FOWD

On wednesday 18th i went to the future of web design conference there where some really awesome speakers there and was an excellent mix of developer and designer talks. The conference focused on the convergence of the designer and developer and the making of co-herent sites with other forms of marketing ideas, obviously this is majorly important to the development of the future of the web, but lacked actual facts and information on how the internet will progress in the future, for example there was no mention of what impact of the introduction of flash lite to mobile handset will have on the market and the implications of that on designers and developers. In my opinion this is a major part of the progression of the web and how we use it in our everyday lives, more of us are now checking our emails and other forms of information such as RSS feeds through out handsets so it seem nieve to ignore this development at a future of web design conference.

The speaker that stood out for me were Rei Inamoto from AKQA LA, his presentation focused on the development of ideas and the design process, He asked what "What do you class yourselves as... wed designers?... motion graphics specialists.... etc... etc..." (and various people raised their hands). He continued and said that they see themselves as problem solvers, they get a breif from the client and they come up with a solution appropriate to solve it. That could be a site, motion graphics piece, game, advertisment, etc as long as it is the best way to solve the problem. I think from this he was trying to say that we shouldn't just sell someone a site just because the client wants a site, we should asses the problem and come up with an approch that will answer the brief in the most appropriate way (maybe this is more of a consultant approach, but we really shouldn't be trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, i agree totally). He showed various pieces of work like the halo 2 site which was all written in the alien language from the game and was translated by people all over the world and they posted these translations on forums and halo 2 sites, this took away the pain staking problem of translating all of the sites - genius!

Andy clarke spoke real truths, when talking about the design and developments of sites, talking on the process on how a design is put together and the roles of people within an agency enviroment, mentioning methods that we should develop in order to keep the value of ownership in our work. For a designer there is nothing worse than someone coming up to you with a detailed wireframe of a site and giving you it to base your design on, surely thats what you have been employed for, instantly the ownership of the site is lost and the designer has no connection with the piece of work therefore in my opinion dosen't produce a great piece of work.

Steve Pearce from Poke was great, really laid back presentation and totally different to the rest 15 things in 15 minutes, just stuff that he had been thinking of that week GREAT!!

Things I thought were poor at the conference were the Flash and standards presentations maybe i was exspecting a bit to much from this but i thought that it was going to be based around how we can develop flash sites and applications and make them more standards based (like flash tabbing systems) but no... it seemed like that they were just pointing out that this was a flash site and this is an html site and so on for 40 minutes, quite disapointing it was one of the ones i really wanted to hear to! ah well!

Over all the whole day was good and i learn't alot, more on idea generation side of things along with some new programes to take note of such as Apollo, CS3, and the community site that i have never heard of, twitter etc.