HOW Conference - Monday

Finally arrived in Atlanta in a most surreal way. Sunday night was spent with my wife Kari and work friends attending The POLICE concert at the Pepsi Center. I had to catch an 11:59 flight and was really pushing it, waiting for "just one more song" ... but I'm pretty sure I didn't miss many songs (Every Breath You Take was the last song I heard) before kissing Kari goodbye and bolting back to LoDo to pick up my car and get to DIA.

Got to the gate, the very last gate of course, just as they finished boarding everyone, and, as usual, couldn't sleep much on the 2.5 hour flight to Atlanta. I probably dozed for 45 minutes, but that's it. Landed, took the MARTA (it's now 5:30 am, full of McDonald's and Waffle House employees heading to work) to the Marriott, checked in, showered, got in touch with Kristen, my coworker who arrived a day earlier for preconference festivities and went to the HOW continental breakfast. We're staying in the Marriott Marquis and the Conference is at the Hyatt across the street.

Not 15 minutes into the first session, I was finding myself struggling to stay awake. I hate that feeling, but the session, A Number of People, was interesting enough to save me from a full chin-on-chest snooze. Chip Kidd, a very flamboyant book jacket designer, had a pretty good, entertaining presentation. His latest project is redesigning the new generation logos for Superman and Batman and Robin comic books.

Next was Kevin McConkey of Grip Design, who talked about avoiding burnout by suggesting ways to increase productivity while avoiding negative cycles of behavior and making burnout delicious. Kevin kinda thought he was on Last Comic Standing and it wasn't working for him, but cut away the attempts at being funny, he was pretty good.

Kristen enjoyed her pre-conference sessions on Sunday. She got tours of 5 print agencies and 5 interactive agencies and she said she took some good pictures. There are a lot of places to eat within walking distance of the hotels and ate lunch at a pub.

Shelley Armstong from Microsoft gave her presentation on a Mac. Her session was about staying creative in an in-house corporate environment. She leads a team that works on the XBox and Zune accounts, so I can't imagine she's struggling in her inhouse creative department! Even so, she had some experiences that definitely echoes what happens at Thomson Healthcare's creative department so it was valuable. Nice to know, even big Microsoft's creative team has to deal with fighting for the respect of the other departments. Took away some good points here, though really, nothing our team hasn't heard before.

The final session was The Way of the Design Shaman. Marc English is a hippy-esque, ecclectic designer who's had some pretty big name clients and a down-to-earth way of doing things.


It's pretty crowded at all the events, resource center and so forth. I've noticed that there are a lot of hipster folks with super-edgy eyeglasses, flip flops galore, guys with facial hair sculpted a thousand different styles, and the women are trying to outdo each other with who can have the pointiest shoes. Somebody's going to get hurt.

The big news around all the TV stations was the apparently huge letdown of the final Sopranos episode, which I have yet to see, so some of the anticipation of a big ending won't be there. But I will still watch.

Just returned from dinner. Just concluded that Atlanta can not do good Mexican. At best, the smothered chicken burrito I just had could best be described as a chicken pot pie wrapped in a tortilla, covered with red sauce. Yeah, no. OK. I'm dog tired. It's 8 o'clock and I'm going to sleep. I'm more tired than a sign-language translator at a Southern Baptist revival.