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Refresh Events encourages collaborative partnerships, fosters education at all skill levels and creates networking opportunities within Toronto's digital media industry.

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Archive for September 2009

Lessons Learned from Sci-Fi Writers

Monday, September 28th, 2009 | By: Elaine Chen

In my wayward youth I spent a lot of time with sci-fi and fantasy writers. Like most communities, the sci-fi writing community is very supportive of newcomers. But there is a certain type of newbie for which writers have no patience: those paranoid about having their ideas stolen.

Never mind that ideas are a dime a dozen, and that if you give a hundred people the same idea, each one will execute it differently. The fact is that there is no competition. A reader who buys Writer A’s epic fantasy novel with the dragon on the cover will also buy Writer B’s epic fantasy novel with the dragon on the cover. They don’t have to choose. Fans of a certain genre will happily consume anything that comes their way.

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Category: Opinion | Tagged with , | Comments

Weekly Community Events Guide: Sep 28-Oct 02 2009

Monday, September 28th, 2009 | By: Justin Kozuch

Event details provided by the simply awesome YouSayYeah Calendar and Eventbrite. Don’t see your event listed here? Get in touch with your event details.

So without further ado, here’s what’s happening in Toronto this week:

eCommerceCamp Toronto 2 (#eccTO), Tuesday September 29 from 6:00p to 8:00p. Well.ca and M Marketing would like to invite you to EcommerceCamp Toronto 2. We challenged 5 exciting and influential guest speakers to participate in a discussion to answer the question “What’s really preventing Canadians from pulling the trigger and buying online?” Come join us on September 29th where our round table will tackle the hard hitting question… is Canada a worldwide leader in ecommerce?

Sprouter at the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner (#TGGD), Tuesday September 29 from 6:30p to 10:00p. Toronto Girl Geek Dinners is proud to announce that Sarah Prevette, founder of Sprouter, will be joining us on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 to talk about start-ups, strategy and and her experiences.

FailCamp 3 (#failcamp), Tuesday September 29 from 7:00p to 10:00p. FailCamp is a celebration of failure. It’s about sharing your tales of epic fail and the lessons you learned from them. It’s about learning not to view failure as defeat, but as a learning opportunity and stepping stone to success. It’s about taking away the fear of failure and learning to take a chance, think big and achieve what you thought you couldn’t. We’ll start with some stories of historical failure: some you’ve read in the history books, and some culled from our own personal histories — the wisdom of fail through the ages. Then we’ll turn the microphone on you, inviting you to share your greatest stories of failure, challenging you to entertain the audience and even win prizes if our “Panel of Fail” deems your failure or the lessons derived from it to be the best of the bunch. The more embarassing, hilarious and educational your story, the better! Where else can you win big by losing big?

OpenMusicMedia Toronto (#OMM_TO), Wednesday September 30 from 6:00p to 11:00p. OpenMusicMedia Toronto is a chance to get together on a semi-regular basis for drinks & conversation around the past, present and future intersection of music, media and digital culture. The purpose of the group will be for people with similar interests and passions to meet and discuss in a relaxed and open environment. There are no vested interests, no politics and no agendas. Open to music label folks, journalists, social media types, entrepreneurs, technologists/developers, music geeks, music bloggers and future thinkers.

meshmarketing meet-up, Wednesday September 30th, 6:00p to 10:00p. It’s been awhile since the last mesh meet-up so we’re organizing another one this week to talk about mesh, meshmarketing and all the exciting happening on the Web these days.

The Facebook Platform: Inside and Out, Thursday October 01 from 9:00a to 5:00p. Interested in learning more about how to promote your brand on Facebook? Want to understand how to leverage Facebook as part of a social media strategy? Or are you a developer looking to build the next great application? This day-long workshop, led by some of the most talented and well-known names in the Facebook community, are coming together to show you how Facebook and its components can be used to create engaging experiences on the world’s most popular social networking site.

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StayFresh12 Content Roundup

Thursday, September 24th, 2009 | By: Justin Kozuch

We’d like to thank our amazing speakers Tim Scollick, Ben Vinegar, Joshua Wehner, and Colin Bowern, as well as all our attendees for coming out on a rainy Monday evening. For the second consecutive month, over 50 of attendees were new faces, which makes us very happy. We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming events!

We’ve posted the presentation decks online, including the audio for Colin’s presentation. Unfortunately, GarageBand had crashed during the first half of our gathering, so all the audio for the other presentations was lost.

Episode 6 of the StayFresh podcast will be available shortly. Stay tuned!

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An Interview with Stéphane Curzi

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 | By: Justin Kozuch

Earlier this week, we had a chance to speak with Stéphane Curzi, developer of the recently released Baseline, a CSS framework built around the idea of a real baseline grid for the web.

Refresh Events: Hi Stéphane, thanks for sitting down with us, and congratulations on the launch of Baseline! Tell us a bit more about it.

Stéphane Curzi: Baseline has had a long gestation, almost a year since I first started to think about it. At first all I wanted was a quick way to build a website prototype; a reset and base typography with a simple column was all I needed. I did the first version of Baseline that was called Boxes at the time and did some production work with it. About the same time I got a renewed interested in typography on the web, more people were taking an interest in typography on the web so I thought that I could adapt my framework with some typography goodness. The more I read, the more I realized that I needed to go back to what designers used to work with. Having studied graphic design almost 20 years ago, I needed a little refresh so I re-read about classic grid designer like: Josef Müller-Brokmann, Massimo Vignel and anything I could get my hands on.

Baseline came out of this research, a way to bridge the gap between what I use to do in print work and what I’ve done on the web.

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Category: CSS, Development, Interviews | | Comments

I Pay It Backward Because…

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 | By: Justin Kozuch

On September 30th, how will YOU pay it backward?

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