Photo by Marc Thiele

On the 19th of May, I gave a talk at Carsonified’s Future of Web Design London on Freelancing. I’ve just been sent the video of my talk if you missed it. – Video no longer available. :(

Although I was really nervous in the days leading up to the conference, I really enjoyed speaking. The audience was great, and made such lovely comments on Twitter. I really hope Carsonified ask me to speak again. (hint hint!)

I’ll be posting a write-up of the talk on either my blog or Scrunchup, so keep an eye on my RSS or Twitter feed.

As much as I’d like to, I’m not going to write a minute-by-minute account of the Future Of Web Design conference. I’m suffering from the side-effects of writing 300 pages for my IT coursework and I’m not sure how much more I can type before my swollen fingers drop off. So I’m going to summarise a few of the good and not so good events of the 3 days.

• The roadtrip to Kensington with Ryan, Paul and Dom
• Enduring the boys singing Celine Dion songs
• Re-enacting Half Life in the car park
• Taking an hour to check into the hotel
• Overhearing the hotel receptionist on the phone to the police
• Squeezing into a minature lift and calculating everyone’s weight to see if we’d break it
• Getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a dodgy unlicensed taxi driver
• Relying on human-sat-nav PaulPaul to locate bars in London
• Getting a very large Media Temple shirt that I ended up using as a nightgown
• Dom setting fire to the toaster in the morning
• Ryan hitting his croissant against his plate to demonstrate how stale it was
• Getting a cool pass with my name on it
• Being very geeky and sitting at the very front of the hall
• Dom twittering EVERYTHING
• The Silverlight talk by a guy who actually worked for Aston Martin
• Watching a very funny Photoshop battle
• Not understanding all the obscure references from the 1970s
• Being completely captivated by Andy Budd’s and Jon Hick’s talk
• Getting Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the boys
• Watching Dom go up to Jeremy Keith and say “Hi, I’m Dom, who are you?”
• Almost using Paul Boag’s iPhone as a coaster
• Getting a Stuff and Nonsense badge from Andy Clarke
• Asking Daniel Burka very school-girlishly if I could shake his hand
• Being mocked by Ryan for asking people if I could shake their hand
• Watching Dom use a dance mat
• Ryan reading me a bed-time story
• The brilliant Silverlight workshop
• The guys from Microsoft using Macs with Silverlight stickers on top of the apple logo
• Being called a “Bloody Northerner” for ordering mushy peas
• Going on a Mini Mondeo Adventure
• Telling Ryan to turn of the sat-nav because I thought I knew the way back
• Ending up in Hemel Hempstead
• Going round hundreds of roundabouts saying “I think there’s a Waitrose round here…”
• Saying a very sad farewell to the boys :(

I really enjoyed my FOWD experience, and can’t wait for the next event. Here are a few photos that I took.

At first, I wasn’t sure If I should go because I’m not a full-time designer yet, and at over £100 (plus hotel, food and travel costs), it wasn’t cheap.  But I would really recommend it, especially to people like me who don’t have much of a chance to interact with other designers.  It’s very ineffective and boring to try and learn everything from a book, and I came back feeling very motivated and inspired.