HOW Conference Early Bird Discount Ends March 12 : I’ll be speaking, along with a host of incredible speakers . Use promo code CM10 and save $50 on the individual full-conference rate. … Read the rest here
One of the things you discover as a speaker and, especially, a conference organizer is this: Keynote generates really frickin’ enormous PDFs. Seriously. Much like Miles O’Keefe, they’re huge . We had one speaker last year whose lovingly crafted and beautifully designed 151-slide deck resulted in a 175MB PDF. Now, hard drives and bandwidth may be cheap, but when you have four hundred plus attendees all trying to download the same 175MB PDF at the same time, the venue’s conference manager will drop by to find out what the bleeding eyestalks your attendees are doing and why it’s taking down the entire outbound pipe. Not to mention the network will grind to a nearly complete halt… Read the rest here
I’m a bad conference organizer. Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November , and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job. Okay… Read the rest here
In order to get more people in the design scene speaking at events like SillSwap , BarCamp and even dConstruct or UX London , I’ve been toying with the idea of organising a free public speaking course. It would be held on a yet-to-be-determined Saturday at the Clearleft offices in Brighton and would focus on practical, hands-on tuition. We would start with how to plan, research and design a talk that delights your audience, paying special attention to story telling and narrative. We would then move onto the delivery and performance side of things; teaching people how to project their voice, vary their tone, use the stage and work the audience. It’s all basic stuff, but it’s these rookie errors that can damage an otherwise excellent presentation. To ensure everybody gets the individual attention they need, the even will be for a limited number of people… Read the rest here
This year will be a busy one in terms of speaking events. I’m currently crafting a brand new talk titled, “The CSS3 Experience”. It’ll focus on enriching the experience layer with advanced CSS and CSS3. Everyone can easily add enhancements to to their designs when focusing on the interactions and events that happen on the page. And by targeting the user experience with these new and evolving standards, you can start using these flexible techniques now, on any site, with less worry. Well damn, that sounded rather pitchy, didn’t it… Read the rest here
This is the last week during which you can grab a ticket for UX London at the early bird price. From February 1st, the price goes up by a hundred squid (and from April 1st, the price goes up by another hundred squid—no joke). In case you’re wondering whether or not you should go, wonder no more. Just check out the line-up of speakers and imagine three solid days of inspirational talks and hands-on workshops in their company. If attended last year’s event, you know what a great gathering it is. If you didn’t attend last year, talk to someone who did. … Read the rest here
Of the many things we do well as creative professionals, we often forget to think for ourselves, relying on thought leaders to determine what works for us and what doesn’t. Paramount in this failure to think for one’s self is the fact that these thought leaders often struggle to encourage others to explore new thinking without belittling their methods–or worse, ostracizing them–in the process. Whether or not the title of thought leader can be applied to myself, I’m just as guilty as anyone else. In ” 20 tips for better conference speaking “, I offer this short-sighted observation: There is absolutely no reason in the world you should use anything other than Keynote. … Read the rest here
It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. … Read the rest here
It’s so easy to wallow in self-pity when things don’t go right. As much as 2009 sucked on all levels, it wasn’t all bad. As much as I want to sulk, the fact remains that I live a charmed life. Through some karmic luck of the draw, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for. Personal Projects This past year was a year of simplication and basically had me letting go of all my personal projects—at least for the time being. I shut down SidebarAds, I never worked on Snitter, and I never finished Haylia, FontSmack or any number of other personal projects that I wanted to work on… Read the rest here
As a self confirmed conference junkie I speak at a dozen events each year, and attend many more. As such I’ve probably seen close to a thousand talks over the last five years. Because of this I’ve got a pretty good idea what makes for an exciting talk and how you can guarantee your session will suck. As somebody who also organises two conferences, UX London and dConstruct I’m really keen on getting new talent into the speaking circuit while still maintaining quality. As such I’ve put together a quick guide to help both new and experienced speakers kick arse/ass. Most of these tips aren’t new, but you’ll be surprised how few people actually follow them. … Read the rest here
As a self confirmed conference junkie I speak at a dozen events each year, and attend many more. As such I’ve probably seen close to a thousand talks over the last five years. Because of this I’ve got a pretty good idea what makes for an exciting talk and how you can guarantee your session will suck. As somebody who also organises two conferences, UX London and dConstruct I’m really keen on getting new talent into the speaking circuit while still maintaining quality. As such I’ve put together a quick guide to help both new and experienced speakers kick arse/ass. … Read the rest here
Tickets for the UK ’s premier user experience conference are now on sale . The great thing about putting together a conference like UX London is that, as a user experience consultancy ourselves, Clearleft gets to set up exactly the conference that we would want to go to. And yet again I’m massively excited about who we’ve lined-up for 2010: Bill Moggridge, Scott McCloud, Peter Morville, Liz Danzico, Josh Porter, Kristina Halvorson, Whitney Hess and Jesse James Garrett to name but a few. Details of the workshops are still being finalised, but you can expect to learn more about running Agile UX teams, using comics as design tools, understanding patterns for discovery, designing to influence behaviour, using metrics effectively, applying psychology to interaction design and loads more. UX London is designed to be the conference we at Clearleft want to go to, and that’s probably why it was so successful last year… Read the rest here
This year’s ATypI conference in Mexico was big on webfonts. FontShop celebrated this by putting together Webfonts Week , a series of interviews with leading type designers. There seems to be universal support for webfonts now, even from those who were dead set against it a year ago. This is obviously great news for web designers and font services such as Fontdeck (coming to a browser near you very soon). Erik Spiekermann It’s the difference between using software and owning it. What webfonts are doing is providing an engine to send fonts to a website, which is like sending ink to a printer… Read the rest here
While at the Fronteers conference watching Thomas Fuchs go through his slides, a keen member of the audience noticed his use of bitwise negation and asked what it was for. Understandable, as there is so rarely a time where bitwise operators seem necessary. It did, however, remind me of a project that I worked on where I ended up using bitwise operators quite heavily in one particular chunk of code. It’s a solution that I’m quite particular fond of. … Read the rest here
I just signed and returned the paperwork. As of November 16, I’ll be an employee of Yahoo!. This might seem like a bit of a surprise for those aware that I started at Squarespace just seven months ago. Unfortunately, six months into it, the requirements of employment changed and I was no longer able to stay on. … Read the rest here
Written more than 6 years ago, my SitePoint article, ” Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal “, is still referenced from time to time as I chat with other designers by email, at conferences, and the like. It struck a chord with people — whether positive, negative, or both — and today that chord still hums. I suppose it’s because the topic isn’t new, nor did I invent it. After all, I was quoting Pablo Picasso as the supposed source of the quote, and he died more than 35 years ago. Others, such as drummer Tony Williams, have said the same . Here again I present another quote on the topic… Read the rest here
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. … Read the rest here
So, it’s been four days since rejoining the ranks of the self-employed . The transition from full-time employment to self-employment has been nearly seamless. This is probably because I’ve been through this all before, but also because the timing was right. I was ready to leap and therefore hit the ground running. I have no shortage of work right now. In fact, I’ve probably not been this busy for quite some time. … Read the rest here
Usually when I write about an upcoming event, it’s because I’ll be speaking at it. But there’s an event coming up in eight weeks that I’m pretty excited about, where I’ll be an attendee rather than a speaker. The cheekily-named Full Frontal will be taking place in the Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton on November 20th . It’s going to be all JavaScript, all the time. … Read the rest here
During the short time that I was at dConstruct , I nipped out with Paul and Marcus to record a quick interview about HTML5. That interview has now been published in the latest episode of Boagworld , complete with transcript. Just to show how fast HTML5 can move, on the very day that we were chatting about the content model of the footer element , the spec was duly updated. Boagworld 184: html5 on Huffduffer Speaking of podcasting and dConstruct… Thanks to always excellent Drew , the audio recordings from the day are starting to roll in. You can keep an eye on the podcast page or simply subscribe to the podcast to get all the aural goodness. … Read the rest here