Talking Type and Design at South by Southwest

¶ Talk of South by Southwest seems to come around quicker each year. I’m already looking forward to heading back to Austin, not least of all because I may get the chance to be on a couple of great panels (please cast a thumbs up if you like the sound of the panels).

First up is Is Your Website Heading for a Car-Wreck? with Alan Colville, Jon Tan and Giles Colborne. We’ll be looking at three cool websites that turned into car wrecks and discuss what went wrong and how disaster could have been avoided. We’ll have some fun ripping apart the good-ideas-gone-bad, disastrous user experience and shoddy implementation, but more importantly we’ll try to get across where and how all of these things could be avoided and how you can stop your website heading the same way.

I also hope to be joining Jon on Get Your Glyph On 2, a reprise of our typography panel from last year, in which Elliot Jay Stocks, Ian Coyle, Jon and I were admirably moderated by Samantha Warren. There’s been an awful lot of movement on web typography this year, particularly with the impending arrival of font services such as Fontdeck, so we’ll have a load to talk and argue about.

The SxSW panel picker also reveals a few other very promising web typography panels:

• Jason Cranford Teague, formerly editor of the CSS 3 Fonts Module, is proposing a talk on Fluid Web Typography: Many Types, Many Faces
• Bram Pitoyo has put together a must-see panel Web Developers, Type Designers & Browser Supporters: Ally! featuring representatives from Kernest, Typekit, type designer Mark Simonson and potentially John Dagget from Mozilla and Thomas Phinney formerly of Adobe.
• The inimitable Roger Black is also getting in on the act as moderator of Web Fonts: The Time Has Come with some excellent panelists including Font Bureau’s David Berlow, Stephen Coles of Typographica, W3C’s Bert Bos and Jeffrey Zeldman.

More panel worthy of your thumbs up are:

• Fellow Clearleftie Andy Budd has two excellent proposals, Seductive Design: Making Sites Your Users Fall In Love With and Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!
• Another fellow Clearleftie, Cennydd Bowles has a really top notch presentation on Beauty in Web Design in which he discusses making websites beyond just cool, fun and useful, but things of beauty too.
• Fellow Brightonian and superb speaker, Aral Balkan is proposing User Experience: Remember the Magic in which he will present a A Tarantinoesque journey to remind you of the joy, fun, and passion – the magic – behind why we do what we do.
• HTML5: Tales from the Development Trenches will be Opera’s Bruce Lawson and feature Accessibility ninja Steve Faulkner and jQuery warrior Remy Sharp
• Erin Malone is proposing SocialMania: Designing Social Interfaces – The Game covering designing social interfaces through interactive, collaborative gameplay.
• Jeffrey Zeldman is proposing New Publishing and Web Content, a fascinating sounding panel exploring the creative, strategic, and marketing challenges of traditional and internet hybrid book publishing.
• Christopher Fahey also has an excellent list of UX-related panels, including his own on The Human Interface, in which he will urge UX designers to stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.

Panel or not, I’m sure I’ll end up at South by Southwest again next year, so hopefully I’ll see you there too.