I gave a talk today the the edUi Conference in Richmond, VA. It’s been a fantastic conference so far, and worth more words than I can devote right now (because Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) is speaking and she’s fantastic and worth the attention). But the response to my talk was just overwhelming, and I wanted to get the slides up here quickly.

Thanks for all your feedback and tweets so far - please stay in touch!

It’s what drives innovation. It’s what drives the web. It’s the force behind the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’

If Tim Berners-Lee was not curious, he would not have created the very place we all work.

If Marc Andreeson wasn’t curious there would be no graphical browser.

If Dries wasn’t curious we wouldn’t have Drupal (there may be a spelling issue there too)

If you weren’t curious you wouldn’t be here.

I had a great time this past week dropping in on a few collected classes’ worth of marketing students at Providence College. I was asked by good friend and former client Ed Gonsalves to talk a bit about how Social Media and Mobile has changed marketing in recent years. While marketing isn’t necessarily a core interest of mine, I’ve been involved in it in one way or another fairly constantly over the years. I think it’s actually hard to NOT be involved in some way when you work as a design and strategy consultant.

Now that #FOWD 2011 is come and gone I can make the video available for my talk from last year! Thanks so much to @Carsonified for permission to make it public (and inviting me back again this year!)

You can find the slides for download here as well.

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 )!