Well, here I am at the AIGA conference in Denver and, in line with Marker company policy set to keep our motley crew informing you of the comings and goings of this industry , I am to blog about my time and experiences here.

However - I must admit that I have been somewhat pre occupied with my new toy and the opening night party to focus a whole lot of energy on blogging so will try to catch up on the first 2 days events - more about the new toy later!

This conference is a veritable who’s-who of design rock stars and there are some great speakers lined up - including Michael Bierut, Steven Heller, Khoi Vinh, Adrian Shaughnessy, Cristoph Niemann, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Ed Fella, and Kidrobot amongst others.

The opening presentation was delivered, at a very energetic pace, by the visionary architect Daniel Libeskind - architect of, among other buildings, Denver Art Museum’s new Frederic C. Hamilton building, Berlin’s Jewish Museum and, most famously, the Freedom Tower concept. I have to say that this man is incredible. He delivered his presentation at pace with barely a pause (and no notes) and walked us through some of his creative process - which is so abstract it is hard to describe but is more akin, as I see it, to graphic design than architecture. Very inspiring stuff and a great opening to the conference.

The format for the conference seems to be pretty good - presentations in the first couple of hours then a coffee break followed by break out sessions. These sessions range in topic and cover many disciplines and the only problem is that you can only choose one!

One from leftfield is the Command-X competition - 6 designers competing to be the designers designer. Bit like a designers reality show where the designers get a design project to do in 24hrs and the panel, 6 well respected design personalities, get to drop 2 designers each day. Sounds pretty dry but, filled with designer humour (sorry, no Wikipedia entry for this - but we all get to laugh at ourselves), and hosted by Michael Bierut is hilarious.

Anyway - will try to catch up on this and bring you reports of the speakers I have been listening to.