Recent Events

Last week I went to Super Freelancing - an event organised by the wonderful Super Mondays crew. You can even see my wee blonde head in the audience. Super Mondays is a creative and IT community in the North East of England who meet once a month and host a selection of speakers from across the industry. As I have recently branched out into the world of freelancing - to tide me over until I decide what I'm doing with my life - this month's even was of particular interest to me.

Paul Easton of Easton Media was first up, who gave us some hints and tips on using PR to our advantage. He urged us not to underestimate the power of good old fashioned newspapers and journalists, and some provoking questions from the audience resulted in us all learning what to avoid when offered a feature-and-ad combo.

Paul was followed by Laura Maddison of Altitude Recruitment  who gave some insider information on presenting our CVs. Always valuable advice. Rob Lavendar followed her, giving a talk titled "The Freelancer's Toolkit". I found this very interesting as it laid out some of the key tools and programs which aid the life of a freelancer. He has kindly uploaded his keynote here, which I highly recommend you check out. Lee Simpson was last up with tips on how to generate a passive income. Very interesting but not really applicable to me, unfortunately.

The following Thursday, I attended the Design PhD Conference at Northumbria University. The keynote speaker was Mike Press, a lecturer of mine from Dundee University, so it was nice to catch up as well as hear his lecture.He showed and described a broad selection of work from Jewellers to Animators, each of whom had made international impacts in their subjects from human computer interaction to cleaning up the planet. This brought the audience to a conclusion that the way ahead for design is in Social Innovation. You can read more about the conference and the lectures at the link above.

The past week has definitely given me some food for thought.