Scott Boms

Our March 2011 Back Catalogue

Connections

There’s a lot I could say about SXSW, but others have already written pieces that echo my own sentiments about the conference this year.

Simply put, SXSW has arguably outgrown it’s effectiveness as a design and technology conference in spite of itself. It’s too big, too uneven, and perhaps, even too corporate. On the other hand, because it’s size, it’s helped foster something else entirely — what you might almost call a resistance.

Luke, Brian and Richard at the Ginger Man
Luke Dorny, Brian Warren and Richard Rutter during SXSW

The last two years have seen a growing group forsaking the official conference almost entirely, instead travelling to Austin during that same period to join friends and peers in small, usually informal gatherings, frequently at many of Austin’s popular coffee houses, pubs or restaurants to share knowledge, ideas, have a laugh, or just to catch up with each other and discuss the future.

There’s reasons why I think this is important, though Josh nails it:

I love meeting new people and connecting with old friends. I love talking about all the crazy stuff we do and what it means and why we do it and how we can do it better and how we can actually make the lives of others better by sharing our ideas and making things and being genuine and opening up to one another and buying rounds of beer for people we don’t know and getting to know them and coming up with crazy, goofy ideas that just might work and practicing a whole new type of alchemy: converting bytes and bits of virtual connectedness into actual, physical relationships that mean something.

Although I love Austin as a city, it’s those relationships and that open sharing of ideas that keeps me going back every year. Strengthening existing connections and making new ones. It’s what the web is made of. It’s what life in the real world is made of.

In Flight

Letting something you’ve created go free into the great unknown of the world is scary. Anything could happen. Nothing could happen. The latter often being the worse of the two options. Today was one of those days. One of those great days — and there are a lot of people responsible for making it that way.

Today saw the start of pre-orders for the second flight of the popular (and sold out first edition) Typographic Lesson Plan by my LL&S cohorts and I, and the ceremonial letting go of a new thing into the world.

Launch of the second flight of the Typographic Lesson Plan
Now available - the Second Flight Typographic Lesson Plan from LL&S

Flipping that switch from “coming soon” to “available” is scary. Every time. Nothing’s real until it’s out there, until we’re really on the hook for something other than to ourselves. That people are there each time, waiting, is still surprising and amazing. It’s equal parts exhilarating and humbling.

This particular piece is a milestone for us, in part because the first edition was so popular and sold out as quickly as it did, but more importantly because it’s given us a chance to come full circle on something we talked about when the original letterpress edition was released — to set some aside for educators.

From day one, we’ve tried to imbue an educational angle on the various pieces we’ve produced, however simple. Whether it’s adding historical context — knowing not only the name of a typeface but also who designed it, who distributed it, and when, but also in producing artifacts that can help pass on knowledge for the benefit of anyone who comes in contact with them.

And so, after what’s been a whirlwind day, I want to take a moment to say thank you.

Thank you to everyone who purchased a print today, tomorrow and may sometime in the future. Thank you to the educators who’ve put in a request for one of the special unnumbered prints that are being set aside just for them — we’ll be getting back to you about those soon. Thank you to everyone who tweeted and retweeted about the launch. And of course, thank you to the dapper, steadfast, and bloody amazing and indispensible LL&S crew — Grant, Luke and Carolyn.

Order the second flight edition here — pass it on.

Carbonated

Ads are not something I would normally gravitate to. They’re usually ugly, irritating or simply get in the way of the content I’m actually going to a website to locate or explore. So until recently, any serious thoughts of putting them on my own site was extremely foreign.

To date I haven’t put any measureable amount of consideration into somehow financing the ongoing costs of hosting, domains and server management, but a recent invitation by the lovely folks at Carbon Ads to join their ad network piqued my interest.

I knew who they were — I’d seen their ads on sites I frequent and so immediately knew there was an opportunity for a good fit. I also knew enough about their angle — one single small, non-animated ad per page, allowing more than a sufficient degree of flexibility with regards to layout and integration. So I said “yes” and have been happily running these ads on the site for a few days now.

The beauty is that the ads are largely for products and services I would likely, or already use and endorse, meaning there’s no guilt. It’s an experiment on one hand, but one with no real downside. And there’s an oppotunity to learn — from the ads themselves, but also by clicking through to see where they take you.

My expectation at this point is minimal, though (obvously) the long-term goal is to increase traffic and impressions by writing more — to share ideas and opinions that I’ve largely kept to myself or saved for a more private dialogue with my close peers and colleagues. To that end, the queue of half-finished ideas, articles that have been building up should start to creep out a little more frequently.

Aside from any potential monetary benefit, however small, this opportunity with Carbon Ads has also lit a small fire under plans that have been smouldering for a while now — to finally leave Movable Type behind and move to a new publishing platform (no, not Tumblr or Wordpress) with a refreshed design that better reflects where I am professionaly across the board.

There really isn’t just one true source for personal publishing anymore, be it on Twitter, Flickr, or Delicious (yes, still) and to that end, the initial work on aggregating these and other sources into a unified whole has been started though likely won’t come to the light until I finish up one last major undertaking.

« February 2011April 2011 »