Headed to Austin Next Week

I’ve been trying to get to the HOW Conference for three years now, and I finally got the approval from my boss to go. Being that I’m the *entire* marketing department at my company, I’m responsible for everything from the design and execution of ad campaigns to requests for proposals on building facilities at new airports; my range of duties (and capabilities) in this position is very broad. I’m sort of a one-stop-shop, if you will.

The upside of being the *entire* marketing department is that things get done very quickly. There’s no bureaucracy, and there’s very little back-and-forth for approvals, re-writing copy, or re-formulating a campaign.

The downside (besides being stretched in ten different directions on any given day), is that I don’t have anyone in my department to bounce ideas off of, learn from (or teach), and sometimes I feel like my ideas are getting stale. Granted, I spend a lot of time on the Internet researching current trends, methods, and industry news, but there’s nothing like having a person (or a department full of people) to get that qualified feedback from.

As far as professional development goes, this will be my second such conference. I was sent out to Las Vegas a couple of years ago to attend the Exhibitor Conference… there were a few interesting classes that I attended, but it was basically a re-hashing of my first year being a marketing major. I feel like the HOW Conference will be a better fit for me, in that their seminar sessions are better suited to my current responsibilities at this company; sometimes being at a company for so long, your learning curve starts to flatten out (which causes job fatigue)- professional development seminars like this might be the fix.

The tagline on HOW’s website says it best, “Recognizing that graphic design is a business as well as an art.”

See you in Austin!