Week 6 - ON CAMPUS EVENT

ON CAMPUS EVENT

Interdisciplinary Interaction Design Conference

Saturday, October 3rd
9 am McComsey Hall, Millersville University

Overview

Every year James Pannafino hosts the IIDCon to introduce designers and speakers from the interactive and creative fields to talk to the students of Millersville University. This year the selection of speakers was slightly different compared to previous years. Pannafino selected all women from the professional fields to help inspire young females about the opportunities that exist in the interactive and design field. The set up of the conference allows all five speakers 30 minutes to present and afterwards there was a small fast round questionnaire. My favorite part of the conference is the meet and greet. The meet and greet session allowed me to ask more personal questions to the speakers and a way to spark up a conversation with them.

Speakers

Joni Trythall - Joni presented on SVG or scalable vector graphics. Her presentation can be found at http://slides.com/jonibologna/using-svg-on-the-web#/. Nora the narwhal is a svg that started out as an illustrator file that became a part of NowSecure branding. SVG is used inline as an <img> tag as if you were linking a normal image file. This scalable graphic consists of paths, shapes, text, and powerful alternative file to render. This graphic has unique UI capabilities because it can easily manipulated. The graphic entire logo can change as it is being scaled from including text and the image to just the image solely at mobile size. Other ways it can be editable is through changing the color, size and text. SVG's code is straight forward as well as minimal although the code can be messy and long. Another pro for using SVG is that the element can be stacked by the location of the graphic in the html code without messing with the z-index. It's important to run the code though an optimizer to clean up any nonsense code.

Kasey Hults - Kasey works at Infatree as an Account Manager. After Kasey graduated from Kutztown University she worked at White Good and learned about web design, public relations, layout, branding, and management. She was able to get a wide range of skills that she later brought with her to Herr's inhouse design team. During this time she lost her web and technology skills but still enjoyed the interactive part by talking to people. When she landed her job at Infantree she started off as a designer, then was promoted to office coordinator, management and now account management. Kasey explained that by working in a brand experience studio the whole team must work together to research, brainstorm, and design a company from the ground up. Because of her wide range of skills she is still able to work on quick projects but explained that you don't always have to be in the field to explore other areas of design. During her presentation she explained the process Intatree takes to design a company from the ground up through communication, visual language, logo design, moodboard, communication and much more.

Erin Good - Erin Good graduated from Millersville University and her presentation was slightly different compared to the first two speakers. Her presentation talked about her journey coming out of school. Erin worked as a lab tech and was able to build relationships. She talked about how important it is to use resources, stay organized and apply everywhere because the jobs aren't only at the big named companies. Some important points she talked about when applying is to remember who you are, what you can afford, your skill level, having experience of 3-5 years, don't just apply to companies but have communication with companies, practice interviews and don't burn bridges with anyone because they could be your next employer.

Sam Provenza - Sam presentation was also very technical. Sam is a web designer from AWeber and presented on using flexbox. She had been tinkering with flexbox in css. Flexbox replaces hacky floats and positioning. It has an almost full browser support. By using flex items you have a lot more control when designing for responsive design. This presentation would have worked better if it was a workshop and we were able to test the code.

Sofia Millares - For the final speaker Sofia works as the creative director at a product design company called Nasdaq. Her team consists of 24 product designers will all different levels of education. Sofia overviewed all the different responsibilities a web designer may take on and the responsibilities of a product designer. Basically a product designer will do everything a web designer will do but analysis and research the functionality of the product through personas, mapping, concept models, etc. A product designer will understand the problem and focus their research and outcomes around the user. Based on the goals of the user can the product be executed.

Final Thoughts

Overall I thought all the presentations were very informational. Joni's presentation was inspiring because she had no design background but was able to accomplish many success in her career. Her presentation was more technical but I thought this presentation demo was the most interesting because I truly learned something new from her talk. During Kasey Hults presentation, I was able to realize that if your not constantly exploring different technology then you will quickly lose that knowledge and it's important to keep reading and practicing your different skill sets. Erin Good presentation personally did not reflect me. I personally thought she made it seem that working in the big cities was a terrible thing but that was just her personal experience. What I took away was her pointers and helpful tips when applying for jobs. As for Sam and Sofia's presentations they were very informational. Every person was able to talk on different points making this conference diverse in the different type of jobs you could apply for in the future.