The highly-attended premiere of Creative Mornings in Chicago proves inspiring, thanks to a motivating talk by Jim Coudal, of Coudal Partners

I volunteered this morning to open the door and greet the flood of creatives eager to attend today’s Creative Mornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series currently hosted in five cities across the globe: Zurich, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and now Chicago. This was the first one held in Chicago, organized by one of my best friends and industry pro, Mig Reyes, who works for the rockin’ tee-shirt company we all know and love: Threadless. The event is free and open to all creatives looking for some perspective from leaders in the industry. Plus, there’s coffee and breakfast for all!

Joy and Tim recently presented at the Chicago Area Adobe User Group monthly meetup on the topic of transition from print to web and digital design, an intimidating prospect for many print-based designers.

Showcasing techniques and lessons learned from past Mightybytes projects, they provided valuable insights to a packed house of enthusiastic art directors, designers, and other industry pros at Ascend Training’s downtown location. Here are some of the take-aways from that presentation.

Mid-way through our rainy Friday, the office was brightened up by some fresh faces.

Students from Westwood College’s Visual Communications and Animation programs paid Mightybytes a social call today. We showed off our demo reel and discussed everything from social media marketing for filmmakers to brewing beer and worm composting. The semi-informal session spawned dozens of questions fielded by Joy, Tim, Steve, Bryan and Stephanie and hopefully helped the crew of nearly a dozen students make some smart choices about career paths. Continue on to check out the photo slideshow.

Last week, most of our crew from Mightybytes ventured down to the Sheraton Hotel and Towers to satiate our Drupal appetites. Here’s what we learned.

The three day event brought in thousands of Drupal users, developers, designers, evaluators and businesspeople from around the world. There were information sessions, talks, code sprints, events, excellent keynotes every day by industry leaders, and even a fashion show. Read on to discover what we took away from this great event.

Drupal Gardens' hosted web service offers a great way for designers to get up and running quickly with a Drupal website. Art Director Joy Burke shares the pros and cons of working with this new tool from the fine folks at Acquia.

Joy is building a website with Drupal Gardens for the first time. A hosted solution for rapid creation of Drupal-based websites, Drupal Gardens offers a wealth of features that streamline development time for creating page layouts, adding image galleries, and theming on the fly. It also offers Typekit integration, which allows for great web typography customization. Joy has found that Drupal Gardens simplifies the design process while also throwing in some restrictions as well. Here’s Joy’s take on the Drupal Gardens workflow as well as some tips for getting it up and running quickly.