• I’m flying off to Japan on Wednesday to visit my uni friend Krzysztof. He has a Polish name with far, far too many consonants. Kris and I went to university together, and since graduating has been working in  Japan. I’ll be staying with him in Osaka for a week, visiting Kyoto at the weekend.
• I’ll be arriving early on Thursday morning, and I predict staying awake will be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately Japan has a sufficiently good coffee culture: it’s apparently easy to find good coffee in Japan. Even better, decaf coffee is very difficult to find. Fine. I never saw the point of it. According to the previous link, the removal of caffeine is treated as a health hazard. Well, that sounds good to me!
• Another reason for the visit is to escape the uncomfortable state of waiting. I’m currently waiting to hear whether I’ll be moving to Germany or London, depending on possible outcomes. Patience is not a strong point. I worked out I can wait wherever I want in the world, with the same results. A bit of dithering, window shopping on Opodo, and three days later, I booked a flight to Japan, and of course I’m very excited and happy about this.
• Travel and learning about the world is, apparently, a theme. Most recently, I’ve become interested in the Middle East. This started after hearing about an incident of anti-Semitism directed at someone I know. To start to amend my ignorance on the subject, I read Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. The book is obviously an argument in favour of the existence of the state of Israel. It lays the facts out and addresses all the arguments and criticisms. For the sake of intellectual curiosity and better knowledge about the subject, I’m also trying to penetrate Edward Said’s Orientalism, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since my good friend Sharmin mentioned it back in 2004. Said is—why are academics usually referred to in the present tense, even if they died years ago?—an interesting fellow, not to mention an influential academic and pro-Palestinian activist.
• Speaking of culture and travel … I’m wondering if the internet produces Third Culture Kids. And can you become Third Culture?
• I return from Japan on the 27th August, in time for this year’s dConstruct in Brighton, which I hope is as excellent as last year’s. Naturally I love the theme, which is “designing for tomorrow”. The scheduled talks look incredible and I’m lucky enough that it’ll be the second time I’ve attended a talk by Adam Greenfield.

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.

–

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.
  

There are several things I’ve been meaning to write about. They’ve been started, but then left half-written in Google Docs. So I’ve decided to take a short break and let them sit for a while.

Last Thursday I attended my first Girl Geek Dinner which was held at Google in London. It turned out to be a fun event, and I’m very glad I went: it was great to meet other girls who are geeks. Visiting Google was also exciting. Attendees had free reign at the bar, which offers every brand of chocolate, biscuit, ice-cream, and drink you can imagine. There were also some delightful stacks of Girl Geek Dinner-branded cupcakes to celebrate their third birthday/anniversary:


(There are a few more photos of the Google dinner on Flickr.)

(I learned the next day that I shared a cupcake from the same batch as Valleywag-belle Julia Allison (wait – who?), who had visited Google cafeteria earlier that same day. Exciting stuff!)

After the dinner – for the curious, I chose salmon layered with potato, and french beans; it was pretty good, but my expectations were unfairly high – there was a talk on mobile UX design from Google user experience designer Karen Groenink. She outlined basic challenges related to mobile design, which were: restricted input/output, network latency, data costs for users, different operating systems, lack of critical mass, small keyboard, and so on. It was unexpected that the talk would be focused on mobile, and it’s really interesting to see it becoming more widely discussed (though perhaps it’s not so surprising, as Google Android is being headed in London).

A busy fortnight approaches. On Friday I’m attending dConstruct, followed by BarCamp Brighton 3 (I am preparing something that resembles a presentation in Keynote), and then Helsinki for a Nokia workshop the following weekend. Yikes. Then I’m visiting Oxford, where I will do absolutely nothing for the duration.