Derek Powazek is what my coworker Dave would call “micro-famous” — He’s well-known in web designer circles, but you’ve probably never heard of him. You’ve almost certainly seen his work, though. In the mid-90s, he worked at HotWired and WebMonkey, before starting Fray.com. He did all the branding, including the logo, for Blogger.com, and then later did the redesign for Technorati.com (which was recently redesigned and looks kinda bad).
Most recently, he’s done a great design for his personal site, Powazek.com, created JPG Magazine, and started 8020 Publishing. His designs are well-known, and frequently featured on award sites. His RSS feed is in my newsreader, and usually has great content.
As a result, when I found out he’d be speaking at WebVisions this year, I was looking forward to it. Imagine my surprise when he started talking to me.
I was checking my email in the hallway when someone grabbed my shoulder from behind. He smiled expectantly at me, and I smiled back while trying desperately to figure out where I knew this guy from. A second later, we both realized that we didn’t know each other, and he joked that it was a good thing he didn’t give me “a big wet kiss.” He told me that I looked just like a guy named Steve Champion, and the conversation probably would have ended until I saw that his nametag said “Derek Powazek.”
After an embarrassing moment of fanboy-ism where I told him that I read his blog all the time, I remembered to mention that I work with Chris Tacy, a former coworker of his. He did a double-take at my nametag and says “Oh, Pop Art! Chris told me to look you guys up!”
We had a great time after that, talking about web design and his new publishing venture. He’s a great guy – totally down-to-earth and easygoing. Once or twice when I slipped back into fanboy mode, he was quick to snap me out of it, reminding me that “nobody’s a nobody on the web.” It was easy to forget that this is one of the guys who was writing for the site that got me into web design in the first place (webmonkey), because he doesn’t seem to think of himself as a big name at all. He makes the analogy on his site that guys who were doing this early on have a friendly kind of “older brother” attitude, which I think is pretty accurate.
I still attended his panel on Thursday, which he referred to as “the last panel with the longest name” — The New Community: How Decentralized Conversation Empowers Individuals while Creating Community. It’s meant as an update to a book he wrote in 2001. The topic was too big to go into here, suffice to say that I thought it was pretty interesting, and I’ll be writing about it later.
