Do It With Drupal 2011 triple-play madness

So I went to Brooklyn this week pretty excited: I’d been asked about giving a talk on web typography at Do It With Drupal ( #diwd ) - Lullabot’s conference about Drupal and the larger world of the web. With keynotes from Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ), Jeff Robbins ( @jjeff ) and Josh Clark ( @globalmoxie ) it was an honor to be on the schedule. I also had a fun little announcement to make that came about just in time too. Things, as they say, didn’t necessarily go according to plan.

A couple hours before my session on Thursday I got a tweet from Steve Fisher ( @hellofisher ) asking me to let the organizers know that he’d been sick with food poisoning all morning and wasn’t able to speak. Not one to cling to any sort of sanity I told Matt and Jeff I’d be willing to fill in. I wasn’t really thinking about the fact that it would be right before my scheduled session! SO… out came my presentation on Web Strategy. After a quick run-through it was time to get on it, and I’m really happy with how it went. It was a long few hours (only a half hour break between sessions!) but I got some absolutely amazing feedback and had just a flat-out blast doing it. Both topics - Web Strategy and Web Typography are things I’m pretty passionate about, and to be honest it wasn’t hard to say yes to doing both. And Lullabot knows how to say thanks too! I came back to my room that night to find a bottle of wine and chocolate covered strawberries. Here’s hoping the bottle survives the trip home in my suitcase!

And in case two presentations wasn’t crazy enough - Jeff asked me to sit in on the closing panel along with a whole bunch of people way smarter than me to answer questions on ‘all things Drupal and otherwise’. It was a really fun way to close out the event, summarizing highlights and talking about where things are headed. The big theme for me? The parallel between designing from the content out and building a responsive world around it to how Drupal fits in the middle of it all, tying disparate systems and data sources together into a content hub easily capable of pushing content out to services, sites and apps all at the same time. All in all - a pretty great picture of where we’re headed.

And that other little tidbit? Well, all my carrying on about web fonts and typography has turned into a deal to write a book on it! More on that in the next post. In the mean time, here’s slides from my presentations, and I’ll include a link to the Lullabot Podcast we recorded of the closing panel once that’s live as well.

Thanks again to Lullabot (Addi - you rock!), the other amazing presenters and everyone who attended for all the great feedback. It’s that kind of support that makes it all so much fun!