As the plane hit the runway in Dublin, after a shaky desent, Kilian, Dave and myself were still talking about the content that was delivered, the conversations that were stirred up and an amazing sense of excitement and possibilities that are ours for the taking and making. The landing, for me, marked the end of few amazing days at NA Conf 2012, my first web design conference.

During the event, Cameron Koczon challenged designers to step up and do something great as outlined in his recent A List Apart article. His talk lit a welcomed fire under my rear; to focus on creating things of meaning and value. I decided to act immediately on the motivation and this post is my first step forward. It’s a reflection on what I learned at NA Conf, what I experienced there, and how I want to integrate that into my life.

My highlights

• Dan Mall validated the usual sketchy and doubtful beginnings my own design process and inspired me to do better work.
• Naomi Atkinson encouraged me to work on my own web space.
• Trent Walton encourage me to break stuff. To play and to experiment and not play it so safe all the time.
• I met the Typecast guys. Their app has massive potential, I started playing around with it this morning and plan on designing the type on this, my work in progress space, with it.
• Cameron encouraged a question, how could I help in education and healthcare?
• Gridpak, the responsive grid generator from the guys at Erskine looks great.
• Learned about Sinatra for prototyping and played around with it this morning.

Several times I heard people mention that they were there for the conversations, the socialising and magic that was woven around the talks. For me it was like negative space; without the form of the conference, the dialog could not have happened, and without the dialog, the conference would not have served it’s purpose.

My biggest takeaway is a feeling of heightened standards, from exposure to great work, and meeting people I admire and that have influenced me so much. My focus now is to pursue great design at Hypertiny and to build LOGO24 into a valuable business that I’m proud of. Succeeding in both, I feel, requires some work and barrier-breaking which I’m very excited about. “The fences don’t have any current”.

A massive thanks to Colly!