The Ideas Are Flowing at Boulder Startup Week: Cast Iron Design Encourages Us To Look Back To Move Forward
Boulder was once a town of hippies, new-age thinking, and alternative lifestyles. The rougher edges of the town have long been sanded down, in it’s place the polished and shiny Boulder we know today. Full of wealthy startup entrepreneurs and tech focused companies, this very modern Boulder is on display during it’s annual Startup Week Celebration.
With networking events, break out sessions and panel discussions, and topics from data science, to design and consumer goods on the schedule, it seems every company that wants to be that next big deal company signs up to host an event to revel in it’s bravado. Which makes it a great opportunity for people looking to break into the startup and entrepreneurial scene to scope out future prospects and learn more about the story of entrepreneurship.
Graphic designer Brooke Web, made her way to a session at the offices of Human Design for a talk about “Magic Paper” from branding and design company Cast Iron Design. Looking to venture into the world of user interface design, Web focused her attention on design events. Beside her sat Chris Hutt, from Rocky Reach LLC. “I am looking to strike out on my own,” said Hutt about why he took the time to attend sessions at Startup Week. People like Web and Hutt attend events not only for the content, but to hear the story of how people are making it in the startup world.
People like the duo at Cast Iron Design, Jonathan Black and Richard Roche, who focus on sustainability in design and took a more unconventional path towards entrepreneurship. Rather than going through the typical cycle of working up from, junior positions at design firms before getting disenchanted and venturing out, Black and Roche started their design company right out of college, with a little naivety rather than skepticism in their back pockets.
As a result, their enthusiasm and excitement for their craft and what they are trying to do really comes across. Sort of like the overly zealous interns and new hires we are all begrudgingly polite to, but secretly despise. But if you stick with them long enough, their enthusiasm and excitement rubs off, and you realize these fresh newcomers might just have something really valuable to add.
In fact, their designs speak for themselves. They worked with the boulder based beer company Finkel and Garf to produce a unified brand strategy across various channels that has an enviable cohesion. They spoke about their strategies in their talk on “Magic Paper,” i.e. a computer screen. Basically, attempting to get web designers to move past the last 20 years of web design, and draw inspiration from the centuries of print design that is rich with inspiration.
This is possible, due to the fact that web design is finally reaching a singularity, if you will, with the print world. No longer are designers shackled by the 12 different fonts available on web browsers, or the limited color choices. With advanced web development, we can now pretty much design anything our mind dreams up. Which is where these young branders gave some advice. Look to books, which have a natural order and hierarchy, and when designing for mobile, only use 66 characters per line. They even touched on such nuances like leading and kearning, which I am wondering if a typical user interface designer has ever given much thought to.
For a more relaxed networking opportunity, where participants could simmer with the new thoughts and ideas from the focused sessions, Pivotal Labs in Boulder hosted a BBQ at the office on Pearl Street. The agile development company, a leader in pair coding, also announced it is hiring.
On a couch in the corner of Pivotal Labs’ modern offices, sat Mithaq Kazimi, a participant in the Boomtown Accelerator program that was sending off it’s graduates at the end of StartUp week. Kazimi has a concept for events called Audienced, that effectively works as a sort of Kickstarter. People can sign up for an event they are interested in, and if there is enough interest, the event will be funded. If not, no one is charged. On his experience with Boomtown, Kazimi said, “the most important thing I learned through boomtown is how to run a start-up company, past the idea phase.” He’s planning on staying in Colorado or moving back to San Diego to continue working on his company.
As the clouds moved over the foothills, the outdoor deck over looking the flatirons was full of bustling conversations. No longer about meta-physics, astrology and new age medicine, conversations in Boulder now focus on about reimagining design, innovative ways to code in teams, and “audiencing” an event. But what remains is a fixation on the new and different, the innovative and unknown. And hopefully that’s not going away anytime soon.