DIBI 2018

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Dibi conference 2018I attended the DIBI (Design It; Build It) 2018 conference for designers and developers on Monday 12th November. It was in Edinburgh which was great for me and the venue was the Hub located just below the castle, which I had never actually been inside.

The first speaker (and MC) was Christopher Murphy, he has a very interesting outlook on life and an excellent speaker. He is a design strategist and writer of several books. He takes the attitude that you should look at where you want to be, visualise it, draw it, then do it. A somewhat daunting prospect he has done more than once. He started a website a number of years ago called Fallt Publishing with someone called W. Conrad Röntgen who was totally fictional and the site became quite successful, though is no longer being updated. He has worked with a number of big clients such as Adobe and the BBC.

At the end of the lunch Mr Murphy gave me a free copy of Offscreen magazine  purely because someone hadn’t met up with him to receive it and he didn’t want to take it back to Ireland. I’m taking this with me on holiday this week, great reading for the train!

The presentations were all very good covering design strategy, cross culture design and loving what you do. Tammie Lister who works at Automattic and the company behind WordPress, emphasised the point that many people use frameworks because they are the latest trend, it’s what everyone else does and because people say you have to. You should do what is right for the project and keep it clean so people looking at the project in the future have a clue what is actually going on in the code.

The closing keynote speech was probably everyones favourite, Mr Bingo, fascinating and very entertaining. He made us all laugh with his ‘Hate Mail’ postcards and nude advent calendars! He is an illustrator/artist who loves rap, hates being called ‘edgy’ and has created Kickstarter projects which sell out within hours. He also has a large following on Twitter and Instagram. When he reached 50k on Instagram he met up with that person and had a beer. The interesting thing is he no longer has any clients, he does what he wants and is good at it.  Another brilliant project was Getting shit faced on a train.

I have to say that it was the best and most entertaining conference I have attended in a long time.

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