My first design workshop

I visited a lot of different workshops in my life. Design, dance, craft workshops. But I never hold one in my life. This changed yesterday. I gave a design workshop about Visual Design and Reader Experience for Bloggers at the Blog Big Conference in Munich. What an experience. Thanks to Blog Big Conference Organisers – Sabine and Janina – for the great opportunity to share my knowledge with other people.

So here is a short description of how I prepared the slides and the content for the workshop. When we first met with the organisers of the Blog Big conference we discussed what would be an interesting topic to talk about and what would help the participant on their blogger journey. After that I literally sat down and wrote everything I know in form of key points about visual design and about reader experience. I wrote down an additional table of contents that will be enough to fill in a 90 min. block. After that I put the key points in the correct order within the table of contents to see the volume of the information that needs to be prepared. Then I watched a bunch of talks and searched through the world wide web for best examples of slide and presentation designs. A designer’s looking for slide designs on the internet. Sure, why not? :) Always looking for inspiration, never for copying. Then I again continued preparing the material, choosing images for the slides and rechecking my text for potential grammar mistakes – the workshop was in german. Several days later I wrote the rest of the notes for the slides and prepared the presentation.

One time going through the whole presentation/workshop and then I was ready.

The conference was a blast. A lot of interesting people, informative talks and of course a very intense time for me – my first workshop. It was wonderful. 10 participants attended the workshop about visual design and reader experience.

I prepared a set of 3 blocks:

theory – where I talked about the basics of visual design and relevance of content, context and user/reader;
useful stuff – links for themes, images and fonts;
practice – in groups reviewing blogs of participants with new knowledge and giving each other feedback.

It was a great feeling seeing their interested look following the process and the slides. And to listen to the feedback they gave each other about the consistency of the visual elements of the blogs.

Within the group work I supervised the process and gave recommendations about the possible changes and improvements for the blogs. After the workshop I was feeling happy and satisfied with the result. Being a designer, being a professional and learning something new is a constant process.

Thanks everyone for being a part of this process.