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 In May, I was really fortunate to attend the Future of Web Design conference by Carsonified in London. It was great to see the current state of the industry from Europe, and take a look into the future of web design via my peers. It was also really nice to get some validation from speakers who are successful agency owners, and who have a healthy life-balance to boot. The best part though, was coming home inspired and fired up for web design. I came home with a new bag of tricks to try immediately, and I also gained some new contacts for my LinkedIn network– a few very talented developers who were all eager to help us get our sites up and running. Here are a few of the sessions that really inspired me: “How to Run a Successful Web Design Business” workshop by Paul Boag from Headscape This fun workshop was a full-day affair, with lots of attendee-participation. Boag is hilarious so the day went by pretty fast, and his workshop was packed full of really good advice. He answered a lot of the questions that I had as a designer/CD/partner/owner, and raised other issues that really hadn’t come to mind before. He covered high-level questions such as: How do I grow my business and take it to the next level? How can I think proactively about growing my business? Should I, or when should I hire staff? Should I have an exit strategy? How do I get a better life-work balance? We also discussed some of the minutae of running a design agency– things that will make our lives simpler as owners/designers, help run our projects more smoothly, manage our clients better. So I came out of this workshop with a bunch of practical things to help me run my business (and time) more efficiently on a day-to-day level, and I also learned different ways of thinking more strategically about the business, clients, future clients, partners and staff. But it was also in this workshop that I got validation for our business, since a lot of the things Paul advised we have already incorporated into the way we do business. Thanks Paul! “Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design” by Aaron Walter from MailChip “Humans, though cute and cuddly, are not without their flaws, which makes designing for them a challenge. By understanding how the wet, mushy processor works in these hairy little devils, you can design interfaces and web experiences that will have them hopelessly devoted to your brand.” At the core of this presentation was basically how to make user interfaces not only usable, reliable, functional — but also pleasurable. Something Walter said struck a chord with me: “[Making a user interface just] usable is a bit like a chef saying, ‘I am going to make this meal edible.’” UIs should also be about a great UX (user experience) — like a delicious meal in a restaurant that has also great ambiance and service. Most useful tidbit: “Emotional Design Principle: People will forgive your shortcomings, follow your lead, and sing your praises if you reward them with positive emotion.” I think in a lot of ways this simple statement might be revolutionary for a lot of designers. We see some great functional web applications out there, but they are also really boring or aesthetically un-sexy. I don’t think a lot of designers think to give users a pleasurable experience on their sites or applications. “Web Design Redefined with Webfonts” by Allen Haley from Monotype Imaging I’m a font nerd so I got really excited to learn about emerging web typography developments. “Typography has often been a thorn in the side of Web designers who have traditionally been confined to a limited number of system fonts or forced to embed type within graphics. New technologies promise to bring Web designers the same level of typographic choice and freedom that print designers enjoy.” Haley introduced Fonts.com’s brand new Webfonts service (webfonts.fonts.com) which enables font nerds like me to use typefaces beyond what comes standard in Windows or OSX in web design. This free (!) service now allows us to use cool fonts in HTML and CSS, rather than displaying them as SEO-unfriendly graphics. Fonts.com has over 4000 different typefaces for us to use as webfonts, but if they could only add Bickham Script Pro, Diensdag and Myriad to their collection… Thanks Monotype Imaging and Fonts.com — I really am appreciative of your new service, I just need more options! “How to Get Started with CSS3″ by Dan Cederholm from Simple Bits All the moon-talk and Buzz Aldrin references aside, this was a good primer on how to get some CSS3 into your web designs. Cederholm called this “progressive enhancement” for user interface design and user experience. He posited that web designs do not have to look the same in every browser, and using various CSS3 techniques could progressively enhance the user experience in different browsers. Now CSS3 has a lot of promise for layout and design. However, today CSS3 is only sporadically supported by the major browsers, so we can’t rely on it for our current layouts. The majority of the users for the sites we design use Internet Explorer — the one browser that sorely lacks support for CSS3. There are a few cool properties that Firefox, Opera and Safari support now though: border radius (rounded corners on boxes), text shadows, box shadows, opacity, RGBA (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha — the ability to use color and opacity combined), and multiple backgrounds — all really cool features that we have to currently use graphics for if we want our designs to show up properly in IE. Other CSS3 properties that are out there but still in the WC3 draft stages are transforms, transitions and animations: again, technologies that can make the user experience more interesting and pleasurable, but not widely supported in some of the major browsers. When CSS3 finally does get standardized and supported by IE, web design is going to get a whole lot cooler. “It’s Business Time: Gettin’ Down with the Graceful Degradation of CSS3″ by Denise Jacobs So yeah, I was really interested to see how CSS3 could play a bigger role in how I design web sites. Jacobs’ funky presentation (Marvin Gaye made an appearance– right on, sister!) likened CSS3 to a complicated love affair with issues. Web designers have fallen in love with CSS3, but this relationship is fraught with difficulties at every turn: sporadic browser support, limited WC3 validation, and users using old browsers. Jacobs’ presentation was different than Dan Cederholm’s in that hers was about graceful degradation, as opposed to progressive enhancement: how you can design for the best-case scenario, but still make sure your users are seeing a nice — albeit degraded– version of your artistic vision. “Tools plus techniques” is the key to graceful degradation, and Jacobs gave us eight CSS3 techniques and how to make sure they gracefully degrade: @font-face(usage of downloadable fonts – Thanks Denise for hipping me to Font Squirrel!), text shadows, border radius, box shadows, opacity, RGBA, transform (rotating, skewing), and gradients. “Five New Skills that Every Web Designer Needs to Know” by Paul Boag from Headscape “What does it mean to be a web designer? The chances are its a lot more than design and front end coding. As the web becomes increasingly complex so do client demands. In this talk Paul highlights 5 essential skills you must have in order to meet their needs.” I was intrigued — what are these five skills, and did I already have them? Boag tried to make us guess what they were: HTML5? CSS3? Typography? JQuery? Nope, none of the above. Turns out the five skills Boag was referring to weren’t skills per se, they were mostly bodies of knowledge. Our clients expect us to know everything about the web, so we should be generalists when it comes to web design, rather than specialists in one certain area. And the most important “skills” we should have to be great web design generalists are: marketing (which includes SEO, email marketing and social media), copywriting, contextual awareness (this one I’m not so sure about), strategy (we are supposed to guide our clients on why they have a site, how they measure success for the site, what their calls-to-action are) and psychology (which Boag contends informs and underpins all the other skills, business roles and bodies of knowledge involved in web design). This talk was really interesting for me since we incorporate pretty much all of this into what we do every day as owners of a service-oriented business, and for me as a designer. Moreover, I think the psychology aspect is something that women in particular use in business all the time. I agree with Boag that learning all of these new skills will probably be a huge undertaking for the average web designer/developer, but for those of us with our own businesses trying to find an edge over the competition, these “new skills” are something we’ve had to employ out of sheer necessity. “The Art of Emotional Design: A story of pleasure, joy, and delight” by Aral Balkan “…In the Age of User Experience, making apps that are merely usable is no longer good enough. So how can you go beyond making usable apps to creating exceptional experiences that evoke powerful emotions in users?” Balkan’s talk was one of my favourites and one of the best at the conference. How can you not love a slideshow that begins with kittens? This discussion centered around how user experience is the differentiating factor in commoditized infrastructure — technology devices, web sites, software applications. Since our day-to-day lives are now so intertwined with software and hardware, we’re talking about going beyond interactive design to experience design. Balkan does this with what he calls “delighters” in his apps, and he pointed to other examples where designers employed cool, subtle features that were meant to delight the user during what would be an otherwise flat, functional experience. As designers/developers, we should think about “manufacturing fun” — as opposed to simply developing for usability or functionality. Yes, the basic responsibility of a competent designer/developer is to make sure users don’t experience rage and frustration when using our application or technology. But what can differentiate, elevate and make a designer great is the simple intention to give users a pleasurable or joyful experience through their work. Like Aaron Walter’s talk, I think these might be revolutionary concepts for a lot of (male) designers. Function over form has always been the norm in this male-dominated industry, and overly arty sites were seen as superflous or frustratingly non-functional, and maybe some of them were. I’ve always been amazed that so few designers could strike a balance between style and function, that one had to clearly be sacrificed for the other. I said male designers because I think that perhaps male designers do things differently than female designers, and maybe some male designers needed “permission” (from respected industry guys like Balkan and Walters) to make their apps “pretty”, sexy, joyful, or pleasurable. I don’t think these intentions are at the forefront of male designer minds, whereas perhaps female designers think style first and figure out the mechanics later. I know that’s how I do it. Overall, I loved the show and learned a great deal. I met a few great people, some of whom we are working with today. Thanks Carsonified, for putting on a very inspiring conference. See you next year! Here are some of my photos from my time in London… share this: tags: CSS3, design business, emotional design, FOWD, future of web design conference, HTML5, London, trade show, user experience, user interface, UX, web design, web development 19 Responses to “Recap: Future of Web Design London 2010”Leave a ReplyTheme design by Chix Creative. Powered by WordPress. |
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