I’ve had this idea of ‘thinking in pencil’ for a long time. The notion that one’s thoughts, opinions and ideas can shift and grow based on the information at hand, on any given day, at any given moment. Every new experience, sight and sound informs you as a person, an artist and as a designer. That commitment to exploration and the ability to admit and even embrace being wrong is one of the aspects of my own personality that I strive to improve every day. It makes me a better designer, a better manager, a better partner to clients - and a better person.
I try to focus on things relevant to web professionals, designers and other creative thinkers. Not always a successful endeavor, but variation keeps things interesting at least.
I need to write more about my experiene at #FOWD this year - because it really kinda blew my mind. It’s a rare thing indeed to go through two days of sessions at a conference and have not a single dud. Seriously - and I could easily have sent a clone to a few more. Just an amazing bunch of speakers who all clearly spent a TON of time on their presentations and were as generous with their time and knowledge off the stage as on it.
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.
I left for DrupalCon London last Sunday night, flying overnight and heading right into a day-long discussion about Drupal in education. The week progressed in a similar fashion: I gave my talk on web typography on Tuesday and the days and evenings were full. I had some amazing discussions, went to informative and inspiring sessions, a bit of revelry and work on projects filling up the late night and inter-session nooks and crannies. Now I’m sitting on a Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to Boston, where my darling wife Ellen and Phoebe and Trevor will be waiting.
Heading to London tonight for DrupalCon this week! I'll be giving a talk on web typography, web fonts and Drupal, and have to say I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. The slides and video will be available after the conference but here's a copy of the slides. I'll add a link to the articles I've written for Monotype's Font.com blog as well (another one should be live tomorrow with demo code to view and download).
Go ahead, London...
Not much of a newsy post really, but excited to announce that I'll be speaking again this year at Future of Web Design in NYC this November! My topic this year is going to be centered around the future of the CMS and how it can (and should!) be a part of every designer's toolbox and workflow. I'll post more about the talk as it develops.
Really excited to announce that I’ll be giving a talk on web typography, web fonts and how to use them at Lullabot’s Do It With Drupal conference in Brooklyn, NY this October! Still a few more days for the early bird discount so check out the announcement and sign up! Totally amazing lineup of other speakers with keynotes from Jeffrey Zeldman ( @zeldman ) and Josh Clark ( @globalmoxie )!
I have a talk at #D4DBoston (http://boston2011.design4drupal.org) this past weekend, and wanted to make sure my slides are available. I was truly gratified by the audience - even though it was at 9am on Sunday! Thanks so much to everyone who came, and for all the great questions.
Design Thinking (DT) is a pretty big ‘buzzphrase’ these days, it’s true. Big in business education, business innovation writing and even (shockingly) in the design world. What has always struck me is that purely by definition, design thinking is exactly what designers have been (or at least SHOULD have been) doing for decades.
I guess I should be clear: this is going to be way too short a post to catch up on ALL of the past month or so - but with so much having happened and the pace continuing, I had to give it a shot.
I wrote this initially as a post to my students - I’m teaching a graphic design course this semester at Rhode Island College, where I studied that subject when I was in school. Heemong, one of my professors in college, always had us start with a minimum of 30 thumbnails of any project we started. Some will say it should be a hundred, some will say it can be less. Some complain that it’s a burden because ‘they can’t draw well.’ But that’s just an excuse, and a condition worsened by not actually doing something to correct it.