One of the things I love about creative conferences is that there are so many really creative people around. You never know where you’re going to find something interesting that totally captivates you, like maybe someone from Sesame Workshop.

Nancy Stevenson from the Sesame Street Sesame Workshop spent a morning showing off how her crew creates art — digital assets, for those in the know — for the drawn and cartoon versions of Jim Henson’s world famous muppets at the MOGO media InDesign conference in Miami. Muppets on their own are pretty cool, but seeing how the artists behind the scenes do their magic flat out rocks.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they rely heavily on Adobe Illustrator and Wacom graphic tablets. Vector-based graphics are scalable, so you won’t lose any image quality as you size up or size down. That makes it easy to repurpose the art for different types of children’s books, art project kits, Web content, promotional materials, or whatever else they want to toss a muppet face on. Illustrator is the right tool for that.

The Sesame Workshop gang totally has this art thing down. They get how to make individual components for the characters they create so they can mix and match parts to build new scenes, show different actions, and put different characters together. Sure, that makes sense, but watching how much works goes into a drawing’s preparation really give you a sense of how much attention goes into the little details.

The cool thing is seeing that what they are creating really is art, and not just a collection of mechanical objects slapped together to simulate a muppet. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that Illustrator users aren’t artists. They most certainly are. I’m just saying that the Sesame team has their own special style, and it shows.

It turns out that Sesame Street doesn’t limit how the muppet characters are interpreted. Along with the flat cartoon-style characters, they also have a whole cut-out paper style, manga, x-sport style, and localized styles for different regions around the world.

I love creativity for creativity’s sake, but the Sesame Workshop people have something special going on. Not only do they get to freely express themselves through the Sesame characters, but they also get to be part of something that’s much bigger: expanding the minds of children all over the world.

As icing on the cake, Nancy gave her presentation on her MacBook Pro in Keynote ‘08. Yeah, the Sesame Workshop people are Mac heads.

On a side note, Disney’s Web site blocks OmniWeb and recommends I download Internet Explorer or Firefox. No thanks, I’ll stick with my trusty OmniWeb and go visit a different Web site. OK, I’ll launch Safari. Why is The Man always bringing me down?

When life gives you lemons, hope the power comes back on soon. Or something like that. Here’s the deal: It’s half way through the first day of the MOGO media InDesign conference and the power went out. Completely. Not coming back on for a long time.

Under other circumstances this would be a minor annoyance, but this is event is loaded with people from several countries that can’t just come back later. So what do you do? Think on your feet, that’s what.

The conference organizers mobilized the instructors and set up impromptu question and answer sessions in the halls — luckily there are plenty of windows for light. Sure, there are some people that are totally bent out of shape. Not that their anger is going to make things any better.

Most people are totally digging the face time they are getting with the instructors that they came so far to see. There are clusters of people around each instructor, and there are several other groups springing up where people are sharing their experiences and issues. This has become an on-the-fly self help event on a big scale.

This is exactly what I love seeing when something that is completely out of our control happens. People are coming together, helping each other out, and breaking out of their personal safety zones and meeting their fellow attendees.

Yes, it totally sucks that power is out, the scheduled classes are off, and there isn’t anything that can be done about that. On the other hand, this is giving everyone a chance to learn in a new way, a more community-focused way. Even better, most people are taking advantage of this new learning environment.

Now, if we could only get that power back on. It’s over 80 degrees outside, and it’s getting hot in here.

Update: The power is back on, well, at least for now. We are picking up where we left off before the power conked out, a little hotter, and with a little more community education that we would have had otherwise. A tip of the hat to the MOGO gang for taking what could have been a disaster and creating a more personalized learning experience.

My conference and expo-going experience tends to be a little different from the average attendee because I’m more often than not on the giving end instead of receiving. By that I mean I’m usually presenting at the event or donning my journalist hat to report on what’s going on. This week I get to indulge myself as an attendee: I’m off to Miami Beach for the MOGO media InDesign, Pixel, Vector and Acrobat Conference.

Oddly enough, I packed as if I was presenting at the event. All of my usual presentation gear including video adapters, backups of important files, and printouts with critical data about the venues I’ll be at is safely tucked away in my carry on bag. Really. Some habits are hard to break.

For all of my traveling, however, this is my first trip to Florida. Thanks to my window seat view, I’m getting to see parts of the U.S. from the air that I’ve only seen from the ground. Yeah, I’m on the plane, and I’m writing. Go figure.

I’ve gone from snow in the air in Denver to what amounts to me as tropical weather, and there’s still a good 45 minutes left in the flight. If my geography is correct, I’m over the ocean and west of Florida right now. At this altitude, you get a very different perspective on the world — much like I’ll get a very different perspective on training conferences all this week.

I also get to watch the other travelers on the plane, and here’s what I’ve noticed: Most people are closed away in their own little worlds, unaware of the amazing things going on around them. The more you pay see, the more you can learn. For example, after I can get at an Internet connection again I need to check up on some geography.

I’m sure — okay, pretty sure — that I saw the Mississippi river at one point, and although I get just how big it is (I’m originally from Missouri, after all), I didn’t get just how big it is. I also need to figure out just where all of those fires I saw was really were. Florida pan handle? Probably, but I can’t be sure until I do some research.

My point is that here I sit, looking out my little window seeing, and ultimately learning, about things that most of the other people on this flight are oblivious to.

Here’s a little observation for you: From this altitude, the ocean waves look like that filmy coating you see on old soup right before the lunch lady stirs it back into the pot. But in a good way.

Believe it or not, I really have a point. It’s way too easy to make up excuses for why you don’t take time to go learn something new, hone your skills, and expand your horizons. It’s even harder of you work someplace where you hear things like “We don’t have time to send you to training. There’s work to be done and deadlines to meet!”

I remember those days, and I also remember how frustrating it was knowing there were new and exciting things to learn, but someone was holding me back. Luckily, life hasn’t been like that for me for some time now.

With that in mind, I’m off to Miami Beach. Sure, I’ve been in the graphic design world for a long time. I remember the good old days of QuarkXPress 3.1, floppy disks, and the promised marvels of PostScript Level 2. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things I can still learn, and I plan on filling my head with cool new bits of knowledge all week long.

It’s no secret that I’m something of a news junkie, and I like to be an efficient news junkie, too. That means I’m always on the look out for new ways to improve my news gathering and filtering arsenal, so imagine my delight when I stumbled across Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop Web site.

Anyone that spends any length of time news hunting online invariably ends up at several different Web sites. That’s just the nature of the beast. AllTop takes all of those sites you are most likely visiting anyhow and groups them together on a single page. The interface is clean and sleek, sites are organized in an easy to follow grid, and rolling over an article headline reveals a nice article synopsis.

Sure, I could see all of the same information in my RSS reader application — and I do — but that’s not the point. The point with AllTop is that I get a slick overview of the Web sites that I’m going to be checking out anyhow, and yes, TMO is on the list.

AllTop by itself is pretty great, but I found a way to make it even more convenient for me thanks to a clever little application called Fluid. This crazy little app creates free-standing self contained applications for your favorite Web sites. I made an application for AllTop so I can keep up on what’s new outside of my browser of choice (OmniWeb, for those keeping score) and outside of NetNewsWire and the hundreds of feeds I watch there.

Fluid relies on Mac OS X 10.5 technologies, so Tiger users are out of luck. Sorry, gang. For everyone that is running Leopard, however, this is a really cool way to create site-specific browsers for the specialized tasks you perform on a regular basis. Let’s say you want a Gmail app, or maybe a dedicated app for your online banking. No problem. Just feed the URL to Fluid, and it handles the rest. As an extra bonus, your home made app doesn’t keep a browser history, so you get a little more security out of the deal, too.

And now I swing my dialog train around and get back to my main point: AllTop is a really cool Web site, and even more so when running as a stand-alone application thanks to the techno-magic of Fluid.

I just love where all of this technology is going. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Please welcome Jeff Gamet, Morning Editor for TMO, to Blogs.TMO!