The Hickensian

Last week I had the pleasure of attending @media 2009 in London, where it has to be said, I had the best conference experience I’ve had for a long time. I prefer the more cosy nature of the event – a single track, not too large and overwhelming quantity of people, and simply great talks. I can’t pick one favourite presentation, as I came away feeling really inspired and energised by everything.

It was also the last @media curated by Patrick Griffiths, who is moving on to follow other passions (from next year the conference will be in the able hands of the Web Directions Team). I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick for encouraging me to talk, and giving the best possible environment to do it in.

After giving the presentation, I realised that there are 2 areas, only touched on briefly here, that should be expanded on: Icon Accessibility and Icon Usability Testing. Those are big topics for another day/talk/blog post, so until then here are my slides for my talk on ‘Icons for Interaction’:

Download the Icons for Interaction PDF (18mb). All links are available on my delicious account, tagged icondesigntalk. My speaking notes are also included in the PDF, hopefully this will be enough to make the slides meaningful.

The typeface I used for this was Comic Crafts Astronauts in Trouble.

Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite. Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s APIs allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further.

I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. Fears were unfounded though, as a majority of people have embraced Unite for what it is, and love it.

If you haven’t tried it yet, head over to the labs and remember: like any service with an API, the real excitement is in waiting to see what people do with it…

Discovery are a new project by members of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot. Vampire Weekend was my favourite album of 2008 – like a breath of fresh air to my collection – and this looks set to be a contender for 2009. Go see the Discovery site created by David Emery and his team of boffins.

Every school day since May 7th I’ve been drawing a little Monster Card for my son Daniel’s lunchbox. Not totally sure why I started this, but he enjoyed the first one, and it’s become a ritual. Every morning when making his lunch, I give myself 5 minutes to draw a monster on paper from one of those memo pad things, give it a name and quickly photograph it with the iPhone.

Sometimes they come out OK, sometimes they’re not so great. The important thing is seeing his reaction at the end of the day. #2 Mrs Wetherby didn’t go down too well – it was a bit girly for his tastes!

So far, I’ve managed 16, and I’ve started a Tumblr account to show them all: danielsmonster.tumblr.com