I’m at a hotel in Las Vegas right now, where I’ll be resting and relaxing and hanging out with friends and family for the next four days. I arrived on Saturday afternoon for the CRMA convention, and did my first-ever public speaking the next day.
I’d obsessed over my presentation daily in the months that passed since I agreed to speak, waking up every morning these last two months thinking about what I was going to say. I spent well over 120 hours putting together a multimedia presentation, which included 540 slides in Keynote. I digitized hundreds of CDs and DVDs from my archives so that I could carefully go through everything I’ve worked on over the last 12 years, and put together a presentation where every piece included was part of a larger narrative. It was a very introspective experience, spending so much time with work I’d forgotten I’d even done, and recognizing in a lot of it something that felt connected to work that’s become a fixture in my portfolio.
I’d never even attended a design lecture before, so I watched whatever ones I could find online to help get a sense of what to do and what not to do. My favorite by far is this presentation by Field Notes creator Aaron Draplin, a guy I’ve become friends with since commissioning him for something for Men’s Journal last fall:
I had an hour and fifteen minutes to fill, with some of that time reserved for questions at the end. I was so determined not to rush through it and leave way too much time for the Q&A session that I actually went long, and had time for only one question at the end. But many art directors approached me afterward and asked me one-on-one questions, which was nice. And I heard more than a few people call my presentation “inspirational,” which is the best review I could’ve hoped for.
Once I was done, I went to my room at Caesars and collapsed on the bed, and slept hard for over three hours. I woke up with a voice that was shot, and with my presentation still going through my head. It was still going through my head when I woke up this morning, two days after finishing it. It’s going to take a little while to get back to normal, I think.
