In case you hadn’t seen our umpteen thousand posts/tweets/envy-consumed observations on social media, last weekend’s AIGA Design Conference in New Orleans was a huge hit with the 2,000 designers who converged on the Big Easy. Hosted by Roman Mars and made possible by mammoth efforts from both AIGA New Orleans and AIGA National volunteers, the conference kicks off a new tradition of yearly design-and-business mashups to replace previous similar events like GAIN.

There’s way too much information to cover in a responsible way, but the #AIGADesign hashtag should catch you up fairly well. For all the original conference details, see the AIGA Design Conference site. Even better, AIGA SB member Carol Yeaman-Sanchez has begun a recap series on Medium about her experience at the conference! Check out her first installment here.

Even though I personally couldn’t attend the conference, I had the privilege of helping the AIGA New Orleans board on one of the auxiliary conference events: a collaboration with NOLA DNA called the New Orleans Print History Tour. I got to build the interactive tour map (using StorymapJS and Mapbox) that AIGA NOLA integrated with their own website, used by attendees on the walking tour.

Next year’s AIGA Design Conference is set to happen in Las Vegas. You can bet that more than one AIGA SBer will be going to that one.

Photo by Carol Yeaman-Sanchez