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Beware the Ides of ... January?

January 10, 2011 | by Jessica Boden

Events, Events, Events!

I feel fortunate to live and work in a city with such an accessible and vibrant design and interactive community. Having lived in both a very small city (Cedar Falls, Iowa) and a large city (Chicago, Illinois) I know firsthand the wide spectrum of event options. Thus, accessibility to a wide variety of usability, design and cultural events is incredibly important to me as a design professional.

As the new year approached I perused various organizations’ websites looking for events to attend. To my joy, January was full of them, unfortunately most seemed to land on the same day. The same day! There are many days in January, so why do these fabulous events all have to occur at the same time?

MinneDemo - Thursday, January 13th

UPA Minnesota - Best Practices in Mobile Web Design - Thursday, January 13th

AIGA Minnesota Evolvedesign Roundtable Discussion - Thursday, January 13th

Ad Fed Minnesota happy hour at FAME - Thursday, January 13th

Which one do I attend? The desire to clone myself and get to every one has never been greater. This is a great conundrum to have, however. As Michael Bierut states in Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, “Back in design school in 1970s Cincinnati, I had been starved for design. It would be hard for a student today to imagine a world so isolated. No email, no blogs. Only one (fairly inacessible) design conference that no one I knew had ever attended.”

It is easy to be frustrated about having too many choices, but I cannot imagine having NO choices. With all of these amazing events to choose from, rather than being frustrated about the abundance of choices, I will happily pick one and follow the others through Twitter searches, hashtags and event recap blogs.

Which event are you attending, and how did you decide?