Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

As we ramp up for Respond, our Web Design focussed conference, taking place in Sydney and Melbourne next month (we’ve still got some tickets, and really significant savings for freelancers and those who work at Not for Profit organisations) we’ll be giving you a little insight into some of our speakers.

First up, Sara Soueidan has in the last couple of years really made a name for herself focussing particularly, but not exclusively on SVG. At Respond she’ll be talking about the combination of SVG and CSS, and how together these make for incredibly powerful expressive design tools, but we also wanted to learn a little more about what makes Sara tick. Among other things we asked her to describe the first time she gave a presentation on a web topic.

Oh, that was a fantastically scary time!! It was so exciting but also so intimidating that I had a moment on stage where I forgot the particular word that I wanted to say and ended up with a thought in my head that said “What are you doing here?! Just get off the stage and go sit back at the table”. Ha ha. It was the first time I ever spoke in English continuously for more than 30 minutes, so it wasn’t easy and I forgot quite a lot of words on stage, but one of them was the worst, so the idea crossed my mind that I should just walk off.

But then I remembered a tip my friend Bruce Lawson gave me via Twitter right before I got on stage: ‘Just breathe. And keep going.’ So I literally did that: I took a deep breath, rephrased what I was going to say and just kept going. By the time I got to the last section I couldn’t believe it, so I ended up saying ìI can’t believe I got to the last section’ … out loud … to the audience!

After the talk, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like I hadn’t even given a talk. You know how you feel numb after a dentist’s visit and only start feeling the pain after the pain-killer effect goes away? Thatís exactly how I felt. For about an hour, I felt like I hadn’t even been on stage at all. It was the fantastic feedback I got from the super nice attendees after the talk that sort of ‘woke me up’ from my trance, and that’s when I realised I must have done a fairly good job.

I hated watching myself speak and said I’d never speak again after watching the video because I was too embarrassed. But, well, you get over it after a while, and the excitement of being on stage sucked me back in just four months after the first talk, and I’ve kept going ever since.

I know Sara will be amazing, and like many of our sessions, worth the price of admission alone. Come and see her, along with a fantastic array of local and international speakers.