Once again I find myself trying to put into words the experience that is South by Southwest. SXSW is not training. SXSW is not a trade show. SXSW is, in the words of Zeldman, a zeitgeist of the what direction the Internet and web industry is headed. You don’t attend SXSW to learn anything in particular and yet you walk away with more knowledge and inspiration about topics that you either had no idea existed or you’d forgotten all about. Having now attended SXSW for the last two years, I can safely say that it’s an unpredictable event that brings together some of the best and brightest. Here are some of my impressions, inspirations, and thoughts from this years event.
Mobile Web
This will continue to grow and become increasingly important in the future. As a university, we’re probably safe lagging behind in mobile development. However, the message was this: build web standards based sites, and you’ll be ready when the mobile revolution happens.
Accessibility
Let me repeat: build web standards based sites and you’ll meet most of the accessibility checkpoints.
Typography
Ahh… an old topic that had fallen by the way side in the last couple of years. For me, the subject of typography would have to be the most inspirational bit that I took away from SXSW. Sitting in on sessions about Grid Theory, Web Typography, and being able to see the world premiere of the documentary Helvetica took me back a few years to my days in CDES.
Typography is more that just choosing a font. It’s about making sure you use proper ligatures, have a good vertical flow that content follows, and making sure when you define substitute fonts, they’re similar.
Networking
Last year, I went to SXSW with hopes of meeting some of my web design “superheros” and for the most part I was able to say “hi” and chat for a few minutes with most of them. That was all fine and nice, except they were meeting so many people, I really didn’t feel that anyone really remembered me the next day. What I found was that the lasting connections I made were with other people from universities. This year, I wasn’t really interested in trying to talk with all the “VIPs” of web design, but rather meeting up with the people I had met last year: Dave, Josh, Jessa, Chip, and Pat. On that level, this year was a great success. I spent some quality time hanging out with Dave and his crew, along with Josh and Jessa.
Sessions
I suppose it’s hard to really know what you’re signing up for from the session titles. I had a lot of hope that I would find tons of good information in the sessions. I was sorely mistaken a few times, and spot on others. I would say that overall the quality of the sessions were lower than last year. I discussed this with others, and they felt the same. The focus this year seems to have shifted toward video and business; not much of a surprise there considering the YouTube purchase by Google. While some will claim that SXSW is not about the sessions but the hallway discussion or after hour events, it’s hard to make that justification to your employer.
With that in mind, I would continue to advocate SXSW as an event that we must continue to send people to because you never know what will grab your attention and what will reinvigorate you.
Final Thoughts
Now that I’m back from SXSW and have had a chance to reflect on my experiences, I’d like to see SXSW continue to play a roll in web development at Chico State. In many respects, much of our web presence is a few steps behind. Here, we tend to treat the web as an extension of old media. Through learning about new technologies, techniques, and what other universities and businesses are implementing, we can understand where we need to guide our own web presence. Instituting that type of change can be difficult and require a lot of energy. SXSW gives you an infusion of energy to help you become an agent of change. Hopefully next year Chico State can have a larger contingent travel to SXSW to experience all it has to offer.