Designer’s Fiesta 4- Lulu’s experience

On the 27th of September 2013, Rebecca sent me to spend a marvellous half-day learning new skills and understanding recent trend in the UK’s creative field at The Designer’s Fiesta-‘a celebration of design and digital’. The event is hold by UK’s leading Adobe Authorised Training Centre- Academy Class.

Venue:

The holding place is very easy to approach; only 7 minutes walk from Blackfriars station. The venue called 15 Hatfields is quite versatile which is a professional place for conferencing and events. A modern reception area located next to the entrance which leads to 4 main conferences rooms, which could be seat no more than 80 individuals. It also gets a large conference room downstairs which could contain around 150 people. Each conference room served with HD video conferencing and web casting facilities, which is perfect for workshops and presentation.

My first time to promote CIDA:

I arrived at the registration desk around 14:10. Sara, one of the event organizers told me that a young digital designer called Laura hoped to find out what CIDA about, and how it works. After a short conversation with her, I found out she hoped to build up a small design enterprise in London. CIDA, one of Designer’s Fiesta partners is exact the ideal agency, which specialised in supporting and representing entry-level creative and artists. Thus, I left her the general office tel. She gave me her business card for exchange. At the end of the conversation, I started to promote our upcoming event creative XPO.

Session Details:

Generally, the Designer’s Fiesta was targeted at digital designers and developers to share their tricks and tips related to digital design works. To be honest, I am not quite a digital person. Surprisingly, after attending the event I started to realize how important the digital media and various creative tools are. I was completely blown away by those techniques and tips introduced by those digital design masters especially Mark Gatter’s presentation on ‘Photoshop masks in all their glory’. Besides, there were loads of creative experts and scholars introducing the current trend in CCI field. Each presentation runs for an hour long. Particularly, I do enjoy Marc Campman’s speech on the importance of social media for creatives. During the presentation, he highly recommended that every CCI workers should set up their own website, which is one of the strategies to set up your personal branding. Then you need to regularly socialise your portfolio (twitter, Google plus, LinkedIn) in order to find new customers and peers. According to the official statistics, in 2013, there are over 50% of population are under 30 years old. Those young people are the most active group among social media users. In such a digital era, the status of information is equal to food. Also for the individual company, social media can be a powerful business-generating tool, or a total waste of time. If performed correctly, social media marketing can measurably increase leads and sales. Overall, the event was well worth going to especially for those digital designers and developers. They had some very knowlegeable speakers and provide a great platform for networking with like-minded peers. At the end of the event, the event holders threw a big drinking party for social networking again.