoyed a lecture from John Langdon, the creator behind the ambigrams of the Dan Brown books “Angels and Demons” and “The DaVinci Code.” Getting one on one lectures with these designers helps to understand where they came from and how they started to work their way up in design.
This year two of my personal favorite designers were speakers at the conference; Jessica Hische and Ronald Cala, II. It was great to see Ronald in-person again and very inspirational to finally meet Miss Hische. This Thinking Creatively really gave me my money’s worth since I admire these people personally. There were of course many designers that I did enjoy but probably would not have attended the conference just for. There were two added sessions besides just designer lectures; a charrette and a portfolio review. Neither had been done before at Thinking Creatively, so I’m glad they are trying to do more than just lectures.
There are many great things about Thinking Creatively, especially how close it is to my location. However I still had my gripes about the way certain parts of it were run.
Unfortunately timing of the lectures was always an issue, since after the first one or two lectures of the morning. Having lectures run too long causing people to of course miss the beginning of the next lecture. Or people will have to leave the lecture early to get to the next one in time. I also felt that not keeping the speakers on a schedule leads to missed opportunities.
Specifically on the first day, the last lecture of the day, the keynote speaker of the first day was a Disney Imagineer. He didn’t start his speech on time, which also lead to him running over the allotted time. Unfortunately causing me to miss an entire hour more of his speech, because I had scheduled a prior engagement after reviewing the listed end time in the program. I feel as though if everything had run smoothly and on time I would have certainly left that first day much happier with the way the day ended. Needless to say I was very disappointed at the fact that I had to miss one of the most important lectures (that I was enjoying) because of their scheduling issues.
Lesson learned if attending Thinking Creatively, don’t expect it to be on schedule. I found that to be the biggest downfall of the conference.
Aside from the horrible timing this year, the Thinking Creatively conference is a great local (non NYC) design conference that definitely is running a long side with the other larger design conferences, such as How and AIGA and great competition in price. Be sure to check out the designers speaking there April 2011.