Austin Kleon

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Show Your Work! Tour Diary #4: San Antonio, LA, Salt Lake City, and Phoenix

I’m on book tour promoting Show Your Work! See all upcoming dates or follow me Twitter or Instagram for daily updates.

Air conditioned! Oliver Jeffers and me

Chip Kidd giving me a look Owen chases a duck

San Antonio: talked to some super-smart booksellers with my friend Julie Wernersbach from BookPeople, had dinner with one of my heroes, Chip Kidd (here’s a Vine of us goofing around), then I had breakfast with another one of my heroes, Oliver Jeffers. (Check out this photo of my son Oliver took with a Texas-sized cinnamon roll.)

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Vampires and human spam: video of my SXSW keynote

Austin Kleon at SXSW

I was too sick then to remember much of it, and too lazy now to write much about it, so I’ll let Omar Gallaga recap:

In his keynote presentation on Friday, local author and artist Austin Kleon tackled the big themes: death, creativity and, most importantly, “Has SXSW gotten too big? Is it over?” (…) In tackling the subject of SXSW’s growth, Kleon suggested making more human connections, sharing instead of self-promoting all the time… he suggested SXSW attendees stop chasing the new, next big thing and think about longevity, the creative work that will stand the test of time.

Here’s the video:

Here are sketchnotes of the talk by Eva-Lotta Lamm:

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Thanks to Shawn O’Keefe and the SXSW gang for giving me the stage.

Photo above by Rodolfo Gonzalez

Keynoting

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Very pleased (and no, not at all terrified, not me!) to announce that I’ll be giving the opening keynote at SXSW Interactive 2014. I’ve been drawing and organizing panels at the conference since 2008, but this is quite the step up, and I’m honored that the SXSW crew asked me.

I gave my last keynote back in June at HOW Design Live in San Francisco. It was a huge room with a couple thousand people — definitely the biggest room I’d done up until that point, and probably the best talk I’ve given, ever. Alas, due to a miscommunication on my part, we didn’t get any video, but some lovely people on Instagram captured bits and pieces, which you can see below.

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Maybe my favorite part of speaking, other than Q&A (yes, I actually love Q&A, because it’s unrehearsed and time I get to think on my feet), is signing books afterwards and getting to talk to people who were in the audience. The line at HOW was at least a hundred people long and it took me 2 hours to get through, but, as should be expected from a design conference, there were some creative moments along the way, such as when Genevieve asked me to sign with a silver Sharpie (why had I never thought of that!?)…

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…and when Allan (maybe frustrated from the line length), did a blackout on the last page of Steal:

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I’m not doing a lot of speaking for the second half of 2013, but I’ll be hitting the road again next spring for the release of Show Your Work! If you’re interesting in having me talk at your event, drop me a line.

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