A sign at MIX09

I feel that conferences are an essential part of connecting with the larger community and keeping a pulse on the future of technology, design, and our industry as a whole. I feel quite lucky to have had the role as the Creative Director for the MIX Conferences 2007 – 2011, for the MIX Conferences held my Microsft each year. The goal of the MIX conferences is to connect with designers, developers and web-technology enthusiasts to share knowledge and create community around “The Next Web Now.” I’m proud to have contributed very, very heavily into making such great events happen over so many years.

The Site: Pushing It Forward Every Year

Launching the conference site was a fun and interesting challenge. The first step was to determine with whom we would partner to bring the “Creative + Developer Spirit” to the MIX09 aesthetic. We had worked with various agencies in the past, most of which were “larger agencies” that had already made deep inroads with Microsoft. As the Creative Director for the conference, I wanted to ensure I brought a specific flair and feel to the event to better engage the attendees who were a little on the outside, a little unsure how they felt about Microsoft. I thought it was best to have the outliers understand that Microsoft was filled with Creative people just like them who were working hard, thoughtfully, and pushing hard against what can sometimes be a very developer-orieinted mindset.

To the end of developing a new visual language, a new aesthetic, and one that was a little outside what had been done in the past, I engaged the creative agency If/Then to create the initial style guide and some deliverables that could guide the rest of our internal team as we developed the site and worked with the various other vendors to produce materials for the onsite event.

In addition to our immediate needs, I thought it would be interesting and useful to make available to the community the original artwork that goes into the site and event: from .ai and .psd original artwork that could be broken out and reused, to Silverlight and WPF files that designers and developers could take advantage of and incorporate into the projects we hoped they would submit to the event.

Specifically, I thought by providing the individual logos, specific colors, and breaking out the individual grids, all of this would be especially useful in the context of the ReStyle contest we’re hosting.  The challenge of ReStyle is to show off your CSS, design, and front-end web-developer skills by restyling the MIX09 homepage.