Future of Web Design – Final Recap

This post will serve as the final recap post for the Future of Web Design in NYC. Below are the quick notes from several of the presenters and here are links to the full speaker recap posts:

• Joshua Davis
• Ryan Sims/Keith Robinson
• Ryan Singer, 37Signals
• Mathew Patterson
• Jeffrey Kalmikoff
• Brian Fling
• Lea Alcantara

Allen’s note: A big thank you to Rachel Clarke for covering FOWD. She rocked!

Some presentations were either very short (primarily sponsor ones) or I came away with only a few key points. Here’s a round up of those.

Sean Seibel of Microsoft as promoting Phizz Pop, a new website for agency professionals. Of interest was the Design Challenge, where they are pulling together agency teams ot compete against each other for a best designer trophy.

Cindy Li talked about the Beautifying the web with Illustration. A run through of sites where illustration is being used to make messages more powerful and to personalise the web. As she pointed out, a photo can be only of one person, an illustration can be anyone, even you.

There was a panel discussion with Andy Clarke talking to Josh Williams and Jeffrey Zeldman. Unfortunately sound issues meant I did not hear all of clearly and much of what I did here was more discussion about histories. Some key points were:

• designers are increasingly becoming their own clients as their frustration grows with having to follow a client line. There’s a growing need to see things through from start to finsih
• most of what a designer learns is not taught but is built up through experience or is self-tought. This should demand respect but rarely does so how can they change that.
• designers should stand up for what they believe is the right thing and not just follow the client line, eg about everything looking the same in all browsers.

Jonathan Snook> gave a quick run through of using AJAX in design. He strongly emphasised the need to consider how you are changing old interactions, ie clicking on a link, which may no longer take you to a new page but change the current page. You have to know what people expect, don’t break too many metaphors and make sure you are obvious with any changes. Most importantly, keep asking people to use it and see how they do – if you have to explain things, it isn’t working.

Jina Bolton took us through some of the new things that will happen with CSS3. CSS2 was released in 1997 so this is a long time coming, in fact CSS2.1 is only now going into Candidate Release. As Jina says, they waited for the browsers to implement before releasing, which is the wrong way round. On this, the thought would be to release the standard and let the browsers catch up. CSS3 is being broken up into modules and different apps can implement different modules.

In 10 minutes Elliot Jay Stocks managed to get most of us laughing as he talked about the web2.0 design look. Characterised by vibrant high contrast colours, special offer badges, gloss/sheen, bevelled edges, gradients, diagonal lines (a bastardised version of go faster stripes),soft focus effects and reflected logos he just wanted to moan that Web2.0 does not mean a design aesthetic so what you are building does not have to have all of these. Following trends is good because it can make money and stereotypes exist for a reason but the best stuff takes the cliches and does something different with them, moving the design along.

Greg Rewis from the sponsor Adobe can up to talk about flash and flash movies, which now has the ability to play h.264 quality video. 92.6% of browsers now have Flash 9 and there are 300 million devices that have the flash players, including the Jaguar XK90. He’s suggesting to his boss that the company get his the car for testingbut so ar they have not gone for it.

David Martin from Fantasy Interactive talked about flashturbation, that malady that digital agencies get wjen all they do is produce in flash with every bell and whistle that can be thrown at it. His company has now seen the light and is using flash more sensibly to build tools and useful sites, eg a lot of work with Time Warner digital and phone systems sites. They are also looking at building out own properties where they have complete control.

Rachel Clarke thinks a lot about digital strategy and blogs at behindthebuzz.com and bibrik.com.