I have been at the HOW Design Conference for the past day and a half.
I attended their blogging session entitled “Daily Candy: Is Blogging Good For You? Or Does It Just Cause Cavities?
There were 60 people at the session. This was pretty poor turnout when considering there are about 3500 people at the event.
The moderator Steve Heller started by asking how many people in the audience were bloggers. Six people in the audience raised their hands.
Heller also said that blogs are a part of normal reading now at NYT. He comes into the office now and sees everyone reading blogs. He says it adds about 30 minutes of additional reading per day.
The two blogs that were talked about the most were Design Observer and Speak Up. If you are of the design bend or are interested, you should check them out.
It’s interesting to see that not many designers seem to be as intrested in blogging as I thought they might. I suppose since the HOW conference still attracts mostly print-based designers, this might account for some of the lack of interest.
Still, blogging is getting pretty mainstream, so it seems like the session should have done better than 60 and a total of 6 bloggers of the 60 present. That’s a terrible ratio!
Both Design Observer and Speak Up are great blogs. However these tend to be more like group blogs or portals than individual blogs.
There are quite a few good design blogs out there by individuals, but now that I think of it, they are all managed by designers heavilly into the web and interactive world (not primarilly print work). Maybe print designers are truly behind the curve on the whole blogging thing. Hmm.
Todd, who were the panel/presenbters of the Blogging panel BTW? Maybe they offered their own blogs? Were they all bloggers?
I’d agree and say these folks skew visual vs words. But in their defense, they were smart enough to have a panel discussion on the topic…at least they respect blogging.
My firm is at the conference and helping create some short films for HOW. http://www.frch.com if you are so inclined to see them.
Kevin, nice site and work! I assume at the end of film 3, the two pizza guys showed up on stage to wrap up the event?
As for reasons for blogging to be just a blip on the minds of the HOW conference attendees, I suppose this is about right for the mainstream, where it seems (in general) print designers are maybe a little head of right now.
Also, your point about visual vs. textual is a good point, though I’d imagine blogging for a designer might also be very visual (posting of samples, images, etc.)
I do think blogging is more common/popular with new media design folks (web-oriented vs. print) because they live in this world all day long, where my sense of print design is that the web is there, but maybe not as enveloping as it might be for media designers. However, that’s just a generalize theory. I’m sure there are print designers who are very keen on the web and its trends.
I do think that as blogging becomes more normalized, and people see the real nature of it (commincation and opportunity for connecing to designers and clients) it will increase in popularlity.
The last 4-5 projects I’ve been hired for have come from my own or others’ blog efforts. So in that sense making money from blogging (ala Jason Kottke) seems not to be as easy. where blogging peripherally as designer, tailor, etc. — that seems a much more effective approach from my experience.