FITC Toronto Review: The Sound of Silence

From April 23-25, FITC held its annual design conference in Toronto. Located in Hilton Toronto Hotel’s conference hall, FITC welcomed its attendees with a goodie bag and a room filled with sponsors such as Blackberry, Adobe and Vitamin T to name only a few, who patiently sat at their booth, waiting to sell you their products or services. Outside the conference rooms (and inside as well, I later discovered), there was little interaction between the visitors. Even when the doors opened and designers poured out of the conference room at the end of the afternoon Adobe panel on day one, very few people seemed to discuss with each other. A sea of zombie creatives washed over the hall with little noise, voices drowned by a queer silence, except for a few isolated groups. It was… strange.

Where did all the noise go?

Conference, even in definition, involves discussion. It was my belief that professionals who usually attend conferences meet not only to listen to their mentors but also to discuss shared interests, solve problems together and interact with each other. Although FITC’s list of speakers was impressive, it failed completely to entice discussion and interaction.

I had originally planned to attend four speeches but ended up only seeing two of them; Frederic Harper’s Responsive Web Design did not have enough seats to accommodate everyone and on the next day Draplin’s presentation conflicted with Moving forward with Flash (or not?) so I had to pick one (I ended up picking Draplin’s Tall Tales from a Large Man). Right after, I watched Kyle McDonald’s How to give everything away. I was pleased by what I saw. However, the venue was very dull in comparison to the speakers invited to present; I was much more impressed by the theatre Montreal Meets had booked for its MMTWO conference where you could clearly see the speaker and the huge screen no matter where you sat.

The two presentations I attended at FITC included neither a discussion nor a question period. In fact, because of the 1-hour time limit and the cramped schedule, the speakers had to rush to conclude their speech. It was a pity, really. From my experience, FITC was a one-way conversation between speaker and listener where no interaction took place. Perhaps in some other room discussion did occur, but I did not have the luck to witness it.

FITC was good but far from great

FITC is heavily promoted and often considered to be THE major design event in Canada. However, if that is all Canada has to offer, I believe we are not setting our quality standards high enough. I have François Hoang from Aoiro Studio to thank for the free complimentary ticket to FITC – without this luck, a single ticket for the event would have cost me $700. Even if I had that amount of money to spend, be sure I would rather spend it on something else than on an overpriced 3-day design and technology conference.

FITC needs to allocate more energy and time into discussions and interaction between designers. It needs to build links and connections. Currently, from what I saw, FITC is not a gathering place at all; it is merely a hall flooded with silent professionals keeping to themselves. It’s a good thing to have the opportunity to learn from other successful creatives but we should also be able to learn from each other. This needs to change.

Some photos of the event:

Comments and reactions

Robert Reinhardt

I’m sorry to hear you had this type of experience at FITC. As the moderator of the panel you skipped (“Moving Forward with Flash (or Not?)”), I have to ask why you skipped a panel where discussion was most likely to occur–especially if you were looking for interaction? We took questions during the initial moderation, and dedicated a third of the session to an open discussion (Q&A) period at the end. I have to admit, though, that maybe what you felt was the lack of creative discussion around HTML5 that Flash brought to the table in past conferences. It’s been a concern of mine that so much of what what the web exciting to discuss at past FITC conferences was the capabilities that Flash brought to the table, and that designers and coders alike could use the tool. Designers shouldn’t have to learn code (i.e. CSS and JavaScript) to explore creativity on the web, and while Adobe is working to provide tools like Edge to provide an equivalent of Flash creativity to HTML5, it’s going to be a slow migration for the creative process. Indeed, many shops still have designers comp in Photoshop, and then have devs carve up the comp into a site. I hope the community can rally the same creative spirit around the future of the web, with or without Flash. It will be a difficult transitioning without tools that everyone to the table.
- http://veodesign.com/ Tina Mailhot-Roberge
  
  Hi Robert,
  
  First, thanks for your reply.
  
  I did want to attend that presentation as I wrote but I had to make a choice. I do not regret attending Draplin’s speech as it was quite nice. However, unlike yours it seems, no discussion occurred, not even a question period. I believe the schedule is to blame here rather than the speaker who did his best to condense the last part in as little time as possible.
  
  I would have very much liked to take part of that debate about Flash and HTML5. My opinion differs from yours completely: I strongly believe that web designers should at least know HTML and CSS as well as the basics of JavaScript. Without these skills, they will fail to produce a website that is consistent in all main browsers and fail to understand the W3C Standards. Why would you bother calling yourself a web designer if you do not know the very basics of web programming, I would ask them. The same can be said of “web designers” who use only Dreamweaver’s Design view to put together websites that end up being full of open tags and mistakes.
  
  I have a lot of faith in the development of HTML5 – it’s not perfect yet, but the advancement in HTML5 combined with CSS3 and JavaScript can create incredible websites that will work almost all browsers, as you most likely already know. And from what I’ve seen, it’s only getting better.
  
  Yes, it would have been great to discuss of this at FITC, either inside the room or outside. It’s too bad I was forced to pick and couldn’t attend both presentations. It’s also too bad that outside the 1h panels, nothing of the sort happened.
- Phillip Kerman
  
  I didn’t attend this year–but I don’t understand the complaint exactly. Were you a vendor? I’ve attended a bunch of conferences and often skip all the sessions–but then feel that it’s still a value because I spend the time socializing. FITC always has great parties too–so that’s a place to ask questions of the presenters. Most are pretty approachable.
  
  I do notice sometimes attendees want their hand on the mic–to ask questions or to help channel the direction of the discussion. That’s fine–but it’s limited. You go to the big room and there just isn’t time for that. But, I guess if your point is that you’d like to see more discussion sessions then that seems valid enough. (Though, not to be combative–you only attended a couple sessions it sounds like.)