adamprocter

longForm writing

New Adventures in Web Design

13 months ago

New Adventures in Web Design was the first industry web conference I had the pleasure of attending & with the star line up consisting of some of the leading designers on the web my expectations were sky high. I have attended a number of education conferences & industry events but not a specific web design one. I have also attended a number of international film festivals.

Meeting Andy Clarke on arrival pretty much made my conference, he has inspired much of what I teach with regards to web design. He was also very gracious when I attempted, (later at after party) to compliment him on his fine talk.

The attendees I managed to chat with ( especially these guys @yannis_ @euklid @Jason_M_Stone @dannycalders @3ur0g33k @timgaunt @natecroft) were great company & many conversations were very thought provoking. The speakers I managed to say hello to were also very approachable, & friendly.

I would like to discuss the conference in general & take a brief look at each talk.

I forget a lot of stuff, I mean a LOT of stuff so I need to take notes. Still there were two talks during which I did struggle to take notes, Andy Clarke and Brendan Dawes were both so entertaining I was too busy enjoying the performance to do any writing. I did some quick scribbling after the talks & look forward to re-watching them online to extract more information.

Bar the impressive list of speakers the conference blurb promised...

"Chock-full of integrity, opinion, & fresh content, with an emphasis on shaking things up & challenging convention."

Initially I felt the talks generally covered basic design principles reapplied to the web & could not see much innovation so by the end of the day I didn’t feel hugely ‘challenged’ or ‘shaken up’. I also assumed much of what was talked about was knowledge that the audience would/should know. (bear with me don’t abandon this review yet) Also playing on the back of my mind was the recent critical nature of comments from some of the web community on academia stirred up again by the article within the New Adventures Conference paper which was written based on a limited personal experience & a limited ‘survey’, not really a true representation of the sector which was disappointing. I would suggest the problems are more in line with the history of web technology & that designing for the web has been left to the computer science departments who know nothing or little of design or art. See footnote.

@niceguyjames in a more recent tweet states

"Glad my article resonated with so many, but more pleased it didn’t with others. There is good education out there, but it needs promotion."

Even if this acknowledgement was in the piece it would have made for a more balanced reading. He also mentions crowd sourcing data to find good design education. Indeed the government will expect Universities to some degree to ensure they demonstrate this themselves, although I expect it will be very marketing driven, so don't expect an accurate picture of the sector. I would however subscribe to thoughts by Don Norman in his article that Universities & Art/Design Schools ensure that…

"Service design, interaction design, and experience design are not about the design of physical objects: they require minimal skills in drawing, knowledge of materials, or manufacturing. In their place, they require knowledge of the social sciences, of story construction, of back-stage operations, and of interaction."

Fortunately I have worked & continue to work with colleagues that are doing this kind of thing & equipping students with the comprehension & creativity to use any tools & outputs within the field of design including a theoretical foundation to build on.

Talking to other attendees & subsequently reading a number of the previous reviews it has since become obvious to me that New Adventures was in fact EXACTLY what the industry needs to move forward. It did indeed addressed key areas that need attention in order for the industry to grow up & earn the respect it deserves.

I misjudged the ‘audience’ as they indeed knew their stuff & it now feels that the conference was to some degree a pep talk to fire up attendees, ready to gee up their less enthusiastic peers & build up confidence in their skills, hooked with great reminders & a bunch of new thoughts/ways to address issues within the industry.

Another thought that I had during the day was that perhaps within the web design industry the clients on the whole are given way too much power & that some designers/developers have allowed them to make design decisions. Designers should be employed for their expertise in design & so allowing a client to tell you to 'up the glossiness' on some button is laughable.

Perhaps due to the fact that many web ‘designers’ may have come from a computer department background or that many are self taught may have a bearing on their design confidence. Of course with a cheap computer anyone can create a website but not everyone can design one.

What also entered my mind was thought on a Bauhaus for web design & I guess it was no surprise I found @collys post Bauhaus Ideology & the Future of Web Design

Read Simon Collison's process toolbox posts as well if you have yet to.

Personally I would have loved to debate the points from the talks within smaller groups.

"This event has inspiration, thinking, and intelligence at its core. It will encourage debate, enthuse, excite, ask questions, and look for real outcomes."

However based on my original misconceptions I probably saved some face ! Great stuff & indeed let’s see some more debates (online/offline) please.

What follows are my thoughts on each of the talks, the format of the talks being 25/30 minutes had its positives.

It's an agreed fact that after 20mins an undergraduate level student will need to engage in some interaction within a lecture delivery otherwise they will tune out.

The negative side is that in such a short time span the speaker has to really consider the material & the depth he/she can go with it. Perhaps differing time slots might have been nice to speed up those with less depth needed & allow time for others.

I am glad to hear the videos will be freely available (online) for anyone as I will most certainly be directing our students to a number of these when thinking about designing for the web.

Morning Session

Dan Rubin talked about language (not the visual but the spoken) and that when talking to clients there was indeed confusion & communication problems as the web borrows terms that have hindered progress, obviously noting the term ‘web page’ to which there was much nodding & in teaching I have always avoided this term again quoting @Malarkey & others by using terms like ‘creating systems’. I felt that although Dan mentioned other industries, Engineering, Medical & Legal as having turning points on establishing there language I would have liked a concrete reference. Language is a massive subject & in 30 mins I would have liked some more honing/focus.

I was keenly interested in his thought on ensuring we detach tech from design and I think this is a crucial point, the animation industry might help with these thoughts as this is a very technical yet supremely artistic industry.

I also held onto the comment that...

"we need to slow down"

I saw this as a chance to step back & evaluate, although we should keep up with tech don’t let it drive!(always good advise). Again perhaps due to the flux of the web, clients are happy to wade in with design change suggestions as they see it as just a quick press of a button & not a designed choice.

I had hoped at the end he would, not tell us what words to use but maybe have announced some wiki style community dictionary or something (don’t know if that would work but…)

@danrubin Any chance you can ban full screen shots on dribbble? I love the focus on detail & any invites going ? :D

Mark Boulton is a great speaker & his background knowledge of design shone through, I felt the 25/30 minute slot really was too short for his talk as he looks set to develop new guidelines for web design, building on the solid foundations of design principles. He talked a little on intelligent design applying some of Professor Andy Clark's theory re: putting things out of your mind into objects to enable humans to function. He also encouraged us to remember the web has no edges (no page).

His focus was on the following 3 points.

• Content out not canvas in
  • Use units you have, adverts etc
  • Find constants to create a grid
• Create connectedness
  • Abandon pixels - use em
  • Books use em
  • Text it’s all text
• Bind content to the device
  • Responsive design
  • Abandon control
  • Embrace reflow

I can see his thoughts are likely to have a major impact on designing for the web. Look out for one of his workshop’s & grab his book ‘A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web’ for some excellent examples of theory hooked into practice. In fact get all the five simple steps books they are awesome !

More recently@markboulton tweeted

"yes, it may have been all ‘high level’ and that, but that theory has real and practical benefit. Hard to get into in 25 minutes."

Sarah Parmenter talked mainly about the psychology of design & her Coke v Pepsi example was spot on. She touched on some rudimentary colour theory and in another example showed how by 7UP adding more yellow to the can colour it made people believe it tasted different. Most of the colour theory was basic stuff that should be a key arsenal in a designers tool kit. Louis Cheskin was mentioned & his books seem to be at crazy prices on amazon so here is a nice podcast.

Sarah mentioned a colours in culture chart & Veerle Pieters later mentioned these sites for helping with colour choice Kuler & Colour Lovers

She also showed a number of pointers from branding & marketing applied to the web and there was also mention of A/B testing. (more can be seen here) I did feel that there was perhaps to many tasters for 25/30 minutes.

Elliot Jay Stocks asked the attendees to think more about the design process.I really did think Elliots talk was rudimentary design stuff presented well but again something I assumed all in attendance would have heard a thousand times. Anyone that has not read Don Norman you should! The key book mentioned "The Design of Everyday Things" is fantastic. It was obvious on a personal design level Elliot has learnt a lot from his excellent 8 faces project & is now applying this to his web work, which will ultimately take what is obviously a natural gift for design to a whole new level & I look forward to his future design work with great anticipation.

Jon Tan talked about emotional design & his talk was focused on a part of our brain called the Lizard brain; a mysterious place of snap judgements & life-saving instincts. Don Norman was referenced in respect to designing for use which would be visited again by Brendan Dawes later on. Jon referenced a number of websites that demonstrated the wow effect & talked a little about that moment of inspiration when designing. I will be revisiting the sites he suggested with the impact/wow factor in mind. Great speaker & calling a font

"slash metal on crack"

was awesome!

• Icons, symbols and pictograms
• commandshift3
• lostworldsfairs Atlantis
• lostworldsfair Moon
• Nike Better world
• Mapalong

Q&A debate one was carried over to after lunch & I felt was very weak, the questions gathered lacked depth & this was a let down. Not that I tweeted any questions but I think for a 600+ event the questions should have been engineered or people selected, perhaps like question time.

Can't recall who mentioned this site but also needs to be seen. Ben the bodyguard (scroll it)

Afternoon session

Tim Van Damme outlined some really good practical ways to work, the good/bad list after each client was a really great tip & one well worth taking up he also suggested if you had 'the balls' get your client to do one, within teaching this evaluation & feedback is actively encouraged & I think would work well in any field. Tims talk was straight stuff & he came across as a great, honest guy that hates flash! He was/is super passionate about design & it was obvious it’s something he loves & he is definitely a web bum! Great stuff.

Greg wood talked about art directing individual blog posts. I thought that this must be an obvious advantage to the viewer but of course there are debates about content being king & the way we wish to consume it, fast & furious or slow & considered? So it was good to see a basic test case that demonstrated that art directing content has a vital role. I have had a few conversations about open data & sometimes I feel that the role of design in presenting this data is often overlooked in the excitement of opening the data. I strongly feel there will be little to no impact if, say the data from your local government is freely available but is almost unreadable due to I’ll fated typographical selection & settings (yes I'm talking leading & kerning) and/or being poorly presented. I am confident that Greg could also gather more data from the history & research in branding & advertising. I for one will attempt to think about context & art direction with my future posts. (although as I have to write the article & then the CSS I certainly need to speed up my writing skills !)

Veerle Pieters gave a wonderful insight into her design process & I am always interested to hear how others work. The take home point I felt here was perhaps, get outside & get inspired, perhaps from the trend for those of us that tend to sit on macs all day. (myself included)

• Pattern tap
• fffound
• dribbble

Andy Clarke presented an excellent look at how the medium of the web could be used to tell 'stories' & lead the viewer on a journey. He used moving image (opening sequence from once upon a time in the west) & comics to demonstrate that timing can make all the difference. As my background is in Animation timing is something that I know is crucial & to apply this & narrative to the web was excellent, to think about interaction not just as a series of clicks but as a movement thorough space & time to enhance & control the user experience was frankly serious & exciting stuff, for me this was a fantastic look at communication design & its function within the web/app space. This was looking at the medium itself. I was disappointed to read/hear people asking for examples, I just don’t really think there are any, yet. There are some using the negative spacing that was mentioned & this can be seen across ‘traditional’ design as negative space is a very important aspect in design, but I personally felt that was a minor point. I was also amused with the a possible commercial application by making users…

"whizz past the price"

Not directly related but I was also recently excited by talk of real timing in css3 & javascript based animation

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art was mentioned in the Q&A & I checked it out from the Library at work immediately (Amazon)

Brendan Dawes talk was fantastically enthusiastic & he has an obvious wealth of experience in design & public speaking, I am a big advocate of the fact that making & doing of stuff teaches you so much & he focused attention on selecting the best tools. I now have host of things to look at & buy.

• KUM Sharpener
• Adventures with my makerbot thing-o-matic
• hack things better

I also dug out the book he mentioned 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Amazon & have been thumbing (not literally as it’s in ebook format). Brendan’s talk was chock full of jokes & information so I know I will need to watch it again !

Q&A debate two was let down by the questions again & not enough time, a more structured approach with an allotted time for each speaker may have been good.

The more I reflected on the talks the more I gained from them, please feel free to comment & if you got this far thanks for reading.

Finally, people, accommodation, venue & socials all excellent, I used my travel time to & from Nottingham to catch up on 5by5 & anyone at this conference that is not checking out the 5by5 shows, they really really should !

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