Be a Creative Sponge is a post on The Hickensian

I’m just back from @media Europe where I talked about the importance of maintaining design collections and how to use them, under the banner “How to be Creative Sponge”. Having only ever resided on panels before now, and with the exception of a 15 minute talk at Oxford Geek Night 2, it was my first ‘proper’ speaking engagement. I was concerned that what I had to say was too obvious, too common-sense, but feedback so far has been good, and I’m really appreciative of those that took time to tell me they got something from it.

As promised, here are the slides from the the talk, and all the URLs mentioned in the talk can be found via the sponge tag on my delicious account: http://del.icio.us/jonhicks/sponge.

As for the conference itself, I had a whale of time. I meet new, lovely, interesting people every time, and always come away with new ideas and motivations. In particular though, I absolutely loved being able to share it with Leigh, and I have her parents to thank for that.

My lasting image of the event will undoubtedly be Drew whipping up the crowd in chants of ‘There is no fold!’, aided by placards. Especially after receiving a Request for Proposal that week, containing the requirement “All information on the homepage must be visible above the fold”, I was tempted to take one of the placards and send it back with my proposal!