We took an hour or so off on Friday and headed out to celebrate Falmouth Week, an annual celebration of sail which involves hundreds of boats in regattas and racing throughout the week. The waters around Falmouth proved to be somewhat choppy, so we headed up river and spent a very pleasant couple of hours enjoying this beautiful part of Cornwall and marvelling at the sights on the way, not least the incongruous views of the large ships in mothballs as you pass beyond King Harry Ferry.

This is what Sharp’s joint Managing Director had to say: ”We set ourselves the objective of finding a top class design company in Cornwall. By restricting our search just to Cornwall the worry was that we would need to compromise. With Nixon there is no compromise, I am sure that we have found one of the UK’s best design companies on our doorstep in Cornwall.”

Oh, and here’s an insight into behind the scenes at the brewery:

The conference talks covered a broad range of topics including HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Web analytics, iPhone app development and sessions on running a successful web design agency. All of these sessions were given by experienced and industry leading professionals so in geek terms it was liking hanging out with celebrities.

I’m sure I will be going on about the conference for a long time and no doubt that as I watch back the talks that were recorded and supplied to attendees I will be blogging about it a lot more. For now though here are some pictures I took whilst at the conference!

The first one up is from the German arm of Toyota, this app lets you print off multiple markers and lay them out in order to build a little course for your Toyota to drive around. They even include a nice community element by allowing you to upload your video to the website for others to vote on. Check out the video below and the app itself here

The second app I found is actually another print and augmented reality integration; this week’s Grazia magazine has been realeased with multiple augmented reality markers allowing you to interact with the magazine content. Interestingly, this also extends onto the iPhone so you can interact with the content on the go too. Check out the video below for more details from Grazia

We’ve just booked our tickets for this years Future of Web Design event and to say the team is excited is a massive understatement! We’ll be learning from the best in the business about where they see the web going and how we can help it get there!

There will be more about this closer to the time, not that we’re counting the days (it’s 90 days away) or anything.

Baroness Greenfield in full flow

Last week we attended ‘The Edge’ organised by the Design Business Association (DBA). The event looked at the links between risk, creativity and success, kicking off with a day of workshops at the RIBA building in Portland Place. Day two saw around 300 delegates gather at The Circus Space in Hoxton where we were entertained, provoked and stimulating by an eclectic list of speakers, such as Baroness Susan Greenfield of The Royal Institution who  illuminated us on the links between creativity and intellect, Gary Low, Executive Chef at the Ivy not only fed us but also gave us his views about leadership and TV Producer Russ Malkin talked inspiringly about the links between risk and creativity.

Finally Rob Seymour from Seymour Powell wowed us all with his captivating talk, in which he extolled the virtue of watching people interact with objects and processes to learn how to improve things- It’s not what people say it’s what they do.

At the end of the day Deborah Dawton announced that the DBA would be working with 15 ‘bright sparks’ in 2010, and revealed that during the lunch break the various design ‘pioneers’ had identified several ‘high fliers’ who will now be invited to a series of exclusive masterclasses in 2010. Clearly  I must have said something of merit to Erik Spiekermann because they called my name out! For more information about the DBA and The Edge visit the site below or Red Cube Marketing’s blog here.

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