Compared to my other conference write-ups, (FOWA, inSites, WDC2011), where I basically just wrote up who spoke and what the talks were about, I’ve decided to do something a little different for my write up of the New Adventure in Web Design Conference 2012 (NaConf).

Why? Well for a few reasons. One, that I felt like doing something a little different as some of the write-ups can be a bit dreary if you weren’t actually there, and secondly, there was one or two talks that I genuinely didn’t think were very good, and I don’t want this post to seem negative, as Simon Collison put on an absolutely fantastic event. I think he was born to be a conference organiser, as everything ran really smoothly and on top of that, I can attest to the fact that he truly is a top notch gentleman who definitely deserves the praise he gets from putting on these events.

So what I’m going to do is write down one highlight from each talk, and hopefully these points should be a pretty good list of design advice, regardless of wether you attended NaConf this year or not.

1. Dan Mall:
   “Your client has to be your partner – they aren’t an extension of your team, they are your team”
   Treat clients as part of your team. Make sure you collaborate with them at each milestone during the projects development.
2. Naomi Atkinson:
   Don’t be afraid to move on and evolve your brand message, in order to get noticed by anyone, an industry or a company.
3. Travis Schmeisser:
   We need to “loosen the fuck up”.
   Remember custom MySpace themes? Despite normally being awful, they encouraged creativity and learning.
   Are we taking our jobs too seriously now? Have we lost the fun and joy of it all?
4. Robbie Manson:
   Don’t be afraid to fail. By experiencing more failures, we learn to make fewer mistakes. Also that accidents can sometimes lead to great results. Who hasn’t accidentally turned off a photoshop layer, or changed a blending mode to discover a really nice result every now and then!
5. Trent Walton:
   Don’t be afraid to break things. We should all try to push stuff forward to discover its limitations, and when we break things, we gain a better understanding of how they work, and are then able to make improvements.
6. Cameron Koczon:
   Design(ers) needs to be elevated in how they are perceived by companies. A design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the responsibility for the outcome of those decisions.
7. Denise Jacobs:
   Allow creativity to come on to you, rather than rushing to find an answer while your brain isn’t yet ready.
8. Frank Chimero:
   “When everything moves – the only solution is to dance.” Design moves, and we can never stop moving with it. It moves the designer when it’s being made, it moves when it is published, and through its proliferation. If it’s good design then it will almost gain a life of its own!

Besides all the great and inspiring talks, I also met and saw so many wonderful people. I am very glad to work within an industry that is so friendly and welcoming, and I am very happy to know and talk to the people I do. I just hope Colly doesn’t need to be bullied into putting it on again next year!

But while just like the pustular, cancerous growth, that was the web 2.0 trend, this is certainly not a good thing, I actually think that the web is in the midst of some sort of natural development. Right now, the focus might well be largely on social networking, but eventually I predict that it will reach a stage where that will just be an underlying layer to everything that is done on the web.

Another positive point worth mentioning is how we’re also starting to see some of these social tools used for larger purposes than just updating the world on what you had for breakfast (Croissants drizzled with honey if you’re interested) – Facebook now has things like the Folding@home plugin, and both Facebook and Twitter have been used as communication platforms in organising revolutions, for example — I think we’ve only just started to touch the tip of a very large iceberg there.

For me one of the most interesting developments to appear in social networking recently is ifttt.com as it lets users create simple tasks that can greatly extend existing social networking sites functionality while also helping to merge the services that the user/s personally use.

Another thing I’d like to point your attention towards is a little Javascript plug-in called socialite-js which handles the activation of sharing buttons for you. All you need to do is write the default element any way you care and then activate it with Socialite, any time you wish!

The benefit of using this script is that you can provide more accessible defaults for each button. So instead of Facebook’s empty <div>, or LinkedIn’s empty <script>, you can have a friendly link to the alternate sharing URLs.

They’re both well worth checking out, if you can drag yourself away from your “Latest News” feed for a micro-second!

I realise that this will be of almost no-interest to any of you, but I’m doing it more for myself than anyone else so you’ll just have to indulge me…or you could just stop reading now!

So, in a nutshell that was my 2011. I wonder what 2012 has in store for me. Whatever it is, if it’s interesting I’m sure I’ll post about it.

Happy new year y’all!

Before 2011 is a distant memory I want to take a little time to look back and see how far the web design industry has come, for me it’s been a hectic year combining working on loads of different things and getting the chance to be part of some new and interesting projects that have helped me to develop more as both a designer and as a coder.

One of the big things that I delved into was HTML5 and I’m still not convinced that it’s the future of markup! Now before anyone starts complaining, I am fully aware that if I don’t have a need for the new elements, no one is forcing me to use them – I can still use HTML4 and I’ll be just fine. However I’m just not convinced that having tags that are so complex in their usage scenarios is a good thing as there is always people that are going to be using them in the wrong context. Maybe I’ll do a full post on this subject soon.

One of the things that I have been convinced by is Responsive (or Adaptive) Web Design. I’d already read a lot about it, but after getting the excellent book by by Ethan Marcotte (http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design), I couldn’t wait to get building my first responsive website!

Leading directly on from that I’m also a convert to the ‘Mobile First’ way of designing and I’d suggest anyone who’s looking into it to read the great book by Luke Wroblewski (http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first).

I’ve finally started using RSS feeds/Google reader to keep track of all the many blogs I like to follow so that I’m alerted when they publish a new post, and I can’t understand why it’s taken me so long to realise the benefits of this!

After working on a big project (Step Success) that required a user registration process and apps that they can use, I now fully appreciate how invaluable ‘user testing’ is! It also made me realise how much we sometimes expect users to know and understand the web, because as we spend so long using a computer we take a lot of things for granted. It has also made me agree very strongly with the following quote!

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Einstein

2011 has been the year that I attended my first web conference which was in Bristol , and with it being such a great experience, I’m happy to say that I have managed to fit in another two (FOWA in London, and the lovely Bristol based WDC2011), and have another one lined up in January!

In a related point, I have met some great people throughout the year and have been amazed at how friendly the majority of web people are! It really is stunning just how amazing, precious, and endearing our web community is And how incredibly lucky I am to be a part of it.

I feel that for this year and the next, (and the next, and the next ect…) it’s going to be an incredibly exciting time to be creating things on the web. The way browsers keep pushing to become more advanced, the way they’re taking web standards more seriously, and loads of brilliant ideas from smart thinking people in general have enabled us to finally begin to web design. We’re no longer forced to think of the web as a digital reproduction of physical pages, but rather to finally embrace it as its own thing.

Remember the web is an ever-changing beast, full of imperfections and limitations, but it is also full of progress and experimentation. And that’s why we love it.

5) Fishin’ for Woos – Bowling for Soup

I thought my connection with Bowling for Soup had come to an end, as I’d not been tempted by their last two albums and was thinking they’d past their prime, but I still love seeing them live so could’t resist going along when they announced they were going to be playing the 02 academy in Bristol. The gig was everything I’d come to expect from BFS, but I was surprised when they played a new song that sounded a little different to their newer stuff, and instead sounded like old school BFS! Encouraged by that I picked up a copy of Fishing’ for Woos and it’s a mixture of Acoustic and Punk Rock music with upbeat, uplifting songs. It gets better every time I listen to it and I consider the song ‘Turbulence’ to be one of their finest to date. It hits the mind, heart and soul with surprisingly calm chords and lyrics that can touch you. Even if you’re not tempted by the album I recommend giving this song a listen as it’s worth a slot in any music library!

This fantastic typographic 'A' is in the inlay cover of the album

4) Hell on Heels – Pistol Annies

Despite being released in April, I didn’t discover this album until near the end of the year but it’s slipped easily into my top 5. Pistol Annies is an American country music supergroup composed of Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley. Whereas many of these high-profile music side projects ultimately amount to little more than artistically torpid, self-indulgent one-offs, Pistol Annies defy that generalisation.

Hell on Heels is proof that good things can come in small packages. There’s eleven songs on the album and not one of them is over three and a half minutes long. Normally I’d point to that being a bad thing, but keeping the tracks short means none of them feel drawn out and never overstay there welcome! Also, I honestly can’t point to any of the songs sounding like filler tracks, which is another reason that I can’t complain about the shortness of the album overall. The album may be having fun with the concept of the three artist’s images, but with great lines like ‘I’ve been thinking about all these pills I’m taking, I wash ‘em down with an ice cold beer and the love I ain’t been making’, it would be a shame if Hell on Heels were the last anyone heard of the Pistol Annies. ‘Lemon Drop’ and ‘Trailer for Rent’ are my standout tracks.

3) For Now – Courage my Love

Most of you will never of heard of this little pop-punk trio, so to provide a little background, Courage My Love are twin sisters Mercedes, (guitar) and Phoenix, (drums) and David, (bass). Considering their relatively small stature, they rock surprisingly hard, but there is a little controversy with my next pick as my favourite song of theirs is not actually on this album as it was recored for a podcast: Tell em’ Steve Dave, but it’s still a top notch example from a fairly small but upcoming band, so I figure they’ll be happy if I recommend more than one of their creations. So what makes this so special, well the song I mentioned is called “I Sell Comics” and it’s all about being a kick ass comic shop employee, combine that with the fact that I’m a huge geek who likes comics, it’s easy to see why I think it rocks. Like I said, they’re not a large act, so give these guys some support, they deserve it, and I’m hoping that soon you’ll be able to say ‘I liked them before they were big’. Standout track from this album is probably the fantastically named ‘Anchors Make Good Shoes (If You Have Issues)’.

2) This Is Country Music – Brad Paisley

For anyone who knows me, it should come as no surprise that Brad Paisley features in this list. How can I not like a guy who actually used a mac’s start up sound in one of his songs! This album starts where his “American Saturday Night” left off, and if you’re hoping for a dramatic change then you’ll be disappointed as Brad sticks to what he knows best on this one. His style is definitely more pop-country so it’s not going to revolutionise the country music genre into something else, but when it’s this good, you really won’t care. The whole album is just nice, relaxing music that is perfect for some easily listening! It’s hard to pick out a favourite track when the overall quality manages to maintain such a high standard, but I’d say ‘Working On A Tan’ will remain one of my great summertime tracks for ages!

If for some reason the cover doesn't make it clear, please note the 'Explicit Content' warning!

1) Balls Out – Steel Panther

Could it ever have been anything else! When I started writing this list I had to have a good look through all the albums I’ve bought over the past 12 months, to decide what deserved to be included, but I already knew what would be filling the top spot! For those that don’t know, Steel Panther are like the 1980′s never ended, and I mean that in a great way! Their music is full of crazy guitar solos, powerful, energising riffs, and choruses so catchy you’ll be humming them in public without realising it, even if you don’t want to be, and for those poor few that have never heard a Steel Panther song, in one word, the lyrics can be best summed up as “offensive”. In four words, the lyrics can be best summed up as “really, really, reallllly offensive”. Yes the humour is juvenile, over-the-top and very rude but the reason that it works is because it’s all very tongue-in-cheek!

What sets Steel Panther apart from a lot of comedy bands, is that they are all technically very gifted musicians and have written some great songs on here. Steel Panther are rare because they clearly understand who they are trying to spoof yet are one of the few parody acts that actually ends up being better than the original influence. Anyone who enjoys b-tchin’ hard rock/metal in general will enjoy this album. Highlight track/s are ‘Tomorrow Night’ and ‘Weenie Ride’.

However the ever increase of online shops has seen me progressively getting better and better at this present buying malarkey, to such an extent that I have now managed to get around 80% of my Christmas shopping done and it’s only the start of December!

Bristol's Christmas Steps

Maybe it’s not surprising that as a self confessed web geek the idea of online shopping appeals to me. It’s much less stressful for one thing, you can sit on the couch in front of the television and be in the comfort of your home rather than trying to squeeze through crowds with all of your purchases. Whacking people with giant bags and constantly apologising gets old very quickly.

What might be more surprising is that I still like doing some of my Christmas shopping offline! Online shopping has downsides, such as if you’re buying something that has important properties other than just visual, how does an item feel, it is made of a quality material? This way you can feel the material and see the colours with your own eyes, which is something the pictures on the internet can’t ever hope to fully replicate! Some pictures don’t do justice for the products either, when they are much nicer in person than in a photograph.

Another reason I like going round traditional shops is for inspiration! I think I’m not alone in saying there are certain people who buying stuff for is a nightmare. I never know what to get them and don’t want to resort to novelty junk, so normally a wander around some of the little independent shops in Bristol such as St. Nicks Market or the quirky ones on Park Street normally provide an endless supply of great present ideas that I would of never even thought of if I’d have purely stuck to online shopping!

Bristol Christmas Market at Corn Street

Am I alone with this split online/offline present buying method? Do you firmly stick to one or the other, or do you mix it up a little bit like me? Do you favour the independent shops or some of the main retailers?

Obviously that last point is normally associated with traditional shops, but there are online stores like etsy.com that provide unique handmade items not found in general stores.

Photo of Christmas Steps by L.A Scowen.

Let me know your preferred shopping methods for handeling the Christmas madness in the comments section below!

Anyway…back to the title – Like and Hate. Despite seeming like total opposites, when put into context of what they’re regarding, aren’t these just two equally useless critiques?

Previously, I would of said yes, but thinking about it I would now say no, they’re not equal. Because “I like it” has a positive element and makes people feel good and people that feel good do better work. Also when a person feels good, they subconsciously spread that good feeling. “I hate it” makes people feel bad and people that feel bad do worse work. They also spread that bad feeling, and that benefits nobody. So while I would still say that they are both fairly poor answers in terms of feedback, I would say the consequences make them very different things!

Also, as a little side note, this is also the reason why Facebook will never have an official ‘Dislike’ button, as Facebook wants users to contribute and for them to have a positive experience. Facebook doesn’t want its users to have a negative experience, and if someone disliked grandma’s photo of the cake she baked, that wouldn’t be too positive an experience, now would it?

Hang-on, I hear you say, wasn’t the last blog post about a web conference….Liam do you actually do any work any more, or just spend all your time socialising at these geeky meet-ups?

A valid question, but inaccurate for two reasons.

1. Sadly I will have to wait until next year before I’m attending my next conference (New Adventures in Web Design if you’re interested).
2. While these events are fun and a nice change from sitting in a studio all day, they are all about learning and that involves attending a lot of talks so the day can’t be spent at a bar…that’s what the after party’s for!

The Odeon was the location for this years event, and while it was slightly weird sitting in a cinema and not seeing a film, it was a perfect choice of venue. The screen was nice and large for the speakers slides and the seats were comfy enough!

Start

The first talk of the day was from a chap called Neil Dennis from a company named Strawberry Soup. He spoke about how the company was founded and some things that he wished he had been told when they first started up. I don’t remember all of the things he said but here are the points that stuck with me:

• For a website they charge 30% up front, 30% on completion of the design and the last 40% on completion of the whole project.
• He empathised the need for a solid contract stating exactly what work will be carried out
• Make sure you have some form of legal backup.

The second presentation was by Rob Hawkes who works for Mozilla. His was probably the most technical talk of the day as it was all about the new and upcoming features of HTML5. I’m not going to go into details about them but I’d suggest looking into all of the following:

• WebSockets
• WebRTC
• Media Capture API
• WebNFC API
• WebSMS API
• WebTelephony API
• WebVibrator API
• Boot to Gecko OS

The third presentation was by some guy who I can’t remember, and I can’t recall much of what he talked about either so I guess it didn’t capture me that much. The one thing I do remember him talking about was on Post Project Analysis, and the points he made were very good:

• Think about how the project went. Could it have been better? How so?
• What about the project made you happy, proud and excited?
• What about the project made you bored, frustrated and mad?
• What have you learned?

Middle

Award for the most barmy talk of the day has to go to Elliot Kember. The man is either a genius or insane – strange how those two qualities always seems to be connected!

• Rubber duck programming (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging).
• Actively seek to do things that are outside of your comfort zone until you get comfortable doing them.
• Accept that doing something new will result in you getting stuck and feeling stupid, but don’t let that deter you.
• You will learn more by doing real work than by simply studying it. E.g. It’s easier to learn french while being in France than it is to learn it at school, then the same is true for coding.

The fifth presentation was more of a project walk-through than anything technical or theory based. It was done by Paul Annett who is currently re-designing the direct government website. Watching him show how the typical user might navigate around the website and highlighting some of the user feedback issues they had encountered was really interesting and if it made me learn anything it was that user-testing is invaluable and you should do as much as you can!

• Old site http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/childbenefit/
• New site http://alpha.gov.uk/do-i-qualify-child-benefit/

End

Although the earlier presentation from Elliot came very close, I think this talk by John O’Nolan was probably my favourite of the day. Maybe I’m slightly biased as I consider myself to be a designer above anything else and his talk was all about designing for emotions and the cognitive psychology behind User Experience Design. There was so many good points made during his talk that it was impossible for me to remember then all, but I’ve listed the ones that I managed to scribble down:

• It’s important to understand your audience and what they care about.
• Think about how users will want to interact with your product. Don’t simply think about what you want people to do with it!
• Aim for your design to make users have an emotional response, as emotions lead to action.
• Make sure that response is not average. No one remembers average. Be great or be terrible, don’t be average.
• Try to stay happy, feeling happy helps you to think outside the box.

He promised that his book (Designing Emotion) would be out soon (for real this time), and for asking a question I should be in line for a free copy, so I’ll be sure to post a review of it in my books section when I have it!

The final presentation of the day was done by Paul Boag. I’d never heard of him before but apparently he has a podcast so look him up if you’re so inclined as his talk was pretty informative about how to be successful in a freelance life and how you need to establish good working habits.

• Stay in control/organised by having one place to keep your stuff. E.g. a to-do list.
• Each day has a beginning and an end. At a certain time call it a night, close your computer and walk away.
• Only check your email a few times a day, otherwise it will constantly be disrupting you, which makes you waste more time
• Work to time slots. He recommended trying 25 minute sprints. You work hard for 25 minutes then take a 5 minute break and repeat. This helps prevent bordom and you don’t tire yourself out.

In conclusion

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the event, as I wasn’t expecting anything too grand, due to it being fairly cheap in comparison to a lot of other conferences. However both the venue and the talks were great as well as being informative and genuinely helpful for anyone working in the web industry, even if you’re not the most technically minded person. I’ll definitely be going next year if it’s on again, and if you’re reading this and hoping to get into web design (or are one of the lucky ones who is already working in this industry), then I recommend that you do as well!

I arrived early as I was half dreading how bad registration for a large event would be. I needn’t of worried however, as the Brewery (the venue for this years FOWA) obviously run a tight ship, and I had gathered my pass within less than two minutes and was making my way into an area where they were serving some much needed coffee and delightful danish pastries!

Now, satisfying as those patisseries were, I had not traveled over to London from Bristol just for them. I was eagerly awaiting the first talk of the day to begin, which was by Christian Heilmann from Mozilla.

His talk was entitled “get excited and build things”, and it turned into the perfect opener for the start of the conference as it was full of passion and spread an obvious message to try and get other developers and designers to start pushing the boundaries of the web. A particular fact that stood out for me was that the Financial Times web app now has more users that it’s native equivalent! Now considering the average reader of the financial times is probably a league away from most designers/devs in terms of technical knowledge, it’s certainly a promising outlook!

Ryan Carson of Carsonified

The most intriguing (and partly amusing) session on the first day of talks was “Browser Wars” – a panel session with speakers from all the major browsers (Microsoft, Opera, Google and Mozilla) who answers pre-tweeted questions from the audience. I mentioned the amusing factor as there was several points when I thought it was going to turn into an actual fight on stage with some notable frustration towards the Internet Explorer representative! It did provide some interesting snippets of information though, one of which was that despite Android being an OS developed by Google, it does not use Chrome to browse the internet!

On the second day a talk that really opened my eyes was about the art of viral marketing by Barbara Macdonald. She explained that if you want to create something that can really feel the benefits of viral marketing then it has to be a core element of the product, and not something that is simply tacked on! Merely adding a tweet or like button to the bottom of your website in the hope that it makes your product go viral is almost completely useless and irrelevant! Instead you need to focus on what is the part of your product that users are likely to want to share (e.g. people will share a video from youTube, not youTube itself).

Thinking about it, most of the websites that I work on have the popular social buttons (normally in the footer) and I’m now realising that they are next to useless as 99% of the time the website is not the element people will want to share!

It’s time for a re-think of a lot of my design elements/methods, and while that is meant to summarise my thoughts from the last talk, it equally applies to almost all of the other talks I attended at FOWA!

Chris Coyiers' talk at FOWA

Finally, and possibly the best part of the two days was the very last talk by Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks. Anyone who reads my design ramblings on this blog will most likely know that I’m a big fan of css-tricks, and Chris’ talk on CSS Pseudo-elements didn’t disappoint.

I also got to have a chat with Chris and a few of the other speakers during the two days which was nice as there is always a few questions that you want to ask that aren’t related to their talks.

Overall I really enjoyed FOWA London and hopefully will get to attend it again in the future!