Jeffrey Veen and Tantek Celik were both superb speakers who engaged me and made me think. I was also extremely impressed by John Allsopp, who led, moderated and glued together the discussions on “What will Web Design be like in 2010?” with a compelling passion of the subject. There just wasn’t enough time to cover the subject adequately in the hour, but fortunately, Dave Shea has created a minisite where discussion of the questions raised can continue.
Andy Budd and Jeremy Keith made their SXSW debut with the excellent “How to bluff your way in CSS” where the irony was (fortunately) not lost on the crowd. “I’m thinking of buying a Mac” became a useful catchphrase at the conference.
As seems to be the case with panels, there were often 3 or 4 events clashing. I missed out on panels such as “Where are the women in web design?”, “Trick out your Blog”, “Doing big things with Small Teams” and “Flash for mobile devices”. I think SXSW missed a trick by not creating podcasts of all the panels and making them available to attendees. This would’ve been a great way to at least get the flavour of the ones you had miss out on. Or are they lurking somewhere I haven’t come across yet?