Speaking Engagements in 2007

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!

Tags: conferences, speaking

Good Design vs Great Design

It was a real honour to prepare and present the “Good Design vs Great Design” panel with Veerle and Cameron, and I don’t care if that sounds trite. It’s something I’d never have foreseen, except in some sort of cheese-fuelled dream. As promised, here are the slides from our presentations, along with the URLs I mentioned:

Download great_design_slides.zip

Cindy Li and Steve Marshall both have notes from the panel, and I intend to get the podcast transcribed when its available from VIvabit.

URLs mentioned in the presentations:

• Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction for examples of how to show hierarchy without changes in type size.
• Jason Santa Maria’s redesign of A List Apart where the typography is the design itself.
• Denis Radenkovic’s LogoLog for examples of clever logos.
• Survey of default fonts installed for Windows, Mac and Unix.
• Sign up for Type catalogues from Type Foundries such as FontFont and House Industries
• Richard Rutters’ Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the web
• Mark Boulton’s series Five Simple Steps to Better Typography.

Also, someone in the audience asked about the problem of scaling up’ in the future. This post by Dave Hyatt of the Safari team was the link I mentioned in my reply – I hope its useful!

Speaking

Anyone who knows me, knows that I really don’t feel I’m a ‘speaker’, but Patrick Griffiths is very good at doing sad puppy eyes and appealing to ego, so I agreed to be a part of the panel! I’m really glad he did, in fact I wished I could talk for longer. There was so much about typography that I wanted to talk about, and the wee 12 minute slot that we each had was only long enough to highlight a few elements. It seemed to go OK, there were a lot of encouraging comments afterwards, and I had a star-struck fan-boy moment when Jeffrey Veen came up to tell me he enjoyed the panel (apparently he likes the ‘g’ of Meta too!).

It boosted my confidence that I might have something to say that some people would find interesting, and who knows, I may just do it again sometime.

I was also asked back for the wrap-up session of @Media , The Hot Topics panel, with Tantek, Eric Meyer, Jeremy Keith and Molly. Jeremy revealed hidden talents in moderating the panel like the genial host. I always feel that SXSW could do with a final wrap-up section like this, to avoid that ‘fizzling out’ feeling. Again I was chuffed to be asked, and genuinely enjoyed every minute.

I enjoyed @media even more than last year, with a superb venue (only let down by the Wi-Fi), and a great spread of people. As always, time is too short to get to speak to everyone as much as I would’ve wanted, or see every presentation. Hats off to Vivabit for organising such an enjoyable event. Please get those podcats online so that I can catch up on the ones I missed!

Tags: atmedia, speaking