Some personal milestones since moving to Brighton, in no particular order:

1. I live in Brighton.
Very fast and spontaneous decision. Zero regrets. It wasn’t easy, but I made it work: moving to a new city, jobless, and without ties or contacts, is something I thoroughly recommend.

2. Started, and actually maintained, this blog.
Scary, for lots of reasons. I’m Googleable. I’m making my thoughts tangible. Blogging has helped me to understand my job better, and it’s helped me to understand the whole industry better. Thinking, understanding, writing, sharing are all good things. I would encourage every single person to have a blog, if you can read, write, and have a brain. Just make a Wordpress blog and start writing about something that interests you. While I’m at it, I’d encourage you to use Twitter as well. Life is fleeting. Publish!!

3. Got a job doing something I love and am genuinely interested in.
Really glad I’m no longer in the shoes I was, post-graduating: flung out into the real world clutching a bit of paper. I was lucky to fall on my feet and figure things out.

4. Met some great people.
This isn’t really an ‘accomplishment’, but luck, and a side-effect of living here. Brighton is teeming with quite a number of smart, talented, inspired, inspiring, passionate people. It’s helped me to understand how important it is not to be an island, but to be part of a community. Islands don’t develop, they just get smaller. Great people help you grow.

5. Attended a BarCamp and actually did public speaking.
Kind of a big thing, for a girl who contemplated breaking her own leg to get out of it at school.

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Some future goals:

1. Write more and write better.
But at the same time, relax about writing: I think I automatically slip into a formal essay style, which actually constrains directions I want to go.

2. Do more public speaking (BarCamps)
And become more confident about it. My first BarCamp was pretty much baptism by fire, as James Aylett put it: my audience included someone involved with BarCamp’s founding, and several other muses.

The best way to think about BarCamp is giving back: sharing what you know, in exchange for learning more about what other people know.

Ah yes, and not entirely unrelated to the rest of this post: I’m going to SXSW Interactive (March 13–19th) in Austin in 2009, and can’t wait to catch up with the great people I met at dConstruct and at Nokia Open Lab.

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.
  

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.