I’m fighting through the haze of my returned flight from London and am thinking back on all the great stuff I experienced at Future of Web Design this year. So many great speakers. Such a great event. And before I jot down some thoughts, I just want to send a thank you to Carsonifed for having me to speak. It was an honor! Also, it was great meeting the speakers and attendees of the event. I spoke with so many passionate people that love what they do. You get all those people together in a room and it’s great to see the buzz and excitement that comes along with it.
Now there was so much that was talked about, but below are a few topics of interest that were discussed during the conference. If you’re interested in watching all the videos yourself, feel free to purchase a video pass here. Also, I’ll be preparing an article that outlines my talk and provides links that I mentioned, along with the presentation in the coming weeks. So check back soon!
Emotional Design
One of the themes was making more friendly and inviting designs. Several years back it was enough for a website just to work. Now that is expected and we are beginning to see sites bring emotional connection to the table. Great quote from Aarron Walter, User Experience guru from MailChimp, “It’s not enough for your website to be ‘usable’. That’s like saying a meal should be edible.”
Mobile
Sarah Parameter’s talk on Mobile UI design was great. She took a mountain of information needed to know how to begin designing great interfaces for the iPhone and boiled it down to a quick presentation. No small feat, I assure you! She started with the initial communication with the client and took us through the process to final iPhone UI design.
HTML5 and CSS3
Multiple talks on HTML5 from Molly Holzshwag, Denise Jacobs, Bruce Lawson and discussion from many others. More of the HTML5 discussions were hands-on instructional in nature. The goal of which was to allow individuals to leave the conference fully able to begin coding their own sites in HTML5. And more importantly, to make sure those sites degrade nicely in older browsers.
Flash vs. HTML
There were several interesting discussions with Joshua Davis, John Davy and Remy Sharp on Flash and the situation that is arising following Apple’s decisions to cut it from their next generation product offerings. While it is exciting that HTML is beginning to “catch up” to some of the actions that only Flash previously enjoyed, it doesn’t feel like that will kill the motion giant. From my perspective, we will begin to see a more focused use of each. And Flash will remain the technology needed to create an “experience” for big ideas online.
The Future
It’s pretty hard to guess where things might go in the coming years of web design. But it is really exciting to get together with such a smart crowd of people that are truly pushing things forward.
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