First Print and ePublishing Conference a Great Success
Wow. That’s about all we can say.
The first-ever InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference took place last week in Seattle and it exceeded our every hope and expectation. We had over 200 attendees from six different continents converge on Adobe University (which Adobe was kind enough to let us use). The weather was extraordinarily beautiful, but of course most of the time we were inside listening to an even more extraordinary line-up of publishing experts. A great time was had by all.
Here’s what it looked like inside the main room (when the airwalls were removed we had three large screens plus two smaller screens):
David presenting on "From InDesign to iPad"
Presenters and attendees would mingle in the back of the room. Here are three indesignsecrets contributors (and speakers) hangin’ out:
Mike Rankin, Keith Gilbert, and James Fritz maccin' out in the back row
You can find more photos on our flickr group. Other folks have also posted photos on Facebook and elsewhere, but we’ll let them post those links below in the comments if they feel so inclined.
One of the most interesting aspects of the show for us was watching the #pepcon hash tag on twitter. It was amazing seeing so many people “talking” in realtime about the sessions.
Because there were so many people in from out of town, Anne-Marie had a great idea to run a Thursday-evening “Ignite InDesign” event, where we encouraged attendees to sign up and present a 5-minute slideshow on any InDesign-or-publishing-related topic. It was superb — a wide range of serious-to-funny, educational-to-wacky… We had no idea how many people would show up, but we enticed them with mini-cupcakes and it was standing room only!
Kris Coppieters showing his amazing CSSDK "fitting" plug-in
With an all-star line-up of presenters at the conference, including Rufus Deuchler, Russell Viers, Mordy Golding, Michael Ninness, many (but unfortunately not all) of the indesignsecrets contributors, and too many others to mention (check the archived speaker page), the sessions were bound to be high-quality… and they did not disappoint!
For those of you who were there: Thanks for coming! If you weren’t able to be there this time, don’t worry: We’re pumped to do it again in another city. Make sure you’re signed up as a (free) member on this site so that you’re on the mailing list… that way you’ll always be among the first to know about upcoming events.
The PeP conference was indeed awesome! Congratulations to David and Anne-Marie for taking a risk in a slow economy to create their first conference—hopefully the first of many!
One of the innovative things I liked best was the 20-minute presentations to the entire audience (in addition to other presentations which were in “tracks”). Based on the presentations at the TED conference (http://www.ted.com/), they forced those of us who were presenters to be very concise and this kept the energy level very high!
I loved being there so much, now I am having to cope with withdrawal symptoms. When’s the next one?
I did not notice, Mike, that you were wearing a very cool RGB shirt. Even though I took that picture.
That conference was for me, a Superhero Convention and more fun than Disneyland! It was so nice to finally meet and personally thank all of the experts who have helped me so much over the years. I can’t wait for the next one.
I agree, the conference was a huge success! I got a chance to reconnect with some “old” friends and make many new InDesign friends!
Can’t wait for the next one!
Hi, I’m a student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, doing my thesis on the epub-format and the ebook. Just wonder, did you guys record any of this event and if you did are you putting it on the webpage?
Great blog by the way!
I agree with all of you, it was a very exciting conference, and it was very funny to present my 5-minute slideshow at the IgniteID.
Thanks again to David and Anne-Marie!
Sounds exciting! So when are you coming to the Southeast?
@Adam: No, I’m sorry we did not record the event. We believe that these events are best experienced live. However, we will be publishing information about epub and other lessons from the conference over time as blog posts.
@katie: We’d love to come to that side of the country… stay tuned for percolating plans.
I notice on the poster “Go Behind the Curtains: How Text Composition Really Works”, at the same time the two other rooms were reserved for ‘Flash and the Future of Publishing in The Year Three-Thousand’.
Had I been at this conference, I guess it would just have been me and the speakers — and a notepad, and a couple o’ beers. (Just can’t make out the speakers’ names; do I spy Eric Menninga?)
What poster?
And we didn’t have that “Flash” session. Hmmm. Are we talking about the same event?
But yes, Eric Menninga (the inventor of the paragraph composer!) was one of the panelists on the “behind the curtains” session, as was Douglas Waterfall (the inventor of the Story Editor!) … and James Fritz was the moderator.
Hi, your Geekness! It’s on one of, uhm, your own photo’s on Flickr … PeP2010_49. (Can you label more faces with names?)
“..the inventor of the paragraph composer!” Heh — well, that would be one of the things on my list for sure! (Did you know that if a paragraph is just too long for the composer to handle, it’ll trick you and format one part first, then the rest? (Not that anyone’d ever notice.))
Ah, found it …
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amarie1/4611724581/in/pool-pepconseattle10
… the session was called “To Interactive and Beyond: New Options with PDF, SWF, and Flash” … presenters were Rufus Deuchler and Michael Ninness. (Where’d you get “the year 3000″? LOL)
Oops — my Obscure Reference of the week (eek-eek-eek). “To Interactive and Beyond”, well, that made me think of this:
http://www.myspace.com/flashgordonsavestheworld
Sounds like it was a great success. It would be superawesomecool if the Event was recorded. I can’t afford to fly back and forth to the States to visit these superawesomecool Events all the time. I’d gladly pay a bit extra for a recorded session.
Our company does live seminars and also webinars and recorded sessions. They are quite successful and reduce the amount of traveling people do.
I agree being live at the event is probably the best experience. But I can’t take chunks of time off work to visit you guys when you put something so great together. So a recorded experience is better than no experience.
Pretty please.
Thanks David + AM for putting on such a great show! Sure, giving some sessions was really great, but the best part was meeting friends and people from all over. Would you believe I actually learned a few things myself? It was really great and I look forward to the next one!
Nice write up here by Megan Read on the lynda.com blog.
Nope, I cannot claim credit for the Story Editor.
That was the work of Kevin Van Wiel when it started in InCopy and Shawn Sheridan did heroic work in bringing it into InDesign back in CS2(?)
I can claim having done a lot of work in composition though – tables, footnotes, text wrap, vertical justification and now most recently paragraphs which span column (and splits…).