I’m not really sure what I’ve got myself into. Feeling a little pressured by the fact tickets were being reserved for both girl geeks and those who hadn’t attended a BarCamp before, I haphazardly signed up to attend BarCamp Brighton 3, which is being held at Sussex University on the 6th–7th September. (It is just after dConstruct, which I’m also attending – I’m hoping to glean some presentation skills from the excellent speakers.) Tickets for BarCamp Brighton 3 sold out within 10 minutes, which, of course, made me feel lucky and compelled to actually go.

I know it’s “just” a BarCamp, but I can’t help wondering what the hell I’m doing. Public speaking was something I despised at school and university, and generally I tried my utmost to avoid it. In fact, public speaking and exercise were my two least favourite things. In some grand twist of irony, I now visit a gym three times a week (paying an obscene fee to do so), and I’m attending a BarCamp – voluntarily!

So, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to talk about. Typography was my specialism at university, and I know a fair amount about how typography works (mainly in print), and, of course, the history of typography. What interests me most about typography is printing. There are obvious parallels with printing and with the web: both deal with the dissemination of information, with literacy, and the flow and sharing of ideas. I wrote my dissertation on the history of the broadside ballad, which was the first low-level way of communicating thought through cheap print. I can’t imagine having written about anything that is more meaningful to me.

I’m going to use a blog post I wrote a few months ago on ‘Twitter and the Crystal Goblet’ as a starting point, and come up with a twenty-minute presentation on transparency in mobile experience design. That way, I’ll usefully combine my three loves: typography, experience design, and mobile. Oh: and Twitter. (I’m also contemplating calling the presentation what dead typographers can teach us about designing for delightful mobile experiences.)

Thoughts welcome. Presentation tips very welcome.

Most compelling to me in Paul Graham’s essay on Cities and Ambition is the idea that “most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time”. Cities are made up of several voices, but one voice speak louder than the others. According to Graham, New York calls for you to make more money; Silicon Valley calls for you to be more powerful; and London calls for you to be more aristocratic. (But as Nancy Mitford put it: “An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off; it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.”) Since we’re living in a world with penetrable social walls, we are able to move towards a city’s centre of gravity, if we want to go that way.

Brighton’s voice is: Decadence. There is a culture for enjoying oneself. Brighton is like a really thrilling romance that has the benefit of being wholesome. It reminds me of California – somewhere in-between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, with a touch of London cool.

It’s not just a party town – it is serious and ambitious as well. A prerequisite for my presence here is the fact that it’s full of people passionate about, and ambitious for, what they do. It’s hard not to be infected by the positivity and interest in life and work, and there is a community here. Paul Graham isn’t personifying architecture and geography; he is talking about people.

Wow, it has been an interesting half-year! Six months ago I decided to move to Brighton, which has turned out to be the best impulsive decision I have ever made. I moved here jobless, mainly friendless, and totally terrified, but I think things have worked out pretty well.

On Monday, I’m joining Future Platforms, which I mentioned a few posts ago, so tomorrow is my final day at Cactus Language. Cactus, incidentally, is a wonderful place to work, and I will miss it and my colleagues a lot — check out their blog — their passion for what they do oozes off the page. Moving into mobile will be an interesting journey, and one I’m really looking forward to. Mobile, as I’ve said before, has a very strong appeal to me for a lot of reasons, and I’ll no doubt be writing on more mobile-related theme over the next few weeks and months. I like it because I feel it’s nascent, it’s gathering momentum, and there’s a lot of room for development and change, a lot of room to experiment and apply theory.

When I visited Brighton for the first time in early September, I loved it. I was briefly conflicted, as I had already set my heart on moving to London; but this was quickly displaced by the jealous feelings I started to feel towards people already living in Brighton. I’m not sure what it was initially: the sea air, the positive ‘vibe’, the endless cafes, Banksy, visiting the Laines for the first time (full of the most exotic street signage I’ve seen, must blog it), the paradox of hippies and tech-geeks living side by side, vegetarians with iPhones. You can walk down St James’s Street in pyjamas and nobody would blink an eye. That’s not to say people are badly dressed: in general, people are as style-conscious as they are in London, but without the bitter snobbery. There’s an aura of ‘anything goes’, you can wear what you want. People are cool, and people don’t judge.

So, that was it. I moved to Brighton, about a week after I had visited for the first time.

Brighton is more bohemian, exciting, and liberal than Oxford; and it has more individuality, spark, and character than Reading. Admittedly, that’s not difficult in both cases, but this place is like nowhere else in the UK. It’s a place people feel lucky, it’s a place where people willingly get stuck. I spent my first night in Brighton sitting on the beach with strangers around a campfire. They were singing, spinning fire, dancing, drinking. Someone was playing a drum. Everyone I spoke to seems to have visited Brighton for a day… 17 years ago, and everyone seemed to be from Russia, or Finland, or Italy, or somewhere else.

Another thing that attracted me to Brighton was the technology community. I can’t really stress how great it is to be surrounded by people who are working in the same field as you, or closely related, and to be around people who are genuinely, seethingly passionate about what they do. There’s a real thriving community here that I love. I felt like a geek at university, but I am always outgeeked in Brighton. Another plus is that here, you are never more than 10 minutes away from a free Wi-Fi connection (thanks to looseconnection.com, and forward-thinking cafes and pubs). The beach itself was also a reason to move: living by the sea (I am 2 minutes away from it) is wonderful, and something I’ve never experienced before.

I’m beginning to sound like Julie Burchill. I wish, she communicates the Brighton thing much better than I do…