SXSW Preparation

Only three days left until the start of 2005 SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin. Tomorrow I hit the road with Aaron in “Scout”, the trusty Subaru Forester that will take us all the way to the Texas capitol and back. I’m severely excited!

This is my first time at “South By”, so it should be not only an eye-opener in terms of learning but also a good chance to share ideas, tips, and gripes with like-minded web design and interactive media professionals. The man who helped inspire me to get into the web as a hobby (then) and a career (now), Jeffrey Zeldman, will be opening the Interactive conference this Saturday with a keynote speech. From there it will be panels, award ceremonies, film viewings, get-togethers, and lots more.

I had a pretty hard time deciding between some of the panel choices, since there were superb topics and panelists at several coinciding times during the 4 days of the conference. Here’s my tentative schedule for the panels:

 Saturday, March 12th
 3:30 pm: How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process
 5:00 pm: How to Make Big Things Happen With Small Teams


 Sunday, March 13th
 10:00 am: DIY Now, or Someone Else Will
 11:30 am: How to be Beautiful: More Hi-Fi Design With CSS
 3:30 pm: The Elements of Meaningful XHTML
 5:00 pm: How to Build Your Brand with Blogs

 Monday, March 14th
 10:00 am: Does Design Matter?
 11:30 am: How to Inform Design: How to Set Your Pants on Fire
 3:30 pm: Startupland: A How-to Guide to Starting Your Own Company
 5:00 pm: Design Eye for the Idea Guy

 Tuesday, March 15th
 10:00 am: Typography for the Screen
 11:30 am: Low-Resource Rich-Application Development: Flash, .Net & CSS
 3:30 pm: Spam, Trolls, Stalkers: The Pandora’s Box of Community

Of note are 3 fellow Arizona (at least!) residents besides Aaron who will be attending SXSW 2005 in Austin. James Archer, Paul Nixon, and Molly Holzschlag. The latter two I know are on panels—go AZ pride! James posted his tentative schedule last week, and Aaron posted about it today.

If there are any other Arizona South Byers out there, let me know—I’d love to talk to you and meet you at the conference. Also, for SXSW veterans, I know it’s late notice but any tips on what to bring and what not to bring? It should be a great time!