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My Time at The Future of Web DesignFuture of Web Design
The Future of Web Design conference is in its second year and has a solid following. Armed with engaging and influential speakers, the conference seeks to provide guidance and inspiration to the audience (maybe 1000 people?) to which they speak. I attended this conference, held in New York, November 3&4. It was inspirational.
A few key facts before diving in:
FOWD WorkshopsI attended two workshops the first day: “jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks for designers” and “Design Principles for Web App Interfaces.” The second workshop was with Ryan Singer of 37signals. It was a really informal session, but remained engaging and educational. We spent a lot of time discussing developer / designer workflow. Some notes:
Ryan was a big advocate of Rails and used it in his talk quite a bit. Ryan and I talked briefly, and after responding to his question of what I did, he responded, “You said you’re working with something called “Silverlight? What is that, exactly?” Another good quote:
Ryan used the 37Signals product, Bootcamp, as the basis much of his discussion/demonstration Some key points for application design:
The second session was about jQuery, my new personal favorite technology (although I still don’t know much about it.) The talk was a little code-heavy for me and not so geared for “designers” per-se … but that’s getting into the weeds of “what is a web designer? Does s/he write xHTML and CSS or just spend his day in Photoshop.” Don’t get me started. J Karl Swedberg , Fusionary Media was the speaker, and he seemed to know a *lot* about it. Again, would have liked to see any examples of how to actually design with jQuery. Here are some links:
FOWD SessionsThe second day was held at the Roseland Ballroom, in mid-town Manhattan. Ryan Carson of Carsonified, the company that produces FOWD, came out to introduce the conference, himself, and a few of the sponsors, Microsoft being the only one in the "diamond" level. Carson says the goal of the conference was "to inspire," and they really reached their goal with me. On this second day we were to have a series of sessions ranging in length of 10-minutes, to an hour-or-so for the panel discussion held at the end.
There was a plug for the Website Named Desire Poster, and Surface and everybody seemed to really like both. As always, the Surface demos were swarmed; at one point 6 people deep in circles around the one available. No matter where I go, that thing is a total hit. Before I get into the sessions, just a few notes:
So, the sessions …
THE FUTURE OF WEB APP INTERFACE DESIGN
I had attended Ryan’s Workshop the day before, so for me, this was a concentrated version of our previous discussion. Out of that discussion, he said he found two particular subjects that arose often: Developer / Designer Workflow and “Designers don’t explain their decisions.” Need to be able to answer “Why? Why did we make the decision we did? What was the thought process? Why should someone listen to me and my decision?" TEN MINUTES OF DESIGN INSPIRATION
http://www.hillmancurtis.com/index.php?/film/watch/james_victore Curtis showed a short film with the major take-away being “use design like a club with spikes.” The film was well shot and executed and inspirational. Curtis seems like a very interesting character, as well, and feel lucky to finally get to attend a session by him – even if it’s only him showing a little movie of his – as I’ve been a fan of his for years. THE EXPERIENCE LAYER: USING FLASH, JAVASCRIPT, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES TO ENGAGE USERS Dan Mall gave an engaging talk with well-designed, cool slides. Generally, the theme could be distilled to :
Dan used sifr as a good example of progressive enhancement: users without JavaScript or Flash experience a good downlevel experience, but users with the technologies on get a richer-more precise experience.
Books he mentioned:
EDUCATING CLIENTS TO SAY YES To help clients understand what we actually do as designers, it helps to show the methodology we use, and also helps to set expectations on what the client and agency can expect from each other. Speak the language of your client: businesses respond to vocabulary revolving around the business: bottom-line, schedules, goals, etc … marketing departments respond well to talk of “market-segmentation,” for instance. Clients are not stupid. They’re experts in their business field. You are not. Be positive. Say yes to everything, but explain the true costs of decisions. Sometimes you can say “no” by actually saying “yes.” HOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF JQUERY AND OTHER JAVASCRIPT LIBRARIES FOR YOUR DESIGN Karl is definitely a dev, and it kinda showed in his presentation through the presentation of a lot of code. There was a lot of comparison between similar actions using different JavaScript libraries, but not a lot of demonstration of what the libraries can actually do, which was a bit of a bummer. I’m really excited about JavaScript, and jQuery in particular, and was hoping to get some more detail. I had taken Karl’s workshop the day before, and experienced the same mild let-down. For instance, the one example of what you could achieve using jQuery was zebra-striping table rows in different ways. Yes, handy, I’ll admit. Inspirational, I’m not so sure … and it was this example he used in both the workshop and the session the next day. He seemed truly knowledgeable about how to implement some cool things, but I would have really liked to see more of a design-perspective on this issue. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE ART IN DESIGN? Mike busted out the drawing-skills and presented his content with fantastic hand-crafted slides. He also provided a printed “flier” of his slides as a take-away for the attendees. This was an awesome idea.
WEB DESIGN FUNDAMENTALS: LEARNING FROM THE PAST TO BETTER THE FUTURE Showed his site and talked about CSS and semantic websites. Forms and inputs
Huffduffer.com sign up form : if you change your form fields so drastically, users may not understand what to do. Here, it’s simple enough to probably not get lost, but … you can push the limits, if you’re careful I like big buttons, and I cannot lie - Concern yourself with the size of hit-areas Browser Sniffing “the stench of bad habits” - Progressive enhancement is better Achieving pixel-perfection: Do websites really need to look exactly the same in every browser? I mean, really? Do they? The state of typography on the web
Don’t dig yourself into a hole with animated GIFs
Accessibility: Accessibility should be considered throughout the process. The future with CSS3: New tags:
Progressive Enhancement
CHARTING DAILY DATA
Charted his life over many years, and created incredible data-visualizations of the results. His summary: it’s really hard to do and you have to be really patient and detail-oriented to do it. Really, this guy’s stuff is awesome. FINDING INSPIRATION FROM YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Nick gave a very inspirational “How-to” through one of his amazing Illustrations. Sketch : Phonenix
He then did the outlining and color in Adobe Illustrator From there he imports it into Photoshop and brushes it up and adds effects like blur to simulate depth. Really, it’s beautiful stuff. Some points of inspiration:
Where to look?
How to avoid copying?
DESIGNERS AND DEVELOPERS, WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? The last session of the day was a panel discussion featuring: Daniel Burka – Digg and Pownce, Joe Stump – Digg, Liz Danzico – bobulate, Ryan Sims – Virb, Chris Lea – Media Temple
To be frank, the developers here sounded a bit like prima-donnas, not wanting to work on projects they didn’t think were interesting or cool. It seems they were demanding the designers come to them and “sell” the developers on the project. As a designer, I’d love to choose all the projects I’d been assigned over the years, but when it came down to it, I had to work on some crappy projects, as that was what was paying the bills. No one had to convince me to do anything. I just did it. To summarize: awesome, inspirational, and I hope to return. Comments (11)
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