Each year, we select a different artist to design the SXSW Interactive Big Bag, the souvenir canvas tote filled with tech-related goodies and promotional materials. We were thrilled when writer-artist Dan Goldman took on the challenge for 2010. A frequent speaker on both digital comic processes and distribution, Goldman is the creator of the Eisner-nominated web-to-print comic Shooting War and a founding member of the celebrated webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE. His recent nonfiction graphic novel 08: A Graphic Diary of the Campaign Trail has been archived in the New York Historical Society's permanent collection. SXSW Interactive advisory board member Noah Kuttler (IBM) recently sat down with Dan for a discussion regarding his recent real-estate horror series Red Light Properties, technology, and the creative process.

What was the inspiration for your mesmerizing bag design?

I thought about what attending SXSW Interactive meant to me, and as much as the programming is enlightening, the films and food and general buzz of it all is fun as hell, the central idea I take away from it is the "meeting of the minds." There's a simple way, given the quality of the attendees, that you're almost guaranteed to have nonstop smart/energetic conversations the entire conference with people you meet on the floor, in the panel audience, avoiding eye contact with at the urinal. So the meeting of the minds idea was core to my design, illustrating that feeling of connectedness and collabotition with a dollop of transhumanism that I'm obsessed with, of us slowly becoming a single thought/organism in the process. From the open-skulls sketch of the three attendees' minds literally meeting, I decided to push things even further into biological-computing/medical-ickiness by including real human brain tissue, which for better or worse gets a reaction from just about everyone.

In today's installment of "The Road to SXSW" Ingrid talks with former Interactive speaker Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic, about why he comes to SXSW every year. HINT: "...it's the place to meet all the geeks in one place." At last year's SXSW Interactive Festival Loic met the founders of Ping.fm. His company later purchased Ping based on that meeting. As he put's it, "it's about doing business without feeling like you're doing business."

Catch the second half of this interview on the SXSW YouTube Channel. And stay tuned right here, everyday until the festival well after the 2010 festival wraps up, for another installment in this video series delving into the experiences of one of the core elements of SXSW Interactive: the speakers.

Over the last few years, the SXSW Interactive Festival has enjoyed some very strong growth. We are seeing the same trend again in 2010 -- which is why we have expanded the programming to four different campuses. These four campuses are the Austin Convention Center, the Downtown Austin Hilton, the Courtyard by Marriott and the Radisson.