February 10th was Ignite Boulder 8, a night of five minute, 20 slide presentations held at the Boulder Theater. Ignite is a global phenomenon, and in March there is a Global Ignite Week with a plethora of presentations across the globe (even Kenya, India, China, Brazil, and more exotic places).

I was honored to be picked by voters to present at this past Ignite Boulder, and my topic was “Minimize your hangover and maximize your awesomeness: How to thrive at a beer festival”. I worked my ass off every night for about 3 weeks designing my slides, doing trial runs, revising slides, doing it again and so on. All in all, I practiced my presentation 12 times, and have screencasts of each practice round even.

Click image to see photoset of my presentation, shot by my buddy Kevin.

Anyway, there’s a web stream of Ignite Boulder (and my presentation). There will be an HD version of my presentation that will get posted in the next month or so to youtube.com/igniteboulder, but below is a low-res streamed version of it. You should definitely watch the whole thing. This was an incredibly rad night of presentations. But if you want to see me first, I’m 1 hour, 23 minutes into it. At the very end of my prsentation, listen closely to the dude who heckles me and i subsequently put him back into his place. That same guy actually bought me a $30 shot of Pechuga Mezcal at The Bitter Bar afterwards. Below is the video, and below that are the slides for more in-depth study:

It was so fun that I’m confirmed and doing Ignite Fort Collins on March 4th, and it looks like I’ll be doing Ignite Denver on March 2nd. So I need to get these presentations knocked out. Are you coming to see me?

Nike has a cool “design your own shoe” promotion at their NIKEiD site. You get to pick from a huge number of different shoes, and you get to customize the color palette to make your own shoe (which is then purchasable). You even get create a special message on the back of the shoes.

NIKE’s social media tie-in is that you can easily tweet/facebook/etc your shoe, which in turn brings more consumers from your own social stream to NIKE’s site. I made these bad-ass Denver Broncos shoes – which you should totally buy me (size 11):

This is a cool tie-in. First, measuring the traffic to their site and measuring conversions is a good way to measure effectiveness of the promotion. And it probably results in a lot of high-dollar purchases.

This is a solid promotion with an equally solid social media activation. I even like their Terms of Service if you want to post your design to their publicly searchable database:

So people are trying to refer to Ignite Boulder 8 as Igneight, but I’ll have none of that stuff. I think that perhaps I shall start calling it “The Ocho”, named after a certain movie you might remember. I’m of course referring to Dodgeball.

Anyway, people who wanted to hear me talk at Ignite Boulder “The Ocho” (at the Boulder Theater next Wednesday, February 10) are getting their wish, and I’m giving a 5 minute presentation with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. My talk is entitled “Minimize Your Hangover & Maximize Your Awesomeness: How to Thrive at a Beer Festival” and I’ve more or less finished my slides for it. I would love it if you came to see me talk. Tickets are just $10 – you get to see 14 presentations, and a band, and some of the money is donated to charity.

Well, I’m mostly just hoping I don’t make a total ass out of myself in front of 700 people. But that’s another blog entry for another time.

Being a designer, sometimes it’s tough to not nitpick myself on things like this, and the aforementioned nitpicking adds a lot of extra time to the project. But when you get down to it, I’m presenting for a big crowd, and this presentation will have basically an unlimited shelf life on the internet (in HD, nonetheless!). So I want to be as prepared for this as possible, especially because I’m looking for a new job (being laid off at the end of this month and all). So the hours and hours this has taken hopefully will pay off in the end.