It was an honour to present at FlashinTO tonight to a packed audience of (mostly) students who bravely presented their portfolios and listened to the collective wisdom of a panel of educators.

My material was beta tested on the crowd after they had sated themselves with pizza and had a few beers. This is exactly the kind of audience any presenter wants: relaxed, full, responsive. Thank you to each and every one of you who came out and stayed to the end.

This content will be fuel for more creative application and innovation based talks this year. Please view the slide show and feel free to leave comments or questions below.

I will never forget Steve Jobs selling the Visualizer in iTunes. He said something like, “We all know what music sounds like, but what does music look like.” That was a stretch, even for Steve, and I could feel the reality distortion field strain to its limits. Ever since that moment, I have chosen to dislike the randomized, computer-generated psychedelic oscilloscopes built into music players.

But when you put sound visualization in the hands of an artist, someone who tries to feel the audio and express it with meticulous, purposeful motion graphics or detailed CGI… that’s something I can get excited about. Putting Content on Content, forcing the expression of a medium through a completely different lens or filter, is a great creative method for innovative artistic expression. In this case it is forcing audio through the prism of motion design.

Vanishing Point is an eclectic, designy new animation from Bonsajo. Watching it, I was reminded of an old Autechre video called “Gantz Graf” which was ridiculously cool back in 2002.

I don’t think success is showing up, doing what you’re told and then going home and watching television… I think many people in [advertising] aren’t artists, actually, but people working hard to do a job or please a client. Artists do more than that. They inflame critics and they make change and they do things that makes themselves and others uncomfortable.

I have already pre-ordered Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, which will be electronically delivered to my Kindle tomorrow.

Immersive Media has created something akin to Google Street View, but instead of static images, it is full video and sound. It is strangely like being there to watch a two minute movie and choose where you want to look, as you sit atop a white truck and drive through the devastation in Haiti. There are more videos on Immersive Media’s website.

Someone over at Kokokaka.com was feeling creative this year and built a ‘playable’ 17-note piano using the power of YouTube Annotations. [Thanks to @leighh for sharing.]

This reminded me of hubs and spokes. Hubs—the websites and dot coms of the world, the ‘traditional’ destinations of the web— are slowly losing their place to the spokes—the outward strands of conversation and ’supporting’ media, the flickrs and youtubes and twitters and facebooks. Boone Oakley decided to play with Annotations too, but they upped the ante. They gave up their website altogether, and redirect all BooneOakley.com traffic to their ‘choose your own ad venture’ video. It goes to show that each incremental feature upgrade, each new communication technology, can be used to tell stories in new ways.

This should be all you need to say.

Sometimes the best way to create something new is to remove the most important elements. Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout, removes words from articles until only poetry remains.

Or if you are Dan Walsh, you remove the main character from a comic strip and are left with a depressing (and hilarious) look into the collapsing mind of Jon Arbuckle in Garfield Minus Garfield.

The next time you are searching for inspiration, try taking something crucial away from a project and take a good look at what is left. It might just be better without it.

There’s something about photography mixed with hand lettering that elevates both mediums. I love old postcards with ball-point scribbles on the front. I love Polaroids signed with a Sharpie. I love movie titles that don’t use fonts.

On the blog notebook doodles, the letterer is so good that she has a disclaimer in the sidebar: