I’ve recently returned from Voices That Matter in Nashville. As Jeremy noted earlier, this conference is a little different in that the common thread was that each speaker had written a book or is working on a book that will be published relatively soon through Pearson Education. If you don’t know who they are, I’m pretty sure you might have heard of New Riders or PeachPit books.
This approach created a rather eclectic and engaging mix of topics in the crowd. One morning you are watching Steve Krug on stage having a conversation about usability and books. Then in the afternoon you have sessions from Kimberly Blessing talking about managing internal standards for Web development.
As someone who is more of a generalist, working on almost every part of a site’s development, Voices That Matter was a refreshing change of pace on the conference scene. In fact, when I saw the speaker listing earlier in the year, I made a point to stay for the whole conference.
In addition to the wide range of topics, the attendance is way lower than SXSW. So, if you wanted to follow up with someone at the conference, you could. You didn’t, like I had to for SXSW this past year, send an email to friends to haggle meeting locations and times.
To help promote PeachPit’s Adapting to Web Standards, I was humbled to be one of the three CSS speakers that includes Charles Wykes-Smith and Zoe Gillenwater, I took the opportunity for my session to be a bit inspirational and showcase how several everyday CSS techniques, applied at the right time can create something visual interesting.
Speaking of inspiration, there was the city itself, Nashville.
In taking it’s lengthy nickname “The Athens of the South” to the extreme, there’s a full-scale replica of Parthenon. As a reformed high school Latin geek, visiting the replica was a little bittersweet. If only the National Junior Classical League held their National convention there, I might have studied more for the Certamen.
Then there was Hatch Show Print, a printing house that’s been making music promotional posters since the late 1800s. The letter blocks they use today or pretty much the same ones they still use in music posters for R.E.M., Modest Mouse, Dave Matthews, Willie Nelson and so on.
So, looking back at it, Voices That Matter was a wonderful, intimate conference. Hope to be back next year.