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This week I had the great pleasure of speaking at the 3rd Web Developer Conference in Bristol, along with Elliot Jay Stocks, Sarah Parmenter and Dan Donald.

It was only a one-day conference, but I had a whale of time, meeting new folks like Elliot Kember (who shone on the 2 panels he attended), Oliver Ker and the legendary Jon Tan, with whom I’ve had emails and chat but never met in person. I also got to catch up with Ben Hostler, the creative director of Bristol-based agency Beef, who I haven’t seen since I was at Middle School with him… 24 years ago!

The talk I gave was an update of one I gave at @media 2007, ‘How to be a Creative Sponge’. Back then, Flickr was really the only option for sharing design collections online, but a lot has changed since then. We’re now spoilt for choice, but I explained my current system of choice – Evernote. Like Fireworks, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with it in the past, but earlier criticisms have been fixed in recent updates. In particular, I’m finding that I can ofter remember text in an image that I’ve saved, so the OCR technology in Evernote makes it easy for me to find items I’ve collected. I would even say it was more effective than a tag.

Download the slides as PDF (27.8mb). I don’t tend to write presenters notes, so I’ve added these afterwards to try and help it make sense. All links mentioned in my talk are available on Delicious under the sponge tag.

I came away with a really good feeling about Bristol – it has a great developer/designer community, in a city that feels friendly and very un-intimidating.

I also came away with a realisation that there is a whole book’s worth of material in ‘Malarkey’s Prank Calls’. Everyone I met seemed to have at least one experience of that delight to share ;)

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.

As well as speaking at the next Oxford Geek Night on ‘Web Typography: Choosing the right typeface’, and How to be a Creative Sponge at the London @Media conference, I’ll be taking the Sponge talk to a new, exciting venue.

Vivabit have just announced @Media Antarctica, taking place May 1st–2nd at the Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, just over 800 miles from the coast of South America. This really going to break new ground for web conferences!

It’s kind of like the ultimate extreme geek holiday, really. To SxSW’s rainy daytrip to the nearby pebbly beach, this is a sunny snowboarding safari on a tropical island. With a top quality conference (and a great line up, as usual) in the most interesting (and extreme!) environment, this one’s for the more adventurous forward-thinking web designer.

Book now to be sure of a place!