Future Of Web Design, London. Reviewed

On Thursday last week me and Nick traveled down to the big smoke to attend the FOWD and I’ve got to say, rotating Aston Martins and slightly dodgy hotel aside it was a really informative and productive day.

The event had completely sold out so when we arrived for registration at around ten to nine there was a huge line waiting to be registered. Not a problem as it moved fairly swiftly and by around 9:15 we had found a seat and only really missed the first 5 minutes of the first session.

In the interests of keeping this review fairly short I thought I would just focus on what were, for me, the stand out sessions of the day. I will say at this point that I enjoyed every session that day and even the plug from Adobe wasn’t too bad (Microsoft please take note).

I really enjoyed hearing from Andy Clarke stuffandnonsense.co.uk and Steve Pearce pokelondon.com and picked up some good pointers but the first session I really engaged with was Andy Budd clearleft.com .

Andy spoke about the user experience curve and how we as people judge an experience like a curve. His point throughout was if you make the experience as easy, fun and engaging for the user over the time period they are immersed in the experience then their impression of your product and brand is something they will use again, and tell their friends.

He spoke of things as simple as using friendly, personal language that the user can emote with. This, he stressed is really important when things go wrong (such as form errors etc…) as it can turn a negative into a positive.

The next session from Elliot Jay Stocks elliotjaystocks.com I had been looking forward to for a good long while as it was actually an approach I had been a fan of for quite some time.

Elliot spoke about what we as web designers can learn from print design.

What really spoke to me from this session was not actually translating ‘look’ of print design to the web but the idea that web design does and should have strong narrative.

He argued that what makes a website outstanding is its use of narrative structure to convey an overall feeling about a site, and thus, a brand. I thought this was clever way to look at web design and user experience and it is defiantly something I will be thinking about more.

Next up was my stand out session of the day from John Hicks hicksdesign.co.uk. I probably learned more layout tips in that half hour than I did in 3 years at uni.

John had made a website for the presentation cheesophile.com and ran us through how it made it.

I really liked the idea of using a default template system to start each project from and his tips on stylesheets and IE6 bugs was invaluable.

The top two tips I picked up were that the main cause of IE bugs is something called ‘hasLayout’ and that it can be simply cured by adding something like div, li {zoom:1;} to the IE stylesheet.

The other top tip was to use a sliding scale for typefaces. By this I mean starting specifically, ie HelveticaNeue Light > HelveticaNeue > Helvetica > Arial > Sans-Serif. I thought this was genius and so simple.

In Conclusion

I found FOWD engaging and enjoyable. The sessions were great and the atmosphere was friendly and eager.

My only negatives were the sales pitches (from Microsoft especially), the price of the beer at the after-show (£5 is too much for a bottle of beer in my book) and the rather ‘Faulty-Towers-esque’ hotel which promised free wifi in all rooms, satellite TV and continental breakfast but actually delivered no wifi, 14 channels of freeview, toast and jam and no shower gel or soap of any kind. (The hotel in question was the Montana in Kensington)