Tickets have gone on sale for the Design It Build It conference, the third-year event for web developers and designers. John Hill speaks to conference producer Oli Wood.

IF THINKING Digital is the North East conference that allows you to see your world differently, you could argue that DIBI helps many people see it more clearly.

After all, Thinking Digital features a breadth of speakers that can show you the future of robotics, talk about computers that read your brainwaves, and then break for a short burst on the hurdy gurdy.

But while Gateshead’s disciple of the TED ideas conference keeps its visitors’ gaze fixed on the stars, the Design It Build It conference provides the talent in the web design and development worlds with practical advice on solving issues, and gives them a better insight on how they work and how they can work better together.

“It’s really a learning conference”, says DIBI conference producer Oli Wood. “Of course, there’s some awesome networking too. Thinking Digital is about interesting people thinking about things in a different way, while DIBI is very much aimed at web practitioners, such as people working to build websites and apps.”

The idea of DIBI is that it’s a “twin-track conference”, meaning that there’s effectively two speaker lists running in parallel at The Sage Gateshead.

Web designers get to listen to six speakers sharing insight and advice, while web developers are doing the same with their roster of six luminaries. The two “tracks” merge at the end to hear from a keynote speaker.

This year, there’s also a “sleepover” involving films, games and hacking, and a series of half-day workshops.

When DIBI rolls around on April 16 and 17 next year, it will be its third year in existence.

For the first two years, the role of conference producer fell to Gavin Elliott. Elliott left Codeworks after last year’s DIBI to devote himself to his own projects, including the upcoming Industry Conference. Under his watch, speakers included web design legend Jeffrey Zeldman.

Wood has been at both of the previous conferences, and was involved in the early conversations that led to the foundation of the first event, as well as using his contacts in the developer world to help find speakers.

He says: “I suppose DIBI partly grew out of a conversation that Chris Stainthorpe and I had with [Codeworks chief executive] Herb Kim about three years ago.

“We said that Thinking Digital was awesome and we definitely went away inspired, but it wasn’t necessarily practical.