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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

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Greetings from San Francisco, where earlier this week I spoke at An Event Apart. I’ve done seven events this year — New Adventures (Nottingham), FOWD (London), The Brand Perfect Tour (London), Interlink (Vancouver), Insites (Bristol), Flash On The Beach (Brighton), and now the aforementioned An Event Apart — and with the exception of the panel discussion at The Brand Perfect Tour and the informal chat at Insites, I’ve stuck to one presentation throughout the year: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Now that I’ve done the final event that uses this talk, I thought now would be a good time to put it online and share some notes.

I’ve never been a huge fan of putting slides online, because I think their meaning can be completely lost without the accompanying commentary. But for those of you who have attended a talk and want to look at the slides again, you can now find them on Speakerdeck. (If you haven’t seen the talk and this is the first time you’re looking at the slides, please prepare to be relatively confused, especially with the Spider-Man references.)

One thing I never thought of — but got reminded about by an attendee in Monday’s audience — is the fact that many of the sites and designers I reference in the talk might be completely new to some people, and it can be hard to make accurate notes. So here’s a load of stuff I’ve mentioned in the talk, some of which are URLs listed on the slides, and some of which are casual references I’ve made in my commentary…

Sites showcased in the slides

Nike Better World
WebKit Clock
3D Text
Nizo for iPhone
Ben The Bodyguard
Typograph: Scale & Rhythm
Typecast

Influential people

Ian Coyle — possibly the most talented designer / developer hybrid I know working in the industry right now.

Jon Tan — close friend, occasional studiomate, frequent 8 Faces collaborator, and co-creator of Fontdeck.

Rich Rutter — co-creator of Fontdeck, long-time writer about type on the web.

Tim Brown — Type Manager for Typekit and authority on on-screen font rendering.

John Boardley — creator of I Love Typography and Codex: The Journal of Typography.

Don Norman — world-renowned thought leader on the concept of ‘affordance’ and author of The Design of Everyday Things.

Other references

Web Font Loader — Javascript for advanced font-loading, co-developed by Google, Typekit, and Fontdeck.

Destroy The Web 2.0 Look — my talk from FOWD New York in 2007.

Hope some of that proves useful! Photo by Drew McLellan, taken at FOWD.

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