I had the wonderful pleasure of speaking at Internetics in Bucharest, Romania late last month. My presentation was Helpful Tips on Running Your Creative Studio. In hindsight, its really an adaptation of my FlashForward talk that was catered to the problems and needs of the design community in Romania.

All in all, the presentation and the trip were something that I will never forget. My hosts from Millennium Communications were extremely helpful and accomodating to my needs and schedule. The attendees were very appreciative of my “outsiders point of view” and I think they were also very pleased to hear that they are catching up to the design standards of the rest of the world very quickly. I met some wonderful designers such as Biris from Web Design 2.0, Ruxandra from aRond, Bogdan from WebStyler, and Stefan from X3 Studios.

If you ever get the chance to go to Romania, on business or pleasure, I highly recommend you make the trip! I would go again in a heart beat.

I have provided links below for those of you who are curious as to what I did and what my presentation was like.

Pictures of My Trip
Presentation Slides (11.1 MB PDF)

AdCritic has a great review of the IDEA Conference held in early November. Their breakdown of the key 19 big ideas to come out of the conference are fresh and reassuring to me on so many levels.

Be a part of the first ever NYC Type Club meeting, 8PM on March 9th at The Skinny (174 Orchard St. [1 block off Houston]) in New York City. The themed event for our premiere meeting is: Auto-convert your hand-drawn alphabets into usable fonts which will be posted for free on the net. RSVP

Didn’t make it out to Flashforward2006 Seattle Conference & Film Festival? No problem! Checkout the link dump with top articles, blog posts, session notes, podcasts, and photo galleries from the conference.

I’ve been slowly listening to “Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, a book about honing your professional contacts through unselfish networking and goal setting. It has been extremely eye-opening so far. It just so happens that Keith is going to be giving a presentation at the 92nd Street Y, so if you are in NYC tomorrow and feel like learning how to change your life for the better, then I’d recommend you sign up right now!

My wife has put together Get Started Using Ajax, a one day training workshop for Carson Workshops, focusing on Ajax, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

I’ve just recently been turned on to the TAXI Design Network. Besides offering a wonderful place to host your online portfolio, the network also provides essential tools like this extensive listing of Design Competitions.

If you are in NY tonight, why not spend an evening tonight with the Midwest’s own Rick Valicenti. He will talk about his work and his life, but he also wants to answer your questions – the later half of the presentation will be devoted to a semi-moderated dialogue.
$15 AIGA members / $25 General public

All the cool stuff happens in Texas! Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of new media endeavors in the Dallas area.
found via Andy Rutledge

Registration is now open for FlashForward 20006 in Seattle. Their focus this year is on Flash as a platform, with a whole new lineup of the industry’s top teachers, developers and designers.