Blogging and all that Malarkey

On a change from the usual date–for the past eight years I’ve been published on 23rd December—I’m back on 24 ways again this year with a new article about Designing Imaginative Style Guides.

Starting today, Geek Mental Help Week is a week-long series of articles, blog posts, conversations, podcasts and events across the web about mental health issues, how to help people who suffer, and those who care for us.

It’s been a question that I’ve been asked a lot over the past couple of weeks in the run up to this year’s Geek Mental Help Week, so I thought that I’d explain in more than Twitter’s 140 characters.

Geek Mental Help Week starts next Monday and I’m very happy to say that there are several events happening during the week.

Flights are booked and visas are in hand * and I’m getting very excited, because in only a few weeks, Sue and I are heading back to Australia to join Espen, Jina and Una, as well as our friends in Perth at the very first Mixin conference.

Do you know where you were or what you were doing exactly ten years ago (next week?) I do. I was speaking at my first, in fact the first Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia. (I gave a talk called ‘Creating Inspired Design’ and there’s audio of it if you’re interested in listening.)

As I mentioned last week, I’ve written a new talk to help me cope with my obsession with making layouts that are different from what we mostly see on the web these days. It’s called ‘ Art Directing the Web’because in the talk I make the point that we should make different layouts not just for difference sake, but to better communicate the meaning of our content and to tell better stories.

Here’s the skinny. Geek Mental Help Week is happening again during the week of October 3 rd 2016 and I think that it’s going to be the best one yet.

I’ve joked before that unless a conference line-up includes Harry Roberts and Sara Soueidan it’s a Code Of Conduct violation. Or something like that. So oh how I laughed when earlier this year I was asked to join them on stage at Frontend Conf in Zurich, Switzerland.

I’m warning you now, it’s a very different kind of episode of Unfinished Business this week as Rachel Andrew and I talk about our feelings on the referendum result for the UK to leave the EU. We talk about the issues that will affect us, you and our businesses in the coming months and years and what we’re already doing to help mitigate them.