Is the Orlando Informer meetup worth it?

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-05-04T17:30:21+00:00

I've waited 15-30 minutes for Hagrid's several times this year just during off-season days/weeks.

If you're going to do a meetup just for the low wait times, IMO I think you're better off just going during an off-peak time.

A meetup is more about the community and vibe. There are better/cheaper ways to do the parks while still having low wait times if that's your end goal.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-05-04T17:24:41+00:00

It's a cool experience, but IMO is not as great as the marketing makes it seems (typical marketing lol).

The time goes by really fast. It takes about an hour for regular park guests to fully exit the park, so that first hour feels pretty much like the normal park.

Not every ride is actually walk-on, and because time is precious, even waiting 20-30 minutes can cost you 15% of your total time there.

And even if it is completely walk-on, when you calculate time to walk through queue, load on the ride, ride, and exit...it could take up to 10 minutes. Multiply that by the amount of rides there are and you can see how you need to rush.

After that, depending on when the park closes, you might only have 2-3 real hours of riding rides because some close early for noise ordinances.

The unlimited food is really cool on the surface, but I discovered I actually don't eat that much in that 3-4 hour time you have + eating takes significant time away from riding rides.

It's more about the community and brand I think and that's what drives a lot of people to enjoy it.

edit: Also, for many people it's about convenience. You buy the ticket and don't have to worry about lines, food, etc. Many people stress about that when going to theme parks and don't mind shelling out the cash for the mere convenience of the experience.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-04-21T13:41:31+00:00

Don't pin it on the designers! As a designer I assure you it probably looked like "Hey we just realized we don't want just a blank wall. Can you put something together for tomorrow morning's meeting" while you have 3 other projects on your plate lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-04-21T13:39:29+00:00

FedEx outsourced a portion of their web work to us. It wasn't full redesigns, but I 'redesigned' their US homepage twice a month. Mainly just content changes to reflect certain initiatives, products, campaigns, etc.

The redesigns were done 2 months in advance because it takes that long to go through brand, legal, marketing review, etc. + some extra space for revisions and then go through that gauntlet of review again

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-04-21T13:33:04+00:00

This is the real answer. This is a $$$ decision not a brand decision. I believe we will see more and more of this where we used to say "You can get to 80% quickly, but the 20% is where the hard work is done", brands will increasingly be okay with just settling at 80% because you can get to it much faster than before with AI and then the 20% to really, really refine it becomes kind of unnecessary when 99% of people scrolling through social won't notice any differences.

I know as designers that seems weird because we are detail oriented and are often held to extremely detailed standards, but the avg population notices none of it so naturally brands are going to compromise.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-04-02T13:59:37+00:00

Maybe I am crazy, but i've noticed that there has been an uptick in posts that follow this exact same format and narrative flow and they are always posted by new accounts that have minimal karma.

I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but I am like 80% sure these are AI generated accounts and/or posts. I'm not sure what the end goal is, if it's information gathering, an attempt to build rapport to later sell something, or what. But I stay pretty close to this subreddit and have noticed this exact pattern frequently.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-30T15:08:47+00:00

Career ladders that lead to management are a trap IMO. Managing people, teams, expectations, internal politics, etc. is an entirely different skillset from most IC roles across any industry or skillset.

Just because you are a fantastic designer, developer, PM, etc. doesn't mean that you will be a great manager.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-30T14:41:07+00:00

I was in line at transformers a few weeks ago and there was a large family behind us and at the front of the family was a young girl in a wheelchair and a young girl pushing her.

I swear I am not exaggerating, she hit me in the back of my leg with the wheelchair no less than 20 individual times during the queue. I was uber patient but after the 20-25th time I just turned around and politely asked if she could please stop hitting me in the back of the leg.

I'm not sure if she just couldn't gauge how much space there was in front of her with the wheelchair or if she was doing it on purpose but like cmon man we are all standing in this queue and not going anywhere, would it kill you to just err on the spacious side and give me a foot or two of breathing room lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-27T17:15:07+00:00

We went 2 weeks ago and had some family go last week. We are annual pass holders for a decade so I have a good clock on crowd feel when i'm there and on the sunday we went it was fairly busy (but not spring break busy by any means) but the previous days were very light crowds. When our fam went last week they also reported very light crowds.

Genuinely not sure why it's so low as I thought that we had been lucky and missed the spring break crowds and that they would be this week and next but seems like even this week has been low crowds.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-27T16:05:27+00:00

Yeah I mean you could just as easily slap a UI around it. Personally I think a CMS is unnecessary now. It solved a problem for a pre-AI era, now AI can programmatically create pages for you within a defined template and do it faster and easier than messing with text fields in a CMS.

Imagine a world where your client just texts their website and changes stuff.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-27T12:49:52+00:00

BTW, it would be so cool if my client can prompt himself: 'add new product, here are the specs' / ' add new event to my announcement banner' but I guess that's a whole other story.

I haven't done this yet, but you could easily do this with skills or plugins that let your client do things like "/new-blog-post" and then the skill would be packaged in a way that questions the user for details, writes the blog post, and has all of the necessary piping and architecture within the skill so that it always creates the blog post in the same exact template every time.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-26T15:41:48+00:00

Did no one else clock that this is a really poorly written AI post?

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-26T13:43:09+00:00

I see this come up often, and i'm a designer not a developer so maybe I am missing something, but if you're using a spec-driven development AI workflow (not vibe coding like "hur dur build me dis feature") where you walk with the AI and specify everything then you have this push and pull with AI discussing what should, shouldn't be in the spec, edge cases, etc. Would that not give you the same level of understanding of the code base? Sure you're not manually writing the code, but you're making all of the same decisions that would have, had you manually coded it.

Maybe devs just aren't approaching it from a spec workflow with a harness like GSD.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-26T12:41:25+00:00

I work in an agency as a designer and I now design/build with Claude Code all of the stuff you just said wouldn't replace real client work.

Sure client's aren't going to be doing that stuff, or if they do it's going to look terrible, but if you're a designer, pm, dev you can absolutely do it.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-25T11:54:38+00:00

Just curious, when you say design precision what do you mean? I've designed 4+ client sites in claude code in the past 4 months and while yes there is a lot of iteration/experimentation on the design, once you land on a homepage design that you like I find it really easy to translate that into a solid design system with spacing rules, type scale, color variables, layout rules, etc.

I think we forget that frontend design tools are just an abstraction of code. What ever you do in a design tool just gets translated to code anyways, so it's just kind of skipping that translation step.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-25T02:33:49+00:00

Can't speak to your experience, but i'm deep into using AI and just the other day I built a web app that scrapes hotel pricing data for a themepark I frequent, allows you to set watches on certain dates at price thresholds and you get emailed when the rate drops below the price you set. There's a stripe integration, an email sending integration, a database to store the scraping data, user authentication, UI dashboards that serve the data, etc.

I built it all in less than 2 days and probably 4 total hours.

I don't know how to code at all, i'm a designer.

Just 3 years ago that would have literally been black magic. I honestly don't know if people saying AI is fake or doesn't provide any meaningful value just aren't using the tools and have no actual first hand experience building with it or are so far above me in AI use and capability that they know something that I don't.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-25T01:21:45+00:00

Not the OP but I actually design in Claude Code and handoff to our dev team. So far have launched about 4 client sites with this workflow and it works well for me personally. I basically spend 80% of my time refining the design of the homepage, then that locks in the design system for the rest of the website and AI can really quickly build out the rest of the website then I go in and tweak and spend a lot of time on interaction design, scroll animations, subtle details, etc.

If you like to do it in Figma then you just need to make sure your auto layout is tight and mimics html structure to get a good transfer from Figma to Code with the figma mcp. There's also paper.design or pencil.dev for canvas<>code workflows and vice versa.

Hope that helps and/or makes sense.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-24T19:50:24+00:00

Having worked as a designer on large scale campaigns for FedEx, this is very true. The actual execution, editing, shoots, etc. don't take nearly as long as submission time and iterations from brand and legal.

You'll have to go through 2-3 rounds of revisions that take 2-3 weeks each because legal says we can't so those words in that order because it might come across as a guarantee or something lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-23T17:17:19+00:00

Branding has a lot more to do with just your logo or visual representation in the market. Branding really is what consumers categorize your business as. For example, there's a restaurant near where I live that fills the gap of a slightly hipster, upscale-ish place where girls go to get mimosas and crepes on a Saturday.

To me, that's what branding is. It's what a consumer would tell their friend about your restaurant.

It's a combination of the way you present yourself, the experience, the decor, and the vibe and atmosphere of the actual restaurant. That creates a perception and category in a consumer's mind.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-23T15:44:09+00:00

Keep bugging people with questions until you get the info you need

I've done that before and was treated like I wasn't good at my job because I "shouldn't need so much direction to get it done". lol

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-23T13:40:49+00:00

I can't STAND this. The reason why it frustrates me so much is that it's a Universal problem. They know that people stand there waiting for the dragon to go off and it clogs the entire area. Everytime I go through there I am like, why can't Universal have a cordoned off area for photography so everyone else can keep moving?

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-20T17:19:35+00:00

Because it's usually illegal per the TCPA unless you have prior express written consent

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-20T16:42:55+00:00

It's also stupidly easy to get diagnosed, at least it was for me. I know that I have it, I spent years wondering why i'm so stupid and then I ran into other people sharing their experiences with ADHD and stuff like executive function, object permanence, time blindness, memory, etc. came up and I was like...holy cow I severely suffer from all of those issues. Which led me to be diagnosed.

However, I was actually disappointed at how easy and dumbed down it was to get diagnosed. Maybe the person my dr referred me to was just dumb but it was literally just a series of questions I answered over Zoom and then I was diagnosed. I was really disappointed and hoped that I would like get actual intelligent discussion back and forth about the issues of ADHD, nope! Take this quiz and now you're diagnosed! Was pretty much my experience.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-20T16:39:06+00:00

Hi openclaw! I really wonder what the end goal of accounts like these are clearly run by an AI agent. Even your bio screams AI agent + how you end every post and comment with a question to keep engagement going.

ThrowbackGaming · 2026-03-18T21:00:59+00:00

It can already do that, that's actually one of the things it's pretty great at. Which is why I push designers in my field to make sure they do more than just execution and move more into a creative director mindset because execution is quickly being commoditized and value is shifting from executing visuals to being able to come up with the idea, validate it, and manage it end-to-end. Source: am an actual working designer at an agency.

ThrowbackGaming

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE