We've all seen it happen. A superstar artist drops a major label debut, catapults up the charts, goes on a world tour, packs stadiums, sells millions, rushes back into the studio and two months later emerges with the single most tragic album ever recorded. It flops. They fade away. The world moves on.

Longevity haunts the music industry. It haunts ours too. Designers are overwhelmed. We're dejected. We're bored. And if we're not careful, we're lazy and later irrelevant.

In my session we'll take a quick look at what it takes to find our creative motivation and how to hang on to it throughout our career. We'll look at pillars of our industry. We'll look at how they stay motivated, how they keep changing our industry and how, with simple steps and hard work, you can do the same.

Passionate about our city? Check. Evangelists for the region? Check. But did this exuberance for our city really mean that the Happy Cog design process was adequate enough to shift the needle on the “Philadelphia” brand? Did we have the necessary methods and techniques in our toolbox to change decades of poor impressions?

While everyone has personalized approaches to create beautiful web sites, designers should always BE hungry to improve process and product. This is especially important when the task at hand is changing the public’s impression of an entire region. Starting with our initial “anti-Rocky” inspiration and then ending with the creation of a simple yet nightmare-inducing UI element, you’ll get a frank step-by-step exposure to the potent mix of design-related exercises, methods, and tactics that Happy Cog design team employed at visitphilly.com.

If you rock design, IA, SEO, or social media, let’s talk. What do you really want? Maybe to better understand your clients' needs? Help them see how your tactical decisions align with their communication goals? Maybe just to minimize rounds of revision and optimize the project budget? Whatever your area of focus in shaping the user experience, partnering with a content strategist can help you hit those goals. 2010 has been a breakout year for the industry, so let's talk about how you can incorporate insights from this aspect of interaction design into your next project. We'll discuss how the questions a content strategist brings to the table can enrich your deliverables and benefit your end users—and how you can reframe the RFP to upsell content strategy in your next pitch.

All while looking taller, thinner, younger, tanner, because you deserve all that too, and content strategy can—well, *some* things you need to just do on your own.

“Where did we go wrong? Is it my fault? Can this be salvaged? Should it?”

The life of a project is complex. From the smallest freelance CSS gigs to the largest, multi-year strategic online initiatives, many forces come together into a system that can, with one bad e-mail or misunderstanding, pull itself apart at any minute.

Pulling from his own experiences at Happy Cog and those of leaders in the web design community, Kevin will share war stories that have led to new approaches to defining project scope, managing risks, and communicating with clients. And <del>if</del>when the unthinkable happens and it’s time to abandon the ship, he’ll illustrate how to make the best of a bad situation in ways that you can use throughout your career.