FITC 2012

I have to admit, by simply changing venues, my impression of FITC seriously improved. Last year, they held it at The Guvernment and I remember someone commenting: “I never wanted to see those washrooms in daylight”. ‘Nuff said. This year it was held at the Hilton Downtown and it was a huge plus. Definitely suitable given the new direction of the conference is taking from “Flash In The Can” to “Future. Innovation. Creativity. Technology.”

I am also surprised how many people who attended that I knew! Last year, I was solo, not knowing what to expect. Just that fact alone has made it more welcoming.

Here are some of the sessions that I attended. Most were awesome, some were okay. Some I’d seen before and some were brand new. Overall, the conference was very well done.

James White – @Signalnoise

I have to admit right up front that I have a slight bias for James as my favourite presenter. I wrote about him last year and he did not disappoint. I was fully prepared to be blown away with some new stuff, but expecting the same chrome that I grew to love about his work. He did surprise me, but not in the way one might think.

He told us of the personal journey he has travelled since the last conference and how his work has changed as a result. it’s still cool but for different reasons. He spoke of getting back to basics and going more base and vibrant colours. Oddly enough, reminded me of my own life for a bit. Isn’t that part of what artists are all about? Now the challenge comes: after I’d made him a Japanese Crane out of silver paper last year (aka Chrome Crane), what do I do to top that? Well here’s a start: a crane in the colours of one of his more prominent posters. Happened to have the colours on me:

James White’s “Drive” poster

“Drive” Inspired Crane

I wanted to make sure I had a chance to catch his breakdown of the posters in the Voodoo Lounge on Wednesday and it was PACKED! Literally, standing room only. Luckily, I did get a chance to see the process of a really amazing artist. And what did I give him? A flower, made of washi paper that had cranes on it, similar to the above colours. The cranes and the style of paper represented the past and tradition. The flower and the colours represent growing and new things. Can’t wait to see what comes next.

Adobe Keynote

Being the IT person that I am and not so much the developer/designer person, the biggest piece of the keynote that stuck out for me was the intro of Proto, something that can do rough drawings and not only create a clean drawing, but also creates the code behind it. Just by drawing a squiggly line, the program knows you want to place text and generates your Lorem Ipsum filler. It also recognizes a simple line, menu items, paragraphs and more. It’s also very easy to share. With a very simple procedure, it’s in the cloud and your team gets access to it. If the crowd’s sounds were any indication, I wasn’t alone at being impressed.

Matthew Potter @AskMP

I started off Day 2 with a pretty heavy tech session with Matthew Potter. My web design skills are a little out of date and I thought I’d be in over my head. I was surprised that I was able to follow along quite well. Matt covered what he wanted to cover and then opened it up to the floor for questions and discussion, which was just as interesting as the presentation itself. This gave me a chance to learn about some of the challenges that exist around HTML5, what it can do, and what its limitations are. One of the highlights of the discussion was around the topic of accessibility.