Over the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve eluded to the fact that I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel at this year’s SXSWi called The Influ­ence of Art in Design.

Here’s a descrip­tion of the panel (straight from the horse’s mouth):

Fine arts have long held a sub­tle, yet influ­en­tial grip on both infor­ma­tion and design. From car­toons, illus­tra­tions, dig­i­tal art, pho­tog­ra­phy and more, you’ll hear first­hand from some of the best in their fields, have a chance to explore the past, present, and future of the tech­niques that you see around the web, and how it can improve your own work and get both sides of the brain work­ing bet­ter together.

Turn­ing Thoughts into Reality

To backpedal a bit, before I made the com­mit­ment to go to last year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence — my first visit — I made a promise to myself that come the next con­fer­ence I would be on a panel. Cer­tainly it’s fun to actively par­tic­i­pate as an observer, but to present your thoughts to peo­ple, to engage them, to make them think and all said and done, if they can get some­thing out of what you’re say­ing, well, that’s say­ing something.

I kept that thought in the back of my mind, that I would some­how, using some force of nature have the oppor­tu­nity to be up there amongst a group of my peers and share some­thing, even if at the time I hadn’t any idea of what that might be.

Months later dur­ing a late night IM con­ver­sa­tion with Anton Peck he men­tioned the con­cept of the panel to me and it didn’t take much con­vinc­ing on his part, I was hooked..

The Dream Team

Next week I will be shar­ing meat­space with the fol­low­ing creative-minded people:

Come join us on Sat­ur­day, March 10th (11:30 – 12:30pm) and be sure to mark it on your SXSW cal­en­dar.

It’s a win-win; you’ll have a blast, learn a thing or two and I can gen­uinely promise your cre­ativ­ity will kick into overdrive.