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!

I wanted to add a bit more on the subject of my site redesign while it’s still fresh in my mind, and pass along some thanks to those who have provided some great inspiration and feedback. My wife Ellen and long-time friend PJ ( @pjmoore_1) had some really great insights that helped me ‘be my own designer’ better than I was, and really got me excited about the process of design and the ‘doing’ of it. The design itself came together pretty nicely thanks to the solid #Drupal framework already in place.

I’ve had the honor recently of being asked to moderate discussion of REWORK by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (of 37signals) on the Business Innovation Factory’s BIF Book Group. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, and as with other of their writings, take much of it to heart.

Recently the topic of complicated versus complex has come up both in relation to a book group discussion I was leading on REWORK and also with an online Twitter-based chat I was moderating on innovation. It’s pretty central to everything I’ve learned, experienced and thought about with regard to design, so it seemed worth it to capture it here.

When I woke up Wednesday morning I was looking forward to an always-fun and interesting meeting day on the newschoolyard.com project, for which I’m the platform architect. We’re working on a platform targeted at independent schools to maintain their own web sites, parent and alumni communities, and the whole project is really satisfying. Great challenge, great way to help bring innovation (and huge cost savings) to schools.

I know, I know. If you listen to the Boagworld podcast or follow his incessant tweeting and audioboo-ing you'll doubtless be saying something like 'good heavens, don't give him any more reasons to inflate his overblown sense of self-worth' - but I think that he's struck upon a really important topic, and one that has an enormous impact on the future of our industry.

Two workshops today at the Future of Web Design conference: Real-World Accessibility for Web Designers with Derek Featherstone and Design Secrets of Digg with Daniel Burkha. It was tough to narrow down to these two - all of the sessions looked great - but I chose these for important reasons. [I’ll be adding more about Daniel’s talk in the next day or two - it’s too much to cover now!]

While I've been 'away' from posting here, a big change has come about for me professionally: I've decided to leave (add)ventures and start my own web strategy and design consultancy. There's been a huge amount of interest in my work, and it seemed like the right time to move. My role previously was far too focused on just implementation, and this way I'll more often get to bring my full experience to projects rather than only a small slice.

So there it is: the shingle has been hung: web strategist, designer, technologist - now for hire.

I’ve traded a few tweets over the past day or two on the subject of good books for web professionals. I use that term to avoid ‘designer’ - as that seemed limiting or possibly a bit arbitrary. I think that information architecture, understanding business requirements and translating them into web site features and functionality, usability/user exerience, interaction design and visual design are all distinct enough that they can be a specialization unto themselves.

I’ve been working full-time at (add)ventures since late 2007, but thought it would be worth it to share my thoughts on the process of interactive projects. When I was interviewing at (add)ventures I was asked the question ‘how do I tackle interactive projects,’ and this got me thinking about not just the steps, but the philosophy behind them. While I think this might have been more than was anticipated, I thoroughly enjoyed the process!