I had a fantastic time at my first BarCamp over the weekend. Despite having weeks to finish it, I left putting the finishing touches on my talk ’til the last minute, which was a bad idea. I couldn’t relax until it was over, and spent time working on it when I could have been attending one of the sessions. I managed to attend a few, though, including Aral’s overview of the Google App Engine, Joshua Porter on interface literacy, Mark Trammell (Digg) on stalking users, and James Aylett’s Impro 101 (the last of which was horrifying, amusing, brilliant, and unexpected all at once). Tantek Celik gave a great introduction to Buildering 101, which is the art of bouldering on and within buildings.

Overall, it was just great to attend a BarCamp and discover what they’re like. I was exhausted after the celebrations following dConstruct (which really deserves its own post, but others have covered the sessions very thoroughly), but still think it’s great to have BarCamp Brighton follow on from the conference day. Lots of interesting people are still in town, and the event was attended by a number of dConstruct speakers (and other interesting individuals who wouldn’t usually be around).

Meanwhile, I was up at 3am on Sunday morning finishing off my presentation on the (pompously-titled) “Ideas in Typography Related to Experience Design”, which is a spin-off of my post on Twitter and the Crystal Goblet. Fear of public speaking described in my previous post reached new heights on the morning of the day, but having committed a time, and also having spoken friends who were expecting my talk on Sunday, I still turned up.

And I’m glad I did – about 35(!) people showed up to my talk, which meant we had to move to a larger room (I’d signed up for the smallest room, initially, called ‘Skint’ – about 5 minutes into the talk we moved. My cunning plan had failed!). So, that was terrifying, but it went well, and clearly, geeks love type. I’m really flattered by the good feedback I’ve received. It was far from perfect, and I definitely have a talent for self-criticism, and have many ideas for how I’d modify the execution and the content if I ever present again. It was great to hear the discussion that the talk kicked off. Content-wise, I’d concentrate more on talking about experimental typography, legibility/readability issues, and other more typography-centric ideas. Plus, I’d make sure I prepared in advance, and that I signed up to speak early in the BarCamp schedule.

Here’s the notes from my talk. I’m not sure if these will make much sense to you as I was using them as guidelines whilst I was speaking, but if you have any questions, please ask…

Ideas in typography related to experience design

• Typography is the “mechanical notation and arrangement of language”
• Some ideas in typographic literature are highly relevant to experience design: communicating through visual signs, whether interfaces or websites

1.
TRANSPARENCY

• Beatrice Warde’s essay, The Crystal Goblet, argued that printing should be invisible: the chief aim of typography is to communicate ideas. I like the idea that interfaces and websites can also be transparent to people’s needs.
• Typography is beautiful by accident. Stanley Morison, who helped develop Times New Roman for the Times newspaper in 1933, said that: Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only ac­cidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim.
  
• The idea of accidental beauty and simplicity is relevant to interface design in particular: there’s not much room for decoration, and like typography, an interface is a very functional piece of design – simplicity, transparency, and visual balance are things to aim for.
  

2.
CONVENTION

• Convention: letters must be a conventional in order for us to read and understand them. Shapes which deviate even slightly from the model become harder to understand (and longer to read).
• In typeface design: convention is critical, as people already have a system (language) for understanding ideas.
• Good typography is boring
• Studies related to legibility / readability. Legibility is how clear individual characters are. Readability is how well text set in a typeface flows together. This is something to think about when selecting a typeface.
  
• In product design: we must respect our abilities and limitations as human beings when designing new products.
  
• The same idea applies to design under the name of natural mapping, which aims to remove the need for information in a user’s memory when performing a task.
  
• Don Norman, in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’: (1) Provide a good conceptual model
- allows us to predict the effect of our actions 
- mental models are formed by learning a device’s perceived actions. (2) Make things visible: mental models determined by interpreting its visible structure, through visual cues.