During one of our (many) discussions at SXSWi 2007, Matt likened the conference to
"a week long rock concert where everyone is allowed backstage and all the rockstars are friendly". I couldn't agree more! It was so cool to hear Dan Cederholm talk in person about developing Cork'd or listening to Shaun Inman talk about his reasoning behind development decisions he made while making Mint. This year was the first time I attended SXSWi, but I can promise you after having had such a successful and inspirational experience, I will do whatever it takes to be there every year from here on out!

In many ways SXSWi 2007 was a web design boot camp for me. In the six days Matt and I were in Austin, I was introduced to a variety of new people, technologies, and movements that have forever changed the way I look at the web. Make no mistake, I was a big fan of the internets before the conference, but now I am down-right obsessed!

It's not possible for me to put into words everything that I learned at SXSWi, but continue reading to see the 10 things that I took away from this year's conference.

1. How To Find and Maintain Inspiration

The first panel we attended at SXSWi was Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert's panel entitled "After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration." The presentation about finding and maintaining inspiration can be summed up in one word — inspirational. Jason and Rob talked about finding inspiration in your day to day life and using that as fuel for your creative fire. If you're a designer, you never shut down and stop designing. It doesn't matter if you're working on a project or out for dinner with your family, inspiration is everywhere and you need to be conscious of that!

One of their suggestions on how to make yourself "ready" for inspiration is to give yourself a daily creative task. Rob explained his daily task is to take the Dictionary.com word of the day and use it in a Haiku. By giving himself the constraints of the Haiku structure and the Word of the Day, he is forced to be creative on a daily basis. Since hearing this, Matt and I have been putting this lesson to practice and it has been fantastic! We are embracing the design all around us, and daily we're finding new things that inspire us. If you don't listen to any other podcasts from this year's SXSWi, make sure you check this one out!

2. You Cannot Ignore The User

I had just started reading Robert Hokeman's book, "Designing the Obvious" literally a week before we headed to Austin. I had no idea he was hosting a panel called "Why We Should Ignore Users" until we were reviewing our Sunday agenda on Saturday night. Robert debated the different approaches to designing user interfaces with interaction designers, Sarah Bloomer and Mark Schraad.

While the other designers championed developing "Personas" or "User Profiles" when brainstorming a new interface design, Robert argued that it was a waste of time. He felt that users should be ignored because they don't know what they want and they know even less about how to reach their mysterious objective.

However, it became clear during the debate that Robert wasn't ignoring his users at all, but instead drawing on years of user experience to design something he knew would appeal to them. What I took away from this panel was that no matter what your method for developing a user interface is, you've got to design with the user as your primary focus if your design is to succeed.

3. Typography On The Web Really Does Suck

After pre-flight discussions between Matt and I regarding a font choice for a particular site, we both felt that Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter's presentation entitled "Web Typography Sucks" was a must see event. Matt is more well-versed in this arena than I am, but after listening to this presentation, I no longer question why Matt puts so much time into finding just the right font for a new site design.

For too long the typography used on the Web has been tired and boring. When the web was new, there weren't a ton of typeface options available to designers when they were designing a site. Oh but how times have changed. There are a multitude of typefaces available for today's web designers, but sadly people are either unaware or don't see the importance of using a typeface other than Arial.

Mark and Richard touched on other topics such as vertical rhythm, and the correct use of the em dash, but the typeface education I received has effectively ruined me for life. Ever since their presentation I am turned off by more sites than ever. I am truly grateful that they helped open my eyes to the beauty of typography!

4. It's all in the details!

I was certainly aware of the importance of the "little things" before SXSWi, but after witnessing several panels with some of the Web's best and brightest, it became apparent that I wasn't putting enough focus on the details in all aspects of my life. Attention to detail is what sets great sites apart from the average ones and the same is true for things in your day to day life. The reason your neighbor wins "yard of the month" every year is that he meticulously trims his grass and shrubs, making sure that each blade lays the right direction and each bush is perfectly rounded (ah, thank you).

We try to approach Web Design in the same fashion. People have given us a lot of compliments on our work, with most folks saying that they love how each design looks so "polished and clean". It looks that way because we agonize over pixel-perfect placement and go to great lengths to refine the details of each site we design. If you don't take the time to worry about the "small stuff", the project will be compromised and your end result will suffer. Seeing the professionalism and attention to detail at SXSWi made me realize that even though we put a lot of focus and care into our projects, we can always do more.

5. Email is both a blessing and a curse

Prior to our trip to Austin, Matt and I had been having a lot of discussions about email. In particular, we had both noticed a serious lack of professionalism in a vast majority of the emails we were receiving on a daily basis. A lot of the emails we were getting were either too long, too short, too vague, contained misspellings &emdash; you name it we got it.

Some of this I know can be attributed to the nature of email. It's so easy to fire off a response to someone when a thought is fresh in your mind. After all, you need to do it quickly to get back to the other 100 things you're working on at the same time. However, some of this poor email etiquette is just plain laziness. Seriously, how hard is it to put a complimentary closing, like "Regards" or "Sincerely", at the end of your email? Needless to say, we were happy to learn that we are not the only ones that feel this way about email!

David Shipley, Op-Ed editor of the New York Times, and Will Schwalbe, Editor and Chief of Hyperion Books, gave a wonderful presentation called, "I Can't Believe You Sent That: E-mail Disasters, Large and Small and How to Avoid Them". They touched on the "Eight Deadly Sins of Email" and told stories of email disasters to help illustrate how bad email has become in today's world of constant connectivity. Check out their site, Thinkbeforeyousend.com, there is a ton of useful information to help you structure your emails more professionally and effectively.

Since that panel we here at 45royale have vowed to send emails that contain valid subject lines, include a greeting and a salutation, are to the point, and include a complimentary closing. We've come up with a company email guideline that we're calling "The Rule of 4".

Basically, we're going to try and send 4 sentence emails. We will open with a greeting and salutation, immediately address the issue at hand, and then follow that up with the next step necessary to resolve the issue. Finally, we'll ask if there are any questions before ending with complimentary closing. Done. Using The Rule of 4 when sending emails is making us think more about what we're actually trying to say, which in turn helps us to be more effective communicators.

6. Love your clients

James Archer from Forty Media, had a short presentation on Sunday called, "Deadlines, Clients and Cashflow: The Business Side of Web Design", where he offered up 40 bits of wisdom about running a web design business. There were a ton of great points and it was comforting to realize that we aren't the only company that deals with these issues on a day to day basis. However, the one point that he made that I gravitated toward instantly was "You have to love your clients".

His point was, don't take a client on if you aren't willing to give them everything you have. Clients are paying you for a service and you should provide the best customer service that you can. Anyone can flake on a job, but it takes a good designer/developer to work through issues in order to complete a project and have it succeed.

We don't always have the luxury of picking and choosing our clients, but we need to try and work with the ones that know what they want and appreciate the work we're doing for them. But no matter how the situation turns out, if we say we're going to take on a new client we have got to give them our all and do everything we can to see them succeed. It won't always be easy, but it's the right thing to do.

7. Microformats are powerfully cool!

In all honesty, I didn't have a clue about Microformats before SXSWi. In fact, Matt and I didn't even plan on attending the panel, "The Growth and Evolution of Microformats" until we decided at the last minute that we'd check it out. Matt warned me that it would be "geeky" but in hindsight, I am so glad that we decided to give it a shot!

If you don't know already, Microformats are "simple conventions for embedding semantic markup for a specific problem domain in human-readable (X)HTML/XML documents, Atom/RSS feeds, and "plain" XML, that normalize existing content usage patterns". In other words, Microformats allow you to enclose your address, calendar event details, and other content into specific tags that can be easily recognized for what they are by your browser or a web application. Tantek Çelik said it best when he told the crowd, "It's your data, you should be able to control and format it how you see fit". By using Microformats on your site, you can control the distribution of your content in ways that make it easy for humans and computers alike to store your information.

Michael Kaply, who works for IBM and has worked on Netscape Navigator and Firefox, came up with Microformats along with a few others at a SXSWi conference several years earlier. Michael and others, like Frances Berriman and Glenn Jones, are heavily involved in the Microformat community and are working to find ways to encourage their usage and support. In fact, Michael has developed an extension for Firefox called Operator that allows Firefox to easily spot and extract Microformatted data. I was completely blown away by the power of Microformats and I truly think the possibilities for them are endless. We've even added an hCard to our contact page and plan on working more with Microformats in the future.

8. You have to document what works

Another item from the James Archer discussion that I felt really applied to us here at 45royale, was his statement that you "should write a manual for the magic". When you are running your own business you're constantly performing the same tasks over and over. After a while, these mundane tasks can start making your life a little harder. The problem is, we are all so busy that we often forget how we successfully approached a situation before and so we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes again.

There is no way you can remember everything, but if you make an effort to document what works for you and your business, you can always refer back to the document when you encounter similar situations. If you run a business with more than one employee, everyone should have access to the same document so they can benefit from your experience and hopefully avoid the pitfalls from the past.

Since our return from SXSWi we have implemented a Company Constitution and we keep a writeboard in our Basecamp Project that any one of us can edit. In the document we've attempted to define the things that work for us; such as file structure, file naming, standard responses to common questions, the afore mentioned "Rule of 4", etc. All of these things enable us to free our minds so we can focus our time and energy on the things we enjoy doing &emdash; like designing kick ass websites!

9. Specialists are great, but the Generalist will never die

We've been having a lot of internal conversations lately about how to tackle projects. Now that there are 3 of us, we've had to take a look at the skills we each bring to the table and how best to utilize those on a per-project basis. And what do you know, "Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design" was here to save the day and help us through the rough spots.

The panel, which included Cameron Adams, Sally Carson, Dustin Diaz, and Jonathan Snook, was originally supposed to be about the integration of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. However, the panelists decided to take a different approach with the panel and instead spoke about the three main parts of a successful project; the business aspect, the user experience, and development. All areas must be equally balanced in order for a project to meet its objective. If one area is disproportionate to the others, the project could fail.

During the discussion, the panelists mentioned that there is plenty of work out there for someone to survive as a Specialist, but the Generalist&emdash;who has wide variety of skills&emdash;will never go out of style. One comment made during the panel that gave everyone a good chuckle was, "Can you imagine a kid coming out of College only knowing Javascript and nothing else?". On projects where a Development Specialist might be having a difficult time explaining to the team why the design can't be implemented, Generalists, are able to speak the language of both the designer and the developer and bridge the communication gap that keeps everyone on the same page.

This reinforced for us that even though 45royale team members each have their own specialty, we need to continue to grow and encourage ourselves to try different things so we can more effectively communicate on multi-tiered projects.

10. Don't make excuses

There wasn't a single panel that touched on this topic, but this statement kept coming up in all of our post-panel discussions. Too often we have found that we make excuses to justify our short-comings. We say things like, "I was too busy yesterday to call that client back" or "I didn't hit that deadline because the client took too long to give us feedback on the 2nd round mock-up." The more Matt and I talked about our excuses, the more we realized that we make them in other areas of our personal life too. Everyone has 24 hours in their day and it's a matter of finding the time and maximizing your creativity. After seeing some of the best in our industry speak, we started thinking "these people seem to be able to find time for everything. Why can't we?"

After our inspirational trip to SXSWi we have made a pledge to own up to our short-comings and take steps to correct them in order to become better designers and better people. Instead of blaming a client for not getting feedback to us on time, we need to turn that question around and ask ourselves if we did everything we could to help them succeed in that task. Did we communicate the deadline effectively? Did we contact the client just before their deadline to remind them that we need their feedback to keep the project on track? If the answer is no, then we haven't done everything we can to help the process along.

I'm not going to lie, doing this can be difficult and certainly painful at times. We are all human and we inherently want to protect our fragile psyches by deflecting blame when things go wrong. However, we strongly believe that if we stop making excuses, we'll be able encourage better habits and avoid making the same mistakes over and over. This will lead to happier clients and in turn, happier designers. And really, isn't that what this is all about?