That was a busy weekend. Here’s how I spent it.
I woke up at about 4:00a on Friday morning and flew to Boston for the Society of News Designers conference, which was great fun. In our session just before lunchtime, Tom Bodkin and I had a very lively public debate about the merits and flaws of digital design, which I think some members of the audience recorded. I’m only sorry I couldn’t have stayed longer.
Then it was off to Denver for the AIGA National Design Conference. I got just a few hours of sleep that night before reporting to the impressive and immense Denver convention center (they have an awesome sculpture of a bear giving drivers-by the ass in front of the building) the next morning, to be introduced for my solo talk by the extremely classy Kurt Andersen, who asked me some sharp follow-up questions after I was done. It was a little frightening, too, to speak for twenty-five minutes in front of some 2,500 attendees, but I’m proud to say that I did not mess up, at least.
But Wait, There’s More
I’d nearly forgotten beforehand but I had agreed to appear later on that afternoon with Bill Drenttel, Allan Chochinov, Alissa Walker and Tina Roth Eisenberg for a panel on design blogs moderated by Steve Heller. I was a little afraid this one would tread too much over familiar territory, but it turned out to be quite a fun exchange.
I stayed out pretty late on Saturday night, drinking and socializing with attendees and getting to chat with lots of designers whose work I had long admired from afar. It was really fun. But I was exhausted by Sunday morning, and slept nearly all the way back to New York. I’m going to bed early tonight.
Evidence
At both conferences, lots of people asked me about documentation of the talks that I did. I believe that some attendees recorded the talk that Tom and I gave at the Society of News Designers Conference, but I haven’t seen any surface yet. As soon as I do, I’ll post a link here.
The same goes for the panel discussion on blogging from Saturday at the AIGA National Design Conference, though I’m not sure if any audience members recorded that one. And of course, I my own slides from my talk, entitled “Control,” on the main stage there in Denver, which I’m posting below via the presentation sharing service SlideShare. I went back and added some notations for slides that had none when I presented them, hoping to help readers here make more sense of the flow. This was a brand new talk and I’m really proud of it because I think it pushes me beyond the territory of just being That Grids Guy, and into an area of bigger ideas on how we think about practicing design. Hopefully you’ll agree.