Happy February! The new year has had be thinking of all sorts of professional goals, planning out meetups, and looking forward to conferences. Thinking about this, I realized I never got around to blogging about my last conference of 2014 - DesignerVaca!
DesignerVaca is a 2-day anti-conference in Palm Springs aimed at women in the design industry, and capped around 100 attendees. My friend Bethany let me know about it as soon as it went on sale and we decided it would make the perfect mini-road trip from her new home in LA.
The conference was set up as two main speaker sessions, a group discussion, a group dinner, and lots of downtime to relax with the other ladies by the pool or explore Palm Springs. The Ace Hotel proved to be the perfect backdrop for this sort of thing. Beautiful rooms, a giant pool, and amazing hot weather. Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that the Ace's tasty cocktails and 105 degree weather don't mix well, but I'll know better for next time :)
The two speakers for the conference were Jessica Hische and Kathleen Shannon. This ended up being perfect, as I got to hear their broader talks at Circles Conference just two weeks before. Thanks to the more intimate environment here I got to hear them speak more in depth, and talk to them one-on-one. The group discussions ended up being better than I expected as well. At first I was unsure of the entire conference because it seemed most of the attendees were bloggers or print/stationary designers. It was great to hear different perspectives though and bond over some common struggles with our work.
Outside of the conference, Bethany and I stopped by the Cabazon Dinosaurs (which I was super excited about!), and enjoyed tacos and a charred pineapple margarita at El Jefe in The Saguaro Hotel (which deserves it's own visit). Enjoy some photos from this lovely trip below!
