Vote to Make SXSW More Boring
Last spring, I made my first trip to Austin for SXSW. After five days, I left with a notebook full of quotes, tips and little sketches that I find myself revisiting often. I heard from speakers whose work I still have open in tabs on my desktop, and links that I pass around almost weekly.
But something irked me about all the presentations I saw at SXSW. It’s something that I see at most marketing or design conferences. The projects on display are almost too good to be true.
For example, at the end of The Made Shop’s presentation, How to Be a More Inefficient Designer, an audience member asked a very real question about budget. The design shop had just showed off some amazing work for Adobe, Inspire Magazine and Son Lux (seriously, check it out), but the audience member – and myself – were left wondering how they paid for all this “inefficient design” and experimentation. Did they even make money off of these projects? And if they didn’t, how did they make money?
I’m not discounting their presentation, or any of the others I saw. Like I said, I still reference them often. They’ve been an incredible source of inspiration and motivation for me.
But the reality is, not everyone is going to end up working on consumer brands like Target or Apple or Nike.
More often than not, working in B2B industries like healthcare, professional services and manufacturing means we’re faced with constraints – strict brand standards, outdated or proprietary content management systems, or stagnant internal teams and competitors going toe-to-toe on bullet points and features lists. Everyone is saying the same thing. Everyone looks the same. And it’s been that way for decades.
There’s a perception that working in conservative industries like these is boring. Boring industries. Boring clients. Boring creative. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We’ve found that clients in these industries present their own set of unique challenges and opportunities for creativity, even if they lack the name recognition of consumer brands.
And so we went out on a limb and submitted a proposal for Atomicdust to speak about this topic at SXSW 2016.
In our presentation, we hope to share some of our experiences and the lessons we’ve learned working in more conservative industries. Why this kind of work is a challenge, and why it’s rewarding. How to push for more creative solutions in industries that haven’t seen change in years. And what to do to avoid burnout (because yes, at some point you will get bored).
SXSW is using the Panel Picker platform to allow the public to view and vote on proposed presentations. The list is daunting. This year, there were more than 4,000 submissions. And that’s why we need your vote.
Public voting only accounts for 30% of our final score, but every little bit helps. You can also leave a comment or share our presentation proposal on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Panel Picker voting closes this Friday, September 4.
We know this is quite a big ask (and yes, you have to register in order to vote), but we think conversations like these are important for designers, marketers and other professionals to have. If more creatives can become interested in working in these conservative industries, maybe someday they won’t be so…conservative.
