Robot Goes to the Creative Summit

On March 28th and 29th, Robot Creative's designers attended the 2008 Creative Summit at Texas State University in San Marcos.

The 23rd annual Creative Summit is a regional student competition and design conference that attracts students and professionals from throughout the US.

Those Robots who had attended the year before were very excited about the speaker lineup. What inspiration would it hold for us this year?

The crowd slowly began to enter the Alkek Library Theater. It was like I was back in a lecture hall in my old college days. After the introductions, first up to the plate was Heather Amuny-Dey from Nike. She walked us through many of the best products and packaging ever to come out of Nike's doors. It was nice to think of what you could do with an amazing new product and an almost unlimited budget. One can dream!

After hearing several speakers, I realized that the focus was not on cutting-edge designs from the biggest and best design firms, but rather on personal projects that these top designers pursued outside of the office. The purpose of these projects was to help keep them inspired and creative, and perhaps even change the world.

Brian Singer, of the 1000 Journals project, spoke about the origin of his idea. As money was an issue, he bought 1000 journals in 10 rounds of 100 and mailed them around the world for others to find, add their own stories and then pass them along in an ongoing artistic form. This project was perhaps the most inspiring and reminded our team of the power of our imaginations.

The conference was a nice mix of small and large design firm work, illustrators and photographers. All in all, I quite enjoyed it. Being a web designer, I would have loved to see more web representation. But there's always next year!