I'm lucky that I get the chance to speak at conferences on a fairly regular basis. Last year, I presented about a dozen talks on web design topics and taught a couple of workshops. But, I'm still a neophyte next to the Molly Holzschlag's and the Jared Spool's of the geeky lecture circuit. I know I have a lot of room for improvement. Yet, getting honest criticism from your audience is just about impossible.
Earlier this year, Khoi Vinh correctly made the case that designers are generally too kind to each other. At no time is this more true than when you're asking people to criticize your public speaking. You can ask attendees and even fellow speakers for tips and they'll invariably concoct a compliment and shrug their shoulders before telling you that they couldn't do as well as you just did — which is total crap.
During the past year, I've figured out a few decent techniques to encourage people to give you a critique. This is something I still struggle with so I'd appreciate your ideas as well. A few things that seem to work for me:
- Ask for just one thing
- If you ask people to tell you 'anything' or 'everything' that you could improve upon, they'll usually stumble about and not give you anything useful. But, ask them for the 'one thing' you could improve on and they'll at least wrack their brain to come up with a single criticism. This is much better than getting nothing.
- Ask people who know you well
- The best post-presentation critiques I've received have come from a long-time coworker and my father. People who've been on the other end of your own stinging criticisms are much more comfortable throwing some back at you. This is great! My dad's a really nice guy, but he's both heard me carp at him more than a few times and he's a seasoned university lecturer. He was kind but blunt with several pieces of good advice.
- Ask drunk people
- Seriously. After a workshop at Future of Web Apps in Miami last year, I asked the attendees to give me some honest feedback and got a tepid response. But... that night, a couple of the guys were pretty drunk and (standing a little too close for comfort and with potent whiskey breath) gave me a healthy dose of totally unvarnished advice. That advice, which was to show more examples and to cover less material but in more depth, was fantastic.
- Ask groups of people
- This seemed counterintuitive to me. I assumed that if you cornered an individual that you could get good one-on-one advice. But, if you can coax just one person in a small group to give you a single piece of advice, the rest sometimes sense blood in the water and will join in too — yay! Once the ice is broken and people see that you actually didn't rip the critiquer's head off, it's much easier for the other people to add their own comments.
- Be persistent
- People are eager to please. Heck, that's why they're being too nice to you in the first place. If you seem genuinely disappointed that no one is offering you criticism, people sometimes throw you a bone to please you. Like in the previous point, once you've broken the ice...
And, of course, If you've seen me present recently or if you're going to be at one of the same conferences I'll be at (I've got a list at the bottom of the page), I'd appreciate your critique in the comments. Be honest, be judgmental, be picky, be cold, heck be downright mean — I'll learn more from your criticisms than from all the platitudes you might write.
I just got back last night from the Future of Web Design conference in New York City. Those Carsonified people really do have their conferences down to a science — it's impressive to watch such a large scale affair appear to come off so effortlessly, even when you know there's a lot of effort (and maybe even a little panic) going on behind the scenes.
I promised the attendees to my workshop and the talk that I'd put my copious slides up on Slideshare. If you attended and you'd like the full set of slides in Keynote or PDF format, email me and I'll invite you to a Dropbox with the big files. Otherwise, here are the downsized versions of the workshop slides and the slides from the talk.
And, particularly considering I did a presentation on using feedback, I'd love to hear comments and critique from anyone who was at the conference. Let me know what I can do to improve!
Well, didn't I just learn something today – vexillology is the scholarly study of flags. I've made several posts in the past concerning my favorite flags, yet I was clearly in the dark about the vexillological arts. Indeed, the umbrella organization, the 'Fédération internationale des associations vexillologiques', has a fairly stunning flag of their own!
I discovered this newly minted member of my vocabulary after stumbling across the North American Vexillological Association's website via Jason Kottke. They have a wonderful guide to flag design — rules that could be easily adopted by logo designers of all stripes (heh heh). I especially love that they feature the flags of Amsterdam and New Mexico as first-class examples.
At the end of September, I departed from my position as creative director at Digg to pursue a new opportunity with my friends Cal and Stewart at Tiny Speck. The entire experience of leaving only the second real job I've had in my adult life has been bittersweet – I'm obviously excited to sink my teeth into something new but I'm sorely going to miss working with many fine people and friends at Digg.
On the sweet side, I've arranged to take a month off before I really get into my new gig. I haven't taken more than a week and a bit off work in almost a decade. This nice break is giving me a chance to recharge my batteries, take a week-long trip to Zion National Park in Utah with my girlfriend, and *drumroll* finally update this weblog!
This poor weblog has been collecting dust for quite some time and I've been heckled by friends (rightly so) to update it. This break between jobs has finally given me the opportunity to semi-complete a refresh of the site. There are still some improvements I'd like to make over the coming weeks, but the basic skeleton is firmly enough in place to make open the door and make this public.
A few notes for anyone that cares:
- Sidebar changes
- Part of the reason this site has been updated so infrequently is that I'm digging, tweeting, flickering, scrobbling, etc... instead of posting here. So, I've finally added syndication into the right rail of my weblog to reflect my broader activity. Follow me on any of those sites if you want to see specific types of updates.
- Realigned theme
- Although it was a bit dated, I still had quite a bit of affection for my previous theme. I really like Cameron Moll's articulation of 'realigning' instead of 'redesigning', which you can read on A List Apart. Hopefully this updated design is in the spirit of realignment. Some parts of this change are still a bit rough, but I'll continue to make improvements over the next few weeks.
- Experimentation
- The nice thing with personal sites is that not everything has to work or at least not work for everyone. For the Flickr images in the right rail, I'm using background-sizing for the first time (which works great in Safari/Chrome/Webkit and will be supported in the next release of Firefox). Elsewhere, I'm using css-inserted content, and some CSS3 selectors... things I wouldn't likely use much on professional work. Hopefully I'll be able to use this as a sandbox to try out things I may employ later elsewhere.
- Degraded Support for IE6
- This is the first project where I've basically cut out the css for IE6. As Dan Cederholm proposed back in February, I'm serving only a very stripped down stylesheet for IE6 and otherwise serving up nice, clean, and accessible unformatted html to that browser. I think it's a good choice for a personal site. If you're developing a consumer-facing site, I'd suggest you read Mark Trammell's important (and oft-misunderstood) post about Digg's altered stance on support for IE6.
Now for the hard part – actually posting here on a regular basis. We'll see how it goes, but I do intend to update this site on a much more frequently. I've got a book review and a few other posts already in the hopper. Heck, my posting here couldn't be any more irregular than it has been in the past, so what do I have to lose!
PS: In case you didn't already know, all of the universal symbol signs I'm using on this site are available for free from the AIGA.
I don't often cross post on Pownce and here on my blog, but this is worth an exception I think. A few minutes ago, a friend reminded me of the Barenaked Ladies' cover of Lovers in a Dangerous Time. I hadn't heard it in years and I'd never seen the video. The song is as good or better than I remembered. I don't care what you think of what the band's done since the famous (at least in Canada) and elusive Yellow Tape, this cover stands on its own.
The fantastic Canadian Design Resource has an article today about the historical flag of Canada's Metis people. I've made several posts in the past about flags and the Metis flag fits well with the other standouts I've mentioned previously. According the description, the Metis flag "represents the coming together of two distinct and vibrant cultures, European and indigenous, to produce a distinctly new culture, the Metis... the infinity symbol suggests that the Metis people will exist forever."
I've been spending many of my recent weekend days working from cafes near my apartment in San Francisco. There's a new one called On the Corner on Divisidero about two blocks from where I live and it gives me a nice break from my small apartment to go down there to write email and work on Pownce stuff — plus their coffee is very drinkable.
However, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels guilty throwing down a couple of bucks for a coffee and then mooching wifi, power, and a comfy chair for a few hours. I try to get up every once in a while and grab a snack or a coffee refill. I hardly need the extra caffeine and I especially could handle eating fewer pastries, but I feel obliged to support the cafe.
In many ways, cafes serve a very similar purpose as co-working space. Many people come much more often than I do and stay longer, essentially using the cafe as temporary office. For co-working space, like the Queen Street Commons, people pay a decent sum for the convenience.
I'm curious if anyone out there has seen cafes experimenting with alternative payment schemes? I could imagine either a subscription scheme or something as simple as special tip jar clearly indicated as a 'thanks-for-the-wifi-comfy-chair-music-bathroom' donation. I know I'd be willing to pay — and my body would thank me for the reduced consumption of guilty pastries and extra cups of coffee.
I'm currently in Toronto at the Mesh conference taking place at the MaRS centre on College Street. Today was the MeshU day of workshops, including great presentations by John Lax, Leah Culver, Ryan Carson, John Resig, and a bunch of others. I presented in the morning and promised that I'd stick my slides online, so here they are. If audio is available later, I'll try to add it on, but I promised to get them up there at least in a basic way. Thanks to anyone/everyone who came out!
