In April 2008, I went to London for the Future of Web Design conference. It was my first trip outside the United States, and I got there in a way that was very much of that moment on the web.
I had been participating online mostly in small ways, including commenting on other people’s blogs. One of those comments became part of a blogging competition run by Adii, a South African web designer, about the direction for one of his next designs. People argued ideas back and forth in the comments. The prize was a ticket to Future of Web Design in London. As the only person in the thread who wasn’t a web designer, I was shocked to win.
At the time, I was working in communications for the National Park Service, teaching journalism and public relations, producing podcasts and video, and trying to understand what people were calling Web 2.0. I wasn’t trying to become a web designer. I was trying to understand what the web was becoming and what it might mean for the kinds of work I was already doing.
I posted throughout the conference as sessions happened. Read separately, the entries are fragments. Put back together, they show where my attention was going: toward audience, usability, storytelling, professional voice, and the systems underneath the visible technology. I’ve left the original language, jokes, enthusiasm and 2008 terminology intact, adding only enough transition and reflection to show what I can see in them now.
Finding inspiration from design
Patrick McNeil kicked off FOWD this morning with design examples from his aggregation site Design Meltdown. His ideas for “living” inspiration–know your sources, practice, and have your inspiration detector “always on”–were commonsensical kind of things that make a difference. But it was his examples of these traits that were particularly helpful.
For example, “just practice” inspires no one. However, a practice regimen, like the “one design a day” concept really changed my point of view. Structured practice is the key. Even if it’s just-get-it-out-of-the-way crap practice.
His notations about trends in web design were interesting. Brown is a big color now (new WordPress admin, and even the FOWD site itself). Oversize banners, formerly a no-no, are on the rise. I think Matt Mullenweg beat that trend by a few years at least, though he said at WordCamp Dallas he planned to reduce it somewhat. And no more eye burning colors like hot pink. McNeil says colors are starting to get softer as Web 2.0 settles into its groove.
Perhaps the trend I found most interesting, and one that made a lot of sense to me, is the horizontal scrolling site. Monitors are cinema-shaped now, instead of roughly square. And lots of people are using multiple monitors. So it makes sense that a site would have more horizontal space. Karlik Design is a beautiful illustration of the concept.
User experience v. brand experience
Steve Pearce of Poke and Andy Clarke of Stuff and Nonsense had presentations that basically boil down to the fact that you have to remember your audience and make sure your site is not only beautiful, but functional as well. Pearce’s presentation replete with handdrawn cartoons with a torn-paper background was a brilliant demonstration of the user experience iceberg concept. Though I remember being entertained by Andy’s talk, I think his persona overwhelmed the subject matter, because I honestly can’t remember any of the points he made. I do remember that he has the longest e-mail address in the universe. Which is more important, I guess, because at least I can contact him to find out what his points were, if I’m interested.
That concern with the person using the site carried naturally into another question I was already wrestling with in my own work: why were print and web design so often treated as separate worlds?
Print is the New Web
As a public relations practitioner who does a good bit of design for both print and web, this topic intrigued me. Elliot Jay Stocks is one of the social media/web design deities of Carsonified (for the moment anyway) so this session was a must-see for me. He began by stating he came up with the provocative title and then shoehorned a presentation into it. Fair enough; it turned out well nonetheless.
He began by showing examples of print, such as book covers, and described how to find in them inspiration for web design. He then progressed to other print media and used a process of overlays to demonstrate how print design elements can be effectively ported into web design. It’s made me look at the process in a new way. I’ve already started scanning bookstores (since I’m in them all the time anyway) and magazine racks for great design ideas.
I twittered during this session about whether there is a conference out there that addresses a holistic view of print and web, allowing designers to consider both out the outset of a project.
This part of the program made me want a drink too
The Photoshop Face-off: Guys v. Gals
Not every session was an intellectual revelation. The Photoshop face-off was mostly spectacle. The next presentation, though, was the sort of thing I had come hoping to find: someone making the technical process understandable without flattening it.
Holy Cheesophile! A presentation that’s practical
For a while now, I’ve been trying to adopt the Beyond Bullet Points presentation style outlined in Cliff Atkinson’s book of the same name. Some folks call it the Web 2.0 style as well. It focuses on gaining audience buy-in by connecting them to the material through high-impact visuals. It’s essentially linear storytelling. In fact, Atkinson tells the presenter to outline the presentation in “Acts”–just like plays or television shows.
I don’t know if John Hicks of Hicksdesign knows of this concept, but he carried it out wonderfully. He took the audience through the process of redesigning a website–starting with the problems with the original, all the way through the redesign. Humorous and thoughtful, it was enough to keep me awake for the hour after my grease-laden lunch. Considering I had a severe case of jetlag as well, that’s saying something!
The best thing about Hicks’ style is that he talked about the underlying “whys” of the redesign put the super-geeky css talk in context and HELPED A NEWBIE “GET IT.” He could conduct a seminar series or write a university curriculum this way. What a service to help the web designers of the world use both sides of their brains!
I’m buying the Conference in a Box just for this presentation!
Bad, Burka, Bad!
So Louisianian‘s live in trailers and marry their cousins, eh?
Well, maybe we do. But my brother-in-law and I are coming to Pownce your San Francisco @$$ anyway. 😉
The conference wasn’t all practical instruction. Some of it was just the strange, funny culture of a web-design gathering in 2008. Then a presentation would come along that made me stop thinking about the slides and start thinking about the person giving it.
An unconventional way to present a concept
I’ve never consciously thought during a presentation “I want to speak like that person.” But such was the case with Litmus‘ Paul Farnell’s presentation on unconventional ways to promote your site.
What was more unconventional was his “every guy” conversational style of presenting. He didn’t need to be abrasive or over-the-top to engage the audience. Just a straightforward, evenly paced, well-articulated and even humble presentation of a concept. What a concept!
Don’t get me wrong–the content was great as well. Everything from the use of satellite sites to building communities by building a culture of trust was highly relevant and insightful.
I will definitely use the info. But this guy is my presentation hero.
Yet another reason to buy the Conference-in-a-Box: to study what made him so effective. Trading my southern U.S. dialect for his British accent? That’s going to be the hard part. 🙂
By the end of the day, I was paying as much attention to how people communicated as to the things they were presenting. That made the conference chair himself hard to ignore.
Boag takes an already great conference FOrWarD
Chairing a tech conference and maintaining the eccentric air your audience of artsy-techie designers expects would seem to be mutually exclusive goals. Not for Paul Boag, the brilliant designer and podcaster, whose on-stage persona hovers somewhere between Gilbert Gottfried and Steve Coogan in Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible. But hold it all together he did, through tech glitches, speaker overruns and who knows what else.
My favorite Boag moment followed the blatently useless Photoshop face-off. “I thought this might be an exercise where we actually learned something … But NO!!!” I nearly fell out of my chair. Thanks to Paul, Jo Andrews and all the Carsonified folks for a conference that was at least 98 percent useful.
I hoped to shake Ryan Carson’s hand and say hello in person, but he had the best excuse in the world for staying home. The first weeks after my daughter was born were the most special of my life. Sleep eventually comes again, but those early moments with big blue eyes staring up at you at three in the morning are so, so fleeting.
My one <rant> vaguely related to the conference would be all the whining in social media about the product demo’s. FOWD is open to folks besides web design geniuses and I personally did learn a couple of things from the demonstrations. And if the demo’s can keep the conference price down so that folks trying to establish a name for themselves can afford to attend, show some grace and just tune out for the half hour, especially if you’re a presenter!
You can make up the time by opting out of the design challenge next conference.
This is the last post on FOWD. Loved it. Loving London. Thanks to Adii, who gave me the pass to be there.
More posts coming on my adventures wandering the city.
Looking back
Reading these notes together now, what stands out is that I was already looking past the tool itself. The things that held my attention were the user-experience iceberg, the relationship between print and web, the “whys” behind a redesign, and the way a good presenter could make technical ideas understandable.
I didn’t come home from London as a web designer. I kept moving across the boundaries between communications, teaching, digital media, museums and technology. Over time, those same questions became questions about institutional systems: what people actually experience, what sits underneath that experience, how knowledge moves, and how technology becomes part of the way an organization works.
Some of the specifics are pure 2008 now. Pownce disappeared. “Web 2.0” became period language. The larger questions held up better than the platforms did. That is what makes these old conference notes useful to me now: not because they predicted the future, but because they show the direction of travel before I knew where it was going.
Archive Note / Provenance
This consolidated record brings together eight short posts published from the Future of Web Design conference in London on April 17, 2008. The original posts remain in the archive and are not being replaced or rewritten. The text above preserves the original wording and point of view; only the order, headings, and basic formatting have been standardized so the dispatches can be read as one conference record.
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