The last week has flown by, things have been super-busy here and this is the first time I've had a chance to update the blog. I've got some exciting news to announce in a few days about a new member to the Team and also some buzz about a new client project that I wanted to share with you; I'll be letting you in on some of our project processes and secrets.

But today I want to tell you about last week's event MeetDraw and some news about a few other events I'll be attending.

An Event for Digital Animals

Last Thursday I attended a brand new event in Bournemouth called MeetDraw, aimed to be a relaxed meet up for local creatives from along the South Coast. I heard about the event from my mate Paul Seys (there's a link to his blog in the footer). I'd been chatting to Paul about the event for the past few weeks, and he'd been a bit nervous about anybody showing up at all; but I'm happy to say that even though it was the first event people came from far and wide; although I reckon I was probably the only one from Portsmouth! The iBar was totally packed out, and I think they reached their capacity at 100!

The evening was organised by Paul and his colleagues at RedWeb, a large Bournemouth based web design company.

The event had a different format from OpenWeb (another similar event I attended last month in Southampton), there weren't any keynotes or speeches; things were pretty relaxed and there was a great atmosphere. Sadly there wasn't any money behind the bar, OpenWeb had managed to get £200 from Campaign Monitor's Giving Back program, apparently Campaign Monitor didn't want to help out due to it being the first event and it not being geared solely towards web designers, which is a bit silly in my opinion - but there was a neat idea that if you filled in a questionnaire card you could get a free drink.

The iBar was a very nice place, sleek interior and everything was modern (although the loos were a bit rubbish!); around the venue there were some kickass plasma screens showing people's websites, Twitter feeds and also a live RSS feed of the #meetdraw hashtag on Twitter. There was free wifi, so we could use our laptops to show off work and also connect using our phones to update the Twitter feeds on the screens.

I didn't manage to chat with everyone, but I did meet Neil Dennis from Strawberrysoup, another local web design studio, I got to chat to Tom Wittlin from Higher Sites and his colleague Jake Skedgell who'd I already met at OpenWeb and also Nick Stocks from the Internet Consultants Group as well as lots of students and also many of the other RedWeb staff.

So overall it was a great experience, I made some new contacts and got a lot out of the evening - I'd recommend the next one to anyone involved the web industry.

More Events in 2009

I'm particularly excited to be attending my first Carsonified event at the end of next month called the Future of Web Design (FOWD for short), hopefully I will get the chance to meet Ryan Carson the organiser (pictured bellow) and his gang; Ryan and his company have posted some pretty controversial blogs over the past few months which have brought in hundreds of comments and caused quite a stir in the web industry, it will be very interesting to meet this guy in person.

The FOWD event itself is on a much larger scale to OpenWeb and MeetDraw, the event has been in cities all over the world and hundreds of like-minded web people attend - Next month's event had a good line up of speakers such as Elliot Jay Stocks and Mark Boulton to name a few.

Then later in June this year I will be attending @media, a similar large scale web conference also in London; this year's looks especially awesome due to its renowned speakers such as Jason Santa Maria, Andy Clarke and Andy Budd, I could list them all as they're all big names and great designers.

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