Samantha Warren's Badass Ideas

It’s no secret that I love typography, and this year I will be giving a talk at SXSW called “Get Stoked on Web Typography”. I love SXSW almost as much as I love letters, so it is a fantastic match!

If you have the chance to check it out stop by on Friday March 12th at 3:30 in Ballroom E  in the Austin Convention center. My talk is the second in line-up of three design related talks that are being moderated by Jason Beaird as part of the Design Workshop. Workshops are new at this year’s SXSW and were created as a solution to folks who have common interests having to truck all over the convention in order to see related materials. Cennydd Bowles will be talking about Beauty in Web design as the first of our 3 talks and Matthew Smith will be detailing the steps you need to take to go from Good to Great web design. I am humbled to be a part of this fantastic line-up and I hope to see you all there!

You can tell us you are going to be there on Facebook or sign into sitby.us (the best way to track your schedule via your iphone).

This is my 5th trip to South By and every year I have written a little bit about my experiences… check out previous posts here.

There are lots of new things I wanted to share with you all…

New Work up and New Type

Check out my “work” section to see a few new and not so new projects that are now featured. I completely revamped my work section to show larger site shots and to be less reliant on images. While I love image replacement for text because it allows for such wonderful control across all browsers, it also is a real pain in the ass to update, so I went in and made some changes so that a quick site update would not be a huge time commitment.

Read on…

I just wanted to wish you all a happy Valentine’s Day.

Heart by Yulia Brodskaya

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Carly Medosch is a designer, long-time friend, and is one of the wittiest people I know. Not only was she enrolled in the JMU Graphic Design program with me, we were also dorm neighbors only living a few feet from each other. Carly has Crohn’s disease and since a recent newspaper featured her story, she is now more openly expressing what it is like to be chronically ill via Twitter.

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Just thought I would share a few snippets of design inspiration from my Ember account.

Sleek, simple, geometric clocks that I want in my house found via The Mid-Century Modernist.

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I once worked for a guy who constantly moaned that using a computer would never be as good as paste-up for layout. As ridiculous as his attitude sounded to me, it worked for him. I learned how to assemble my first graphic compositions natively in Photoshop and inDesign while he was seasoned in the art of phototypesetting. His hand-crafted layouts were exquisite, flawless and just as professional as those created using a computer. Using a Mac saves designers time and energy, and makes the process much more streamlined, but for someone who was fluent in conceptualizing his visions through traditional methods the computer was the wrong tool for the job. The final product of his process yielded designs that won awards and exceeded client expectations even after the mac became an industry standard.

Read on…