Geekend ’09

This weekend was the first annual Geekend event in Savannah, GA. The event started off friday night with a great talk by Aaron Draplin. Talking about his career into graphic design and his passion for junking, it was by far one of the most inspiring presentations I’ve attended. His work is incredible and I highly recommend checking out some of his work. I picked up a really cool poster that Aaron signed for me to put up in the new office.

Saturday morning kicked off a full day of hour long talks by some really inspiring creatives. My day’s schedule looked like this

9am – Sketching: The Secret Sauce of Design

10:30am – See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas with Comics. This talk by Kevin Cheng of Raptr was really great. Seeing how complex problems can easily be expressed /solved through comics brought some cool ideas to try out at work. I also have this whole presentation on video that I hope to post some clips sometime soon.

11:30am – Nurturing Creativity. Again, a really inspiring talk by Joey Hasty, creative Director at Disney. I got some really inspiring and creative ideas I hope to share with the team that we can use in the new space.

2:00pm – Connecting Fans with Band given by Eric Snowden of Atlantic Records. This was mostly about Snowden’s career path and his development of Fanbase at Atlantic Records, but It was really cool to listen about where he has been and how he got to where he is now.

3:00pm – How Design Make’s or Breaks a Venture by Matias Corea of Behance.

4:00pm – How to Be a Great Interrogator Designer by Andrew Davies, Carl Clark, Ariel Janzen, and Janna Hicks Devylder

5:30pm was the Keynote speaker Major Nelson (Larry Hryb), Director of Programming for XBOX Live. Again, another great talk about how Microsoft and Xbox Live is incorporating social media onto the Xbox console. Being a big fan of his blog and pod cast, I had a chance to meet him and also had him sign my Xbox faceplate.

The day ended with a block party where the speakers hung out with all the Geekenders in front of Seed Eco Lounge. They had a video game van and DJ set up and was a really cool way to end a great day.

Here are a few more photos of the Geekend.

And for a quick side note, David Carson was suppose to be the first Keynote speaker of the weekend. He was then pushed to Sunday due to scheduling conflicts. The current report was Carson was unable to speak on Sunday due to being “Stuck in Denver”. How unfortunate…