I woke myself up pretty early this morning with a splitting headache. Whether it was a combination of all the free drinks plus or minus the higher altitude, I may never know. Thankfully some Starbucks put out that fire, and I wandered around the downtown shopping area until it became apparent to me that normal stores don’t open until nine.

So with coffee in hand I headed straight to the convention center and the year 200x. To the uninitiated, the year 200x is a volatile time where man-made human-looking robots duke it out for control of each other’s arm-mounted weaponry. This was not the scene I was greeted with at the convention center, and I was a little bummed.

Checking in was completely painless. I walked up to these nice folks and gave them my name; they, in return, gave me a hippie bag filled with swag. Or… er, advertising. Lots of advertising, but some other good things are well, including (finally!) a complete guide to the conference, which was pretty, too boot.

And then? Boredom. Straight up, look: AIGA promoted a bevy of pre-conference activities way back when I signed up for this show and booked my plane tickets and hotel. Studio tours, workshops, seminars, etc. It was not until later they revealed (or I discovered) that those activities could cost over $100 to participate in (the workshops are free to everyone, but as of this writing the letterpress one I wanted to do is still setting up). And that sucks, AIGA. That sucks hard. I won’t begrudge you the need to charge extra for extra activities, but let a brother know up front!

I picked the PANTONE ad… er, presentation The Color of Ideas. The first half of this presentation by Doris Brown was nice. She gave a history of PANTONE, which is a much smaller company than I thought, and then took us around the color wheel to talk color meanings and messages. Trends and whatnot. It was useful, and useful is what I’m all about from this conference. Then the second half was an advertisement I paid $35 to listen to about their new GOE system, with twice as many colors as the standard PMS and neat software and a new bag of tricks. Sucks that Adobe isn’t integrating it into their software yet; I mean, Quark is, but Quark makes my ass itch. Anyways that stuff will be the bomb when it finally gets rolling.

Your bear wants AIGA, but it can’t has it.

After that it was time for the Design Fair! Which, to this point, seems to be Sponsor Land! And that’s cool by me. Without sponsors, there’s not conference, so bring ‘em on. I tooled around that area for a bit, getting a little more swag and chilling at the Veer booth, which sadly was not giving away dope shirts. The coolest booth is off to the side of Adobe’s where you paint in motion graphics using a Nintendo Wii, and then can apparently load your creation to …somewhere.

There’s also a bookstore area with a ton of sweet book and a few practical ones, and 20 iMacs lined up for you to use for reading this post on BADG. That’s nice. Also nice is this company I’ve never heard of called “Leopard An Ogilvy Company” (seriously, try to find that name anywhere as just ‘leopard’) who is donating wireless at the convention center. No more $10 per day internetz! The only downside is that when 27 bazillion designers all log on at once, the bandwidth, she runs a little thin. I’ve got 20 more minutes on a podcast download I’m working on. Yikes.

Then I got a chance to get down on the massive cardboard graffiti wall. And tossed a few up for my homies. In about 45 minutes the real show is going to start, for really for realz, and things in here are picking up pace. Soon it will be time to leave the comfort of the Design Fair, and wander out into the great wide expanse of the Wells Fargo Theater. Or, is it Theatre?

What will happen at the actual NEXT Conference? Will Command X suck? WIll out hero be able to locate anyone he knows amidst 2,000 he doesn’t to sit with? And when, oh when, will he start learning anything? Tune in later today for the exciting answer!