One of my biggest sources of inspiration this month was the reasons.to1 conference. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical about it. I added it to my conference plan mainly because of the location (Old Street, I could walk there) and the price (~£80, very cheap). Why was I sceptical? I am a big fan of technical talks, and I usually find talks about personal experience a bit boring.
Long story short, I attended two of the most inspiring talks ever. The first one was by Stefanie Posavec, on how to use datasets as raw material. The second one was by Elliot Jay Stocks, about his career and how he learned to enjoy his side projects. The second one was especially good, and it pushed me to reopen my blog and finally try out Ghost (the blog platform I used to run this site on).
I was also lucky enough to meet him at the pub and, between one pint and another, ask him one of the biggest questions of a web designer’s life:
Is it possible to learn typography from scratch, even if I always get fonts wrong?
He was really kind and gave me a list of resources, which I want to share:
- Stop stealing sheep and learn how type works by Erik Spiekermann
- Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
- Combining typefaces by Tim Brown
Footnotes
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Unfortunately, there is no page for the 2015 event anymore, so this link goes to the conference homepage. ↩