Our top sessions from New Adventures in Web Design

After a few days recovering from the fantastic New Adventures in Web Design in Nottingham, we thought we’d put together a quick wrapup of what we thought were the top sessions of the day…

Luke

Even though it was rather difficult to choose, for me the two top sessions of the day were from Mark Boulton and Brendan Dawes. Mark presented some ideas in his talk on ‘The New Canon’ that were a new way of thinking for me. The three basic concepts of ‘content out, not canvas in’, creating connectedness with your content and binding the content to the device are simple enough, but are also quite powerful in creating the new canon of what is web design.

Brendan’s talk, while definitely being the most entertaining of the day, also seemed to have five solid, inspiring points at it’s basis:

‘It’s good to obsess over the quality of tools we use’
Look outside your comfort zone for inspiration
In everything you do, iterate
‘When you design a door handle, think of the door’ – always consider the wider context
Be naive

However, with such a level playing field of speakers, it is hard to pick favourites. Each speaker provided inspiring and thought provoking talks on design, inspiration and the industry. By the sentiment on Twitter, it looks like New Adventures may become a favourite on the conference calendar.

Spooner

I couldn’t pull out one single speaker as a highlight (although EJS and Brendan Dawes did make me laugh more than the others), what I did enjoy was the theme that ran through the conference. Yes, speakers contradicted each other (you’d worry if they didn’t), but what they were all focusing on, was how creative developers can approach the internet in 2011.

The New Adventures conference was different for me in the way that the community got involved. Created for the love of the internet we had a personalized tweet stream and an interactive restaurant guide. Not only do these function well, but they look lovely. The Feed Your Face app from James Willock helped conference attendees to find decent food (something we know can be difficult in a foreign city) and Anthony Killeen’s tweets from NAConf with an accompanying how-to post on his blog – http://mrqwest.co.uk/blog/129/tweets-from-naconf explaining the approach.

Examples like this prove that Simon Collison (conference host) has a great deal of respect from this community. I’m looking forward to next year’s show.

In the meantime, check out the sketchnotes that @nocturnalmonkey did for Ubelly.