Jason from RefreshPittsburgh reached out to let us know that he is helping organizing a Flash conference in Pittsburgh. I’ll let him give the details.

Flashpitt is a one-day conference for multimedia designers, developers, and artists. It’s Pittsburgh’s first major Flash-centric conference. We’re bringing in a good number of out of town and well-known speakers. We’re hoping the event turns into an annual thing. Usually, an event like this would require folks from Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas to travel to other cities, such as New York, Chicago, Boston and even DC sometimes. So we’re hoping to not only turn this into nice regional event, but also trying to show off the area to the speakers/attendees and show them that there is some interesting and creative work going on here too! The conference will consist of two tracks of sessions running from 9am until about 6pm. We’ll finish it all off with an after party later that night. You can see more information on the event such as the schedule and our list of speakers at http://www.flashpitt.com/.

If your looking for a “local” event head over to flashpitt and check it out - Space is limited. I look forward to Jason letting us know how it goes.

So I wanted to write a couple things down while everything is still fresh in my mind and I think of where to get dinner. I’m attending the Flash Forward Conference here in San Francisco and I roll up everything into two ideas; passion and inspiration. This conference has not been devoted to the newest code you can use in flash. Or even techniques you should use as best practices, this has let down the developer in me. Instead, the designer in me has been blown away by what I have seen.

And I believe this is a foreshadowing of how the upcoming version of Flash has been upgraded. It’s being upgraded for the designer. Advances in tweening on the time-line reminds me of using the 3D applications I love, where you have individual control of all the properties of an object. Animation doesn’t need to be set to a path, the path is created for any motion tween and then you can apply changes directly on the stage. Oh, and one new thing I had no idea about; INVERSE KINEMATICS! They’ve built skeleton rigging into flash animation. There are more flash upgrades I can get into, new text rendering and controls which are now on par with photoshop and illustrator, being about to think in 3D now without extra 3rd party integration…but now I’m getting distracted by what I really wanted to focus on.

Inspiration. Every speaker I have seen have helped me going as see all this new, and existing, potential.  Miha Pogacnik’s presentation on passion, creativity and professionalism opened new ways to think about how to work on projects with clients. How to keep passion in a projects. Not being controlled by fear and ‘Let Go’ of roadblocks to drive past them. There is no rebirth without death, and you cannot be afraid to fail. Unless you fail, how do you learn?

And seeing such potential to use a resource like flash to create something truly beautiful. Robert Hodgin delivered a beautiful presentation with Zoe Keating using Flash to show visual representation of music beyond what you can see just using Whitecap or the iTunes visualizer. And the last presenter today, Erik Natzke, uses code to create such fine art pieces which I don’t see how they can be created any other way then using Flash as he does.

It’s not to say there was nothing technical going on at all. And there were and are more speakers lined up. But these presentation really struck a cord for me. There is potential for anyone to create something beautiful, even with just code. You just need to be passionate about what you are doing. And it’s easy to get trapped in a routing and get distracted from just ‘playing’ with the tools we have available to us. Being here has just reminded my that I don’t want to get pulled away for creating something great, and I’m sure many of you don’t either. I sometimes worry I’ve lost that passion, but it’s never too late to be re-kindled.

So what is your passion? And how do you keep hold of it, while having to survive through life? I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about when I come back to my hometown.

Why would you print out a design that will ultimately be on a screen? Website users are not running monitors that display 300 dpi at 11 x 17. That would be one impressive screen.

But if you were to make a layout of a page true to the look of the end user’s monitor screen, you leave yourself open for an attack on your designs. I had a client recently tell me that a design I did looked very unprofessional and ‘childish’ because I chose not to anti-alias the type in photoshop. I wanted to give a closer representation to how the end user would be seeing the site. That did not strike any kind of positive chord with the client.

I suppose sometimes trying to look beyond the moment your in can make you loose focus on what the client is really seeing. Looks like next time I present a design, I’ll be making sure all type is anti-aliased. Wait, so what happens when you break out the design into actual HTML and the text now isn’t anti-aliased in the browser? Sometimes the client understands that HTML text renders that way, sometimes the client just needs a little explination, sometimes they start to think you can’t make your design into a website that looks EXACTLY like the design in turn trying to hire more consultants to dip into the conversations between you and the client and triple the time needed to complete to project and your chance for a profit goes into the negative zone…but that would be a pessimist view of all of this. (^_^)

So what about everyone else Are you more concerned with putting a pristine design together, 11×17 300 dpi printable with crisp print quality images? Or being able to show how true HTML text will be rendered and design around 1024×768 72 dpi layouts, which are not always the nicest to look at when printed out, though you don’t look at a website on a piece of paper in the end, it’s on a screen.