I have been living in Munich since the summer of 2007 and I used to think that for web design, I was living in the wrong country. Let’s face it, the companies and independent designers we all admire tend to be from the U.S. or the U.K., for example my idols Dan Cederholm, Jason Santa Maria, Brian Hoff, the talented folks at Meta Lab Design, as well as Andy Clark and Elliot Jay Stocks and many others. A quick google search for Web Design in Munich reveals mostly mediocre agencies who still use Flash.

This past weekend, I attended and spoke at the Front End Conference in Zürich, where about 200 designers and developers from Switzerland as well as Germany and rest of the Europe got together to talk the latest in design, web technologies, UX and mobile. I should have done this a long time ago - attend a conference in Europe. It was an incredible feeling to be amongst so many talented young people, from the fabulous team from Amazee Labs and others who helped organize the conference, as well as Benny and Stefan, the fabulous duo who created this awesome responsive Parlament Explorer. During Robert Nyman's talk about new HTML5 technologies, I asked if we could also cache files off a CDN, for example the jQuery library. The answer came from a young developer named Thomas via twitter. It’s a shame, we didn’t record the incredibly enlightening mobile technologies fishbowl discussion with Johannes Fahrenkrug and Bastian Allegeir among others. I could go one forever. But I won’t.

Few Organizers of Frontend Conference 2011, Zürich

It occurred to me that it isn’t that Europe doesn’t have talent. It’s just that they don’t self market. In the case of Switzerland, during the design clinic session with Marko and myself, someone made the point that Switzerland is so expensive, they market only in Switzerland. No one else could afford them. After walking by a kebab shop that sold pizzas and Döner plates for 20 Swiss Francs, I can believe that. 

But I also think it is culture. In my observation, Europeans, at least Germans and Swiss just aren’t the self marketing types. They don’t go looking for attention and recognition. They care more about just making something great and being satisfied with that. I feel that in American culture, we’re never satisfied and we go immediately looking for the next big thing and patting our own backs each step of the way. But in Munich, I’ve learned to stop, take a break and look around once in a while. Go into the Alps, be it on a summer hike or winter snowboarding tour, you can’t help but have your breath taken away. You wonder at the beauty of something bigger than you and forget about yourself.

It’s just a different work life balance. There’s a lot of talent in Europe and they’re creating amazing stuff. They just don’t talk about it. And that’s okay.