In October I was at this year’s Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. Fronteers is a front-end developers association that organises local events throughout the year but is most well-known for this – compared to others – small (around 500 visitors) but all the more exciting conference. The event sports a familiar atmosphere and a broad range of first-class speakers presenting about all sorts of front-end web development-related topics.
The videos of this year’s talks are now online. A particularly interesting talk was the one by Espen Brunborg, Gordon McLachlan and Bart Oleszczyk – the people behind Edinburgh-based design agency Primate. They talked about the – seemingly – conflicting priorities of wanting to do meaningful, inspiring work and the need to get paid by customers (for often uninspiring, run-of-the-mill work) from both design, development and business angles. They outline how this conflict can be resolved and how these priorities can be combined to achieve better overall results.
They offer a refreshing inside view on the digital agency business and how to build such a business in an ethical manner today:
Espen Brunborg, Gordon McLachlan and Bart Oleszczyk – Walking the Tightrope Between Mediocrity and Bankruptcy from Fronteers on Vimeo.