Gradualism

Interest and yes, inspiration! at the Future of Web Design conference

May 20th 2009

Having caught my attention with the inclusion of an Expression Engine workshop presented by none other than Jamie Pittock of Erskine Design (one of the first UK companies to use EE on high profile client work), I decided to treat myself to a ticket to the 2 day extravangza that is the Future of Web Design conference and workshops.

I am aware that there has been quite a lot of criticism of FOWD this year that it wasn’t forward looking enough, too much retrospection and not enough looking at cutting edge technology of the future. In some way I have to agree as you’ll see something of this sentiment in my comments on the design presentations. However, in the process of writing these notes and reviewing the experience as a whole, I’ve realised just how much inspiration there was to be gained from many of the speakers. And I know I’ve already referred to all the meeting people and socialising there is to be done in an earlier post, but I can’t emphasise enough how important this is to the whole day. So perhaps it shouldn’t be called “Future of Web Design” but I’m not going to argue over the name: I went to see a selection of presentations about web design and related topics and that is what I got, and they weren’t all bad—as you’ll see from this lengthy article—there was plenty to take note of.

Talks at web design conferences seem to fall into one of four categories (though inevitably there is overlap), so I thought this might be a good way to organise my notes. The categories are: creativity, business management, design, technical. There’s probably other ways I could categorise them but for the sake of having some organising structure I’m going to go with these.

Creativity

The official keynote speaker, Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners talked about exercising and harnessing your creativity. He used his company’s website as his slides, which was an interesting idea. (I wondered if he was charging extra for the advertising spot on his homepage for this 30 minute timeslot which I’m guessing had a much bigger audience than usual!) I have to confess I hadn’t heard of Jim Coudal. Hell, I hadn’t heard even of Layer Tennis (though I have artist friends who do pass Photoshop files back and forth as part of their collaborative practice, so it wasn’t such a revelation to me).

In his company they exercise their creativity by playing a game of blending book titles with band names and writing the humourous results on the walls of their office’s bathroom which is painted in blackboard paint. Some contributions from the audience to this game were “The Joy of Sex Pistols” and “The Lionel, the Ritchie and the Wardrobe”. Jim explained how this is a good exercise because you tend to come up with either a book or band and try to match that, so you take one constant and one variable which is like the creative process (… I’m figuring this is like your brief includes a constant (the known) and the variables are what you work through (the unknown) to come up with a creative solution…)

In terms of harnessing your creativity, Jim talked about how basically a lot of designers have ADD (attention deficit disorder) [I’m not sure he actually said ADD but that was the gist of it] and that this is what makes them good because they are always looking towards the next big thing, which often results in creating something new. Not sure this entirely makes sense now I write it here, but there were two designers speaking later (Folkert Gorter and Simon Sankarayya) who certainly demonstrated the ADD tendency, the way they whizzed through huge amounts of their portfolio work so fast it was hard to keep up!

After Jim Coudal’s talk I felt like I still didn’t really understand what all the fuss is about, but I’ve since heard an interview with him on the latest Boagworld podcast and I’m understanding a little more about why he is so highly regarded. As well as explaining what exactly his company does to make money (not a lot of client work), in this interview he describes in more depth how his company runs a business on pure creativity (and no business plan!!). Fascinating stuff.

Danny Somekh wasn’t on the official lineup but added a lot of value to the day with his brief presentation on ‘agile branding and creative development‘. He has been considering how an agile approach (most commonly used in reference to web development processes) could be applied to the creative and design process as well. The inspiration here being that the projects he’s spent the least time on have been the most successful ones. That the longer a project drags on for, the less excited and engaged the team are, the less successful the end result is. I certainly know the feeling all too well of preparing to put a website live that I can no longer bear to look at, and wishing I could have that feeling of excitement back again, if only to motivate me to tell all my friends about it.

He explained this approach as having 4 key points:

• Client engagement
  You need to get the client ‘online’ from the very start of the project [insisting that they deliver some copy before you get started is a good practical application of that point].
• Dream team
  You need to get the best people lined up for the job and limit those participating to this particular team. E.g Use dictaphones for taking notes in meetings instead of project managers/secretaries – I’m not so sure about this point, as I love the idea of having someone write up notes after meetings I have with my clients, cos this takes up way too much of my time, but then again since I can’t afford this anyway, a dictaphone does sound like a good idea!
• Visual exploration
  Don’t tell your client what you are going to do, SHOW them what you are going to do. Demonstrate with visuals what you are thinking and planning as you go along, because pictures speak louder than words (and isn’t that why they hired you—visual designers—in the first place?)
• End user involvement
  Can’t quite remember his point on this one. Probably something to do with user testing at a prototype stage rather than after you’re done and dusted.ser testing at a prototype stage rather than after you’re done and dusted.

Danny’s going to be blogging more about the future of co-creation on his wordpress blog but there’s nothing there yet.

Technical stuff

Meagan Fisher of SimpleBits was up next talking about Mobile Interface design. This was timely for me as I was just working on an iPhone stylesheet for our website last week. She confirmed that I have been taking the right approach and also provided some useful resources.

• consider what elements of the desktop site the user needs on a mobile platform and ditch the rest (echoed in Robin’s talk later about why mobile versions of web pages are useful to visually impaired users)
• don’t use images for navigation or headers
• where you do need to include images make sure they are scaled down in size appropriate to handheld devices
• watch out for inconsistent implementation and use mobify.me to test on – emulates 100s of handheld devices

Her slides were stunning, Meagan must have put a lot of work into them. There were some nice details like the way the images she showed looked like they were photos tucked into an album (in the old fashioned way: a cut in paper which you tuck corner of photo into). You certainly couldn’t forget you were looking at a SimpleBits production. I guess I was slightly disappointed that this talk didn’t teach me much I hadn’t already grasped in the short time I’ve spent dabbling in mobile interface design, but it was so well presented—both in terms of the oral and visual presentation-—that I feel too mean to complain. I think this is where the importance of your presentation style comes in (include some humour, show beautiful slides) but more of that in a later post.

Robin Christopherson of AbilityNet gave an excellent presentation which was inadvertantly an exposé on what it is like to use a computer and browse the web using a screenreader like Jaws, since this is what he uses, a blind user. He showed us some good and bad examples of accessiblity:

• how not to make captchas: an audible version of a captcha that was completely incomprehensible.
• how not to use flash: a site that has a main navigation entirely in flash and comprising of tiny clickable dots laid out in a spiral that would be impossible to click on for someone with motor-neurone impairments.
• bad page content signposting: a site (the New Scientist, actually) which has 150 links and 75 headers (starting at h2!) on one section landing page – imagine trying to wade through all of those, trying to find what you want. (His recommedation here was to use a mobile version of the site if you can find one – I thought he showed us this with the New Scientist but can’t find it now. Typing “m.” in place of the “www.” is a quick way of jumping to a portable version if there is one, and its likely to be much paired down in content (see Meagan’s point from earlier).
• page titles (Robin didn’t make a point of this but I couldn’t help but notice) the aforementioned web page also had the wordy title “Technology news and new technology highlights from New Scientist – New Scientist Tech – New Scientist” and hearing that read out by JAWS everytime he navigated back to the page made you realise how packing your page <title>s full of unnecessary/repetitive keywords is a usability impairment. That title could more appropriately be called simply “Technology news from the New Scientist” (6 words instead of 14!).
• good use of flash: a main navigation where each button was a video of a person, which was activated when you rolled over them and they would tell you the name of the section in sign language.

Mark Boulton gave a wicked talk about typography. He is a great presenter – his easy manner and confidence a clear indicator that he’s done this a few times now! You might be surprised to find me listing Mark’s talk under technical instead of design, but I felt the most important point was about how your choice of fonts effects the usability of your website, and that your choice should be based on suitability to the content you are presenting. The importance of the content’s influence on how we choose a website’s typographical style is one more reason to require copy up front from clients—the more support we have for this argument the better— because typography communicates so much in itself. There was a brief reference to the ongoing Comic Sans debate here – which got fired up again recently when his #indefenseofcomicsans tweets got him a hellavalota passionate responses. His point being, there is a context for everything. Comic sans should be used for primary school newsletters but shouldn’t be used for Police notices about speeding regulations.

Mark also talked about the appropriateness of fonts from a purely technical (=legibility) point of view: Times New Roman was designed with very thin pointy serif bits so that when it was printed on cheap news paper they could bleed a bit and still read well. This doesn’t work on screen because they are finer than can be rendered on a 72dpi screen resolution. Georgia, which was designed specifically for screen, has fat serifs which work well at a small size on screen. There are lots of other fonts designed for screen which we should use whenever possible, like that batch of ones Microsoft released recently that all begin with C.

My favourite quote from Mark Bouton’s talk was about Drupal, which he’s currently working on redesigning:

“Its pretty much broken for designers and we’re trying to fix it”

Ah! So true. (Only I think even with a redesign its still no good for me but I’ll explain more about that another time when I explain why I love EE.) The good news is that he is redesigning the default theme for Drupal, (as well as the user forum/website) which will hopefully mean that future Drupal sites will not all look as shit as most of them do today (Comic Relief 2009’s website being one fine exception). This might sound flippant, but his point was that if we provide people with a limited* set of well chosen tools, like a better default structure, stylesheet or toolbar, then they will be better placed to design things that look good. (*Limited e.g if you are using TinyMCE, don’t give your client all 77 buttons on the toolbar. No kidding! I usually just give bold, italic, lists and a couple specially selected headers).

We ended the day on a high note, with Molly Holzschlag‘s presentation The Future of Web Standards: Is There One? which was both informative and a pleasure to watch as Molly is such a charismatic and knowledgable presenter. This was one of the few presentations that specifically looked towards the future, albeit in the frustrated position we, as web developers, are in: we know where we want to go, but seem to be prevented in getting there due to a variety of barriers like:

• battling against Microsoft’s proposals for Version Targeting with the launch of IE8. Their proposal Molly so eloquently and succinctly quashed with this simple statement “Versioning is antithetical to everything the core Web ideals express: backward compatibility; future growth”
• waiting for implementation/completion/integration of new standards which we have been teased with the knowledge of for so long (CSS3, HTML 5)
• the need for more open standards

Business/Client Management

Brett Welch works for Good Barry and came all the way from Australia to give us his talk (and also pimp his product but that’s O.K. since his presentation was good). He presented his idea of how to make better websites and happier clients, which is to employ an approach that has the quirky aconym of B.U.S.T.A:

• Talk Business
• Understand why they want to go only
• talk Strategy
• set business Targets
• talk Action

One point that he made which really caught my attention was about setting targets – he suggested to concentrate on just 3-5 business goals. He said DON’T talk about traffic (visitor stats) with a client as this is meaningless unless they understand conversions. This is a big point for me in the dealings I’ve had with some clients and one which also came up in Sam Brown’s recent blogpost about SEO which I will write about more at a later date.

Brett summed up by saying that this approach would help you create more effective websites, have less conflict with clients, more repeat business and higher profits. Sounds good to me.

Sabrina Dent also spoke about working with clients in a somewhat controversial presentation called The Stalinist Web Design Model. Her point is essentially that the client is not always right, which completely flies in the face of the “Delivering Happiness” approach which Tony Hsieh of Zappos talked about in his keynote at SXSW this year. She makes some good points though. I think we have to be clear that although customer service is an integral part of what we deliver, our job is to design and develop and since we are experts at this and the client might forget this from time to time, we may indeed have to say “No” to the client. Of course this is difficult because ultimately the client must be happy in order to pay us and thus keep us in business, so she offered some ways around this, like eliminating choice (don’t show them the version of the design you don’t want them to go for), and anticipating their need to get involved by making the logo way smaller than you actually think it should be so that when they ask for the logo to be bigger you can actually say “Yes”.

See above for Danny Somekh’s talk—which you could say also covered this topic of working with clients—but his was more geared towards managing creativity.

Design

Lastly (and yes in some cases, least) I come to talks about design. Well I know that is not fair—the other talks have been about design: how we design for usability or for mobility; or how we manage the design process—but there were a few presentations that were purely about design, in some cases to a fault. Two of the three were like a show-n-tell “here is my company’s portfolio-” type affairs which quite rightly didn’t go down too well. We can all surf through someone’s online portfolio in our lunchtime. What we want when we pay good money to come to an event like this, is to get some detail about the work. We want to know how and when and why? Not just what. Folkert Gorter and Simon Sankarayya have impressive portfolios of work, but I would like to spend some time looking at a couple projects in detail, rather than being rushed through great swathes of work with barely time to understand what the project was for. Still there were a couple interesting projects shown by Folkert that I would like to point to here, as although they may not have been done so recently, they still stand out for being innovative, and so point the the future (I would certainly like to see more of this kind of thing being done):

• website documenting the artist Bas Jan Ader‘s work [which I love anyway!] – has a full screen video image as the fluid background of the page  (it resizes to fit your browser window)
• SpaceCollective is a website that gathers together ideas and information about ‘being human’ with regards to science and space exploration – the ‘blog’ type section provides a glimpse of the latest posts in a non-hierarchical and fluid grid. The posts you can open to read without navigating away from the page (the box expands within the page)

There was one brilliantly prepared and inspiring design presentation by Carsonified’s own Mike Kus. He talked about The Forgotten Web Standard: top quality, innovative design. He really didn’t need to say much – his beautiful slides spoke for themselves and you can watch a fabulous animation of him making them here.

Download mp3s, slides and watch videos of the presentations at FOWD 09 here.

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