Process and Creation

This year was my fist year at Build. With talks and themes that reminded me of dConstruct in its more abstract theoretical content, it wasn’t easy to capture in bite-sized tweets but gave us a lot to think about.

There were very wide-ranging topics and points that made it tricky to bring together common themes, even on a more abstract level. I think this separates Build from more content-curated conferences, but each talk was more like its own story, making Build this year a conference of stories.

In an attempt to better understand the way we work, there was a lot of talk about the creative process. Kirby Ferguson dispelled the ‘myths of creativity’, these reasons that humans have created to excuse away their lack of ability to continually produce great new ideas.

Using terms such as ‘gifted’ or ‘talented’ suggest creativity is something inherited at birth which make you lucky to have it and otherwise unfortunate.The Romantics popularised the idea that creativity is an expression of the soul and so tied completely to the individual. The myth we’re probably most guilt of perpetuating is that of the idea as a lightbulb, something which is just spontaneously switched on. This doesn’t do justice to the hard work used to arrive at that point, and the knowledge gained in order to understand whether it is the right idea.

Kirby told us the basic elements of creativity based around his ‘remix’ theory: creativity is either copying, transforming or combining. Creativity through copying is when something starts out as derivative, which helps the creator learn from the process of making, but then turns into something new. Creativity through transformation is an improvement upon an existing design. Creativity through combination is when existing components are combined to make something new. Kirby gave technology, in particular the web, as examples of combined creation; it’s often too technologically demanding to build something from the ground up. Kirby posited that if we keep ‘remixing’ in this way, eventually we can make something new.

Robin Sloan talked about creativity and invention and distilled the creative process into four stages: Notion > Theory > Formula > Prototype. Rob Giampetro spoke about creation through ‘unbuilding’, “exploring the other side of building.” Unbuilding can act as a critique of what has come before and Rob has broken it up into four strategies: negation, removal, reversal and incompletion. Negation is subverting the typical method of production. Removal and reversal can both act as statement, where something is defined by where it is not, or by the things it is not; it encourages the viewer to consider what the world is without that object. Incompletion as an unbuilding strategy interested me the most as it is the most significant to the web. Incompleteness is openness and encourages collaboration, rather than just ‘being unfinished

Mandy Brown spoke about editing as a creative process, and mae the point that an editor isn’t just someone who cuts, but someone who also creates new joins, bringing the cuts together to make a coherent whole.

Jeff Veen spoke about the process involved in solving problems in three stages: identifying the problem in as much detail as possible, building a solution and then integrating that solution.

Multiple Discovery

Kirby Ferguson’s ideas about process lead him to point out that creativity isn’t necessarily about originality. Multiple discovery (where the same discovery is made somewhere else at the same time) is common. Innovation can be inevitable when we’re all building with the same materials. All works contain elements of other works and we are not self-made; we draw a lot more from our culture than we acknowledge or admit.

Reinvention and Building Ourselves

Many of the speakers talked about understanding ourselves and our position within the industry and the world. They spoke about learning from this, using it to improve and refine our processes.

Reinvention

Ethan Marcotte spoke about understanding our current position on the web and how we need to reinvent the way we’ve been working. Quoting Paul Robert Lloyd, Ethan said that we need a new aesthetic to match the way the web now works across so many devices, a new definition of beautiful. Our old dependencies on print design don’t work any more, we need to be inspired by other media but not governed by it.

Mobile broke everything because it reminded us that the control we thought we had over the way things looked on the web was never real. We need to learn to let go of the idea of that control, and remember that we’re succeeding as long as the basic promise of *access* is being delivered.

The root of many of the problems we face when designing for a flexible web is the fragility of this delivery. There are so many potential points of failure.

Seams

Ethan’s suggestion of dealing with all these potential points of failure was to communicate them to the users. When we communicate these ‘seams’ in our designs to our users, they become features and not bugs.

Mandy Brown also spoke about seams when editing. Editing and the cut is about finding the natural seams, not violently breaking work apart. Both were talking about embracing seams, not trying to hide them. Our work on the web isn’t permanent, it can be ever-changing and so trying to reach perfection is madness.

Equanimity

Jeff Veen’s talk was centred around equanimity. Equanimity is a state of emotional stability in a difficult situation; seeing and understanding what’s happening around you rather than just reacting. Jeff’s job as the leader of a team is to provide this equanimity and he spoke about his strategies for doing this.

Most notably, Jeff focused on the culture of a team and having principles to encourage productive communication in difficult times; both are formed around trust. The culture of a team is built on shared values and shared accomplishments, strengthened through equanimity. Effective communication is created through having objective techniques for subjective situations; design critiques, ambient accountability communication (with IRC and status boards) and always asking “Why?” over and over again, until you find the root of a problem.

Purpose

Jeff also spoke passionately about the importance of having purpose. I think this was a great underlying theme and something that a lot of us working on the web find incredibly important. Jeff described purpose as discovering what problem you wanted to solve and ensuring the place you are in is the right place to solve it. He pointed out that putting problems into their simplest form gives them longevity. Jeff’s example was Typekit; they might provide web fonts as a service, but their idea in its simplest form is to make typography on the web more beautiful.

Robin Sloan asked why should we bother trying to invent new things? Why try? His answer was that there have been so many life-changing inventions in the past, there must be the potential for many more in the future.

Tiffani Jones Brown approached the idea of purpose and understanding ourselves from a different direction. In order to discover the truth, we need to get away from the ‘bullshit epidemic.’ It’s not that we’re lying, it’s that we’re failing to say what we really mean. Tiffani acknowledged that it’s hard trying to get to the bottom of what we’re really trying to say; to understand ourselves in order to express ourselves.

Jeff Veen had a fantastic proposal for how we should understand and measure our purposes; “measure momentum in days, measure projects in weeks, measure vision in years.”

What do you take away from a conference?

Conferences that are obsessed with “take aways” tend to be filled with buzzwords for employees to take back to impress their bosses, so what do we get out of conferences that are quite the opposite? I think the overwhelming feeling I got from Build was the need to continually re-evaluate what we do, why we do it and how we do it. In an industry that’s always changing, we can’t get stuck in our ways or we’ll just get left behind…

After a weekend of reflection, I’ve decided that dConstruct 2012 had the best talks of any conference I’ve ever attended. The overarching theme was ‘playing with the future’, and so of course many of the themes of the day were focused around either future, play, or a mixture of the two. However, there were many other mini-themes, and these combined are what I’ve tried to explore and understand. I live-tweeted on the day from the ubelly account and you can see all those tweets along with my notes in Storify.

Caring, knowledge, and taking responsibility for that which we love

Ben Hammersley started the day talking about the beauty of what we’ve created on the web. As a community, we’ve worked long enough on the web, and know it well enough that we can see the beauty inherent in it; in its code, and in the standardisation that the community has worked so hard to create. But now we’ve made something good, we should stop being so enamoured with the tools we’re using.

Ben used the analogy of a painter obsessing over paintbrushes and not considering the people looking at their paintings. We need to consider the users. We know that the things we create can have a huge impact on the user, so we have a responsibility to create these things for the right reasons. We need to understand our long-term effects on society. Ben said that the people in power may want us to become solo Zuckerberg-style developer millionaires, but really the best things we make aren’t solo efforts/made in a vacuum, they are communal. It’s the community, and its interconnectedness, which we can use to improve the societal and cultural experience of the web.

Connections

James Burke also spoke about the importance of community and interconnectedness. James said that being able to make systemic connections—an ability based on cross-disciplinary skills and knowledge—is the only way we’ll be able to understand what the future might hold for us.

Future

The past’s role in the future

Lauren Beukes, Scott Jenson, and James Burke all spoke about the importance of looking back to the past to gain perspective and to be able to predict or imagine what might happen in the future. Both Scott and James spoke about how predicting the future just isn’t possible. Scott pointed out that the media always focus on speed, size and cost; how everything will be faster, smaller and cheaper (and that’s just based on exponential increases we’re already experiencing) but are unable to predict anything more significant. James said that the systematic connections we can make through our ‘web’ of knowledge could, in theory, predict the future but this is all dependent on the patterns and values of the past, not of events that haven’t yet happened.

James Burke gave a fantastic end to the day in a talk that covered so much and at such speed that you should probably listen to it for yourself. On predicting the future, James explained that we can’t make any significant predictions because the smallest thing can create very large ripples throughout the world. The example he gave was the invention of the stirrup for loading up camels in Afghanistan. This invention enabled the French to ride horseback against English foot soldiers in the battle of Hastings, giving them a huge advantage, winning the war, and resulting in French becoming a significant part of our present day English language.

The future, past and preservation

Along the same thread, Jason Scott told us that we can’t know what in our past will be relevant in the future. Lauren spoke about how this kind of information is the ‘legacy of the past’. Jason saves so much of his data because of the ‘sideways’ value it could have; high-quality scans and photos literally allow us to learn from the background of the primary focus/data. It also leaves records that other people can use to learn. Jason said that it’s a crime that we take millions of people’s files on the web and get rid of them, just like they couldn’t possibly contain anything of relevance.

Archiving

Jason gave us two sets of action points that we could use to improve preservation and archiving on the web:

As users:

• take photos of people you’re with and places you work
• spend time with people you care about, create memories
• save mementos from events
• take time to tell your stories and save them

Jason said a lovely thing that really should drive you to do the things above, “if you’re proud of what you’ve done, you’ll be proud of it forever.”

As ‘computer people’

• in the systems we create, always provide an export feature for people to retrieve/backup their data
• educate our users in the importance of backing up and archiving their data

The future and the advancement of technology

Both James Burke and Scott Jenson discussed how the advancement of technology would affect us in future, but in very different ways.

The experience model

Scott Jensen focused on user experience. He said that what should happen next is that we should think about technology and *understand* it. Scott believes that the mobile web is the only way that we can deal with a more interactive mobile world. And the interactive mobile world relies upon ‘just in time’ interactions in order to be useful on the move.

The problem we have is that we have mobile apps that so far provide us with a generally fantastic experience but are not tailored towards single use (not many people would download an app for a one-off interaction.) Whereas mobile web is perfect for one-off, speedy micro-interactions but is often let down by a poor user experience, especially through not making full use of the sensors provided in our devices.

Scott spoke about the importance of reducing pain in user experience. The old-fashioned software model allows pain points, as long as the value provided is greater than the pain caused. But as designers/makers we need to be focusing on removing *any* kind of pain, anything that would discourage use. Scott described this as being a shift from a software model to an *experience* model, closing the ‘experience gap’ between native apps and mobile web.

Abundance

The part of James Burke’s talk that everybody was talking about afterwards was his prediction that we can’t turn around our social and economical infrastructure to cope with the inevitable, abundant and rapid advances in technology. Everything in our society and economy is based on value through scarcity, or perceived scarcity, so abundance in technology that could solve so many of the world’s problems would have an impact so enormous that it’s hard to imagine. Lauren Beukes made an interesting point about how we can deal with these predictions when she said that imagined monsters aren’t always cute, but we can always imagine ways to deal with them. If we’re considering problems which might happen with technology in the future, then hopefully we can come up with strategies and solutions to help solve them.

Play

Play was the central theme to three of the talks but in different ways. Seb Lee-Delisle talked about play through sharing, Ariel Waldman through hacking, and Tom Armitage through toys.

Playing and sharing with people

Seb demonstrated a few of his interactive digital art pieces where he uses technology to create an atmosphere and bring people together through audience participation. Where technology usually separates people, he uses it to bring them together. Seb pointed out that we sit together but continually play with our separate devices, cut off from each other. His work uses technology to encourage the opposite, and wouldn’t even work without the participation of a live audience.

Making things for the sake of making things

For Seb a significant part of this playing is that it is just for fun, not to make money or as part of a business. He creates cool things because it’s fun for these things to exist.

Ariel also spoke about how hack days should be fun and pure excitement. They should be about playing, and experimenting for the sake of making things. Ariel explained that chaos and mess are part of the process of exploring the unknown and undefinable, and that hackers should embrace this. People can (and have taken) hacks and find a practical use for them. The position of the hacker isn’t just to find a solution to a problem, it’s about having the different viewpoint to make connections which weren’t previously considered.

The value of making toys

Tom Armitage talked about how making toys, similar to Ariel’s hack day experimentation, is about exploring things you couldn’t always do through work. His toys aren’t about being ‘useful’ but have a value separate from the constraints associated with work. Often toy making is pushing the barriers of what’s possible with technology away from the constraints of utility; a demonstration of skill and craft.

Don’t mistake utility for purpose

Tom emphasised that just because you’re not creating utility when creating a toy, it doesn’t mean it’s purposeless or idle; often the value of a thing found through the making of it. Toys are things designed to be played with, not to worried about breaking.

They are for fiddling with, exploring and learning through abstract concepts.

Seams

A concept that Tom explored was that a toy is “seams all the way down”. A toy isn’t unfinished, or a prototype, but has inviting seams, gaps and edges which encourage interaction, exploration and building upon. This is why successful toys are often those which are incomplete, encouraging you to ‘finish’ them. This is also why toy making can be very hard. In order to design these seams and edges, you have to think like the player, and this is difficult because playing is freedom. Freedom is the opposite of obeying and the opposite of the constraints we give ourselves to help us solve design problems.

Education

My final theme came up in a number of talks, partly in James Burke’s when he was speaking about how we learn to make cross-disciplinary connections in our knowledge but mostly in Jenn Lukas‘s talk.

Jenn spoke about teaching others to code, and how there are so many reasons for people to learn to code, even if it’s just to change the colour of a MySpace background. Despite this, it’s very hard for people to know where to start when they want to learn code. Googling ‘learn to code’ brings up a number of articles telling the reader it’s a bad idea to learn how to code, but Jenn pointed out that this is usually because the person who wants to learn to code can have unrealistic expectations of what they should be able to do after a few short lessons.

Jenn explained that, as somebody teaching code, you must understand that you can never teach everything. A big part of it is teaching a student where to start. You need to teach the basics, the terminology and the ability to identify good resources in order to enable your students to learn for themselves after your lesson.

Jenn also emphasised that teachers must bear in mind that people are often learning code in their spare time, as an extracurricular activity. This means that it’s important for students to gain experience and understanding through real life use cases, i.e., how to apply code to a real problem. This should also make learning more fun and minimise student’s fears that they may be wasting their time which often makes them fear failure even more.

Our positions of power

The main threads of dConstruct that keep coming back to me are that we need to consider our roles in what we do, feel empowered to effect change, and ensure that we’re doing what we do for the right reasons; whether that’s for the good of society or just for fun.

It seems that, in the tech and creative industries, we’re getting to the point where we feel like we know what we’re doing, and what we’re aiming towards, but now we’re trying to consider our position in the world; what can we do to help and make life better for those around us?

Mike Monteiro’s Design Is A Job is such a wonderful book. That sentence is pretty much a warning of things to come: this review is going to be gushing, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you come across a book like this very often.

Design Is A Job covers all the basic areas of working as a designer in client services. Be it working for somebody else, for yourself, or even running a company, there’s advice for everyone in there, and most of it is applicable to all.

Straightforwardly named as they are direct and easy to digest in their structure, the chapters are:

• What Is a Designer?
• Getting Clients
• Choosing the Right Clients
• Charging for Your Work
• Working with Contracts
• Sticking to Your Process
• Presenting Design
• Managing Feedback
• Getting Your Money
• Working with Others

I’d just got through the first two chapters when I realised this was a book I would read very quickly. Written in such an easy-going, informative yet brilliantly funny way, it didn’t feel like I was reading a book about business, I felt like I was drinking the words.

As a freelance designer, I’d say I’m fairly happy with how I run my business. I’m fairly successful, but this book was full of lessons that I needed to learn. Saying this book had loads of tips would be selling it short, it is filled with stories that Mike has learnt for himself. These are anecdotes to help you understand the reasoning behind his advice, not just ‘do this, do that’ rules. Mike continually emphasises how he’s made most, if not all, of the mistakes he describes. It’s not a matter of shame, it’s about learning and honing our practices.

Sometimes I find books that focus on freelancing hard-going. They don’t fit well with my ethos: the focus is too much on making money, often at the expense of the client. Mike Monteiro is not about that. Mike speaks from a principled standpoint. His work is about making a difference and doing yourself justice. This book isn’t about being ruthless or cynical, Mike explains his approach in a way that comes across as wise and practical.

I was going to recommend this book for people just starting out, but actually I think it should be required reading for everyone. It’s specific enough to be valuable but not so specific that it’s unsuitable for non-web designers. Any kind of designer, and possibly even developers, should be able to learn from this book. Or at least get a much-needed kick to keep their attitudes and egos in check.

Whilst I was struggling through some designs which involve fairly complicated data, Anna Debenham recommended I have a look at ‘A Practical Guide to Designing with Data‘ by Brian Suda. I was really impressed with the previous Five Simple Steps books I’d read, Designing for the Web, Hardboiled Web Design and Designing the Invisible, so I bought it in both digital and paperback straight away.

The first thing I’ll say about this book is that it isn’t what I expected. In a time where infographics are being used (and over-used!) all over the place, I had expected the book to cover more of these visualisations. Instead, I found an incredibly solid foundation covering simpler and more straight-forward ways of displaying data through charts.

Parts 1, 2 and 3 were fascinating. Brian covers the reasons we use charts to express data and the visual design of charts with depth. I really loved the focus on simplicity and clarity, although I sometimes struggled to relate to the importance of the amount of pixels, and reducing the amount of pixels, in a chart. (This seems relevant to ink in print, and maybe slightly relevant to pixels on a small screen.)

Brian Suda is clearly a man of logic. Throughout the book he kept reminding me of Tuvok from Voyager. Except where he threatens to hunt down people who use doughnut charts, I can’t really think of a Star Trek character who would do that… Brian continually emphasises that expressing data through charts is about real maths. It’s about making the data as easy to read and understand as possible. Brian was clear that any chart that doesn’t do that either ineffective or misleading, or both. In fact, he’s fairly scathing about infographics and any decorative elements used to describe data, frequently dismissing them as ‘chart junk.’

This did mean that through Parts 4 and 5 of the book, ‘Common types of charts’ and ‘Not so common charts’, the conclusions are mostly that each type of chart is often created for a specific type of data, and if it’s not used for that type of data then it’s useless. This results in Brian frequently saying “you should really use a bar chart for this type of data.” If I’m honest, and whilst I’m sure that Brian is absolutely right, I found this a little bit prescriptive and left me feeling limited when I now design with data.

The last, and surprisingly short, chapter on ‘Everything and the kitchen sink’ covered a few more interesting chart types and I’d have loved to have read more about these. What I’m secretly hoping is, that now Brian’s covered the foundations of designing with data in this book, he’ll release another one with some more exciting and unusual examples to help us get more innovative with data design.

Overall, I’d definitely recommend Designing with Data. I feel as though I’ve learnt a lot from it but I found the first half of the book a lot more inspiring than the second. I’m becoming a firm fan of the Five Simple Steps books, they seem to be making a name for themsevles in thoughtful and interesting books really exploring design theory more than any other publisher.

In its second year Ampersand conference was again a great event, benefiting hugely from having a unique curated theme (typography) when so many other conferences can seem unfocused.

This year the talks were clearly split into a morning of type design theory and an afternoon of more practical and technical talks, mostly centred around web fonts.

Theory

Phil Baines made a brilliant point in his opening talk: a web font doesn’t just make good-looking website. There’s a lot more to it and perhaps that sums up the reason why so many of us were there. Phil also put things into perspective when he pointed out that however seductive a web font is, it’s still only part of the design.

Typography

Phil explained that, regardless of using an appropriate typeface, typography is the “mechanical arrangement of type”. (Mechanical doesn’t really best describe digital arrangement, but Phil said he couldn’t come up with a more appropriate term!)

Phil told us that what it really came down to, the real fundamentals of typography, are type size, leading, and line height. Arranging type with inappropriate type size, leading or line height can make your content beautiful. But misusing these fundamentals can also render your content impossible to read.

Yves Peters went further into discussing typeface readability and how you need to be aware of what and why you’re designing. I loved it when Yves spoke about the fact that typography is a lot about nothing: it is about the space between characters, the space between words and the space between the lines. We read word shapes, not individual letters, and this spacing can help define these shapes. This is why the counters in letterforms are important, and the tracking in lowercase text. Yves recommended not increasing the tracking in lowercase text as word shapes can break up, whereas big type can benefit from tighter tracking. Luke did a more indepth post on Yves’ talk.

Choosing typefaces

José Scaglione and Veronika Burian gave a fantastic overview of typographic principles that can be applied to both web and print. Giving a disclaimer that the topic can be very subjective, they particularly focused on choosing the appropriate typefaces for your projects.

Yves Peters explained that there’re so many typefaces out there it makes choosing very difficult. He told us about Massimo Vignelli who said you can do everything with just five typefaces. Yves pointed out that this is narrow-minded, because who says everyone’s five typefaces have to be the same? Phil Baines talked about the extreme where people have said the only typeface designers care about typefaces. He gave an example of someone who used Helvetica for everything (and pointed out what a sad existence this would be!)

In what was probably the fourth Jon Tan reference of the day, Veronika and José emphasised that people react to typefaces on an emotional level. People could put something down because they think they dislike the text when they actually dislike the typeface. Yves explained how we’re conditioned to recognise the types of faces used across the media. As an example, Yves showed us a wide range of genre-specific film posters which used a surprisingly limited range of typography: there’s such a strong association between these typefaces and film genres that they’re always used together.

The four basic areas of type selection

Functional criteria

The first area that Veronika and José described was the morphology and function of the typeface. These are about considering how the typeface will be used, the type of text they will be applied to, the text’s linguistic and content needs.

Technical criteria

The second type selection area is the technical. This is about considering the application support within that typeface: is it made for screen or print, for small body text or large display headers? Yves Peters explained that the keyboard gives you a very narrow view of what makes up a typeface. There are so many more glyphs than those on the keyboard, which makes a keyboard rather like looking at a typeface through keyhole. This happens to explain why there’s so many free fonts. These fonts rarely have large sets of glyphs, just the basics on the keyboard, but a lot of people never see past that keyboard.

Aesthetic criteria

Next up Veronika and José talked about aesthetics, arguably what we often get overly-caught up with when considering typefaces. Aesthetics are the properties related to the appearance of the letterforms. Yves Peters spoke about the importance of historical and cultural context when choosing typefaces: there are truly historical typefaces but there are also modern interpretations of historical typefaces. When Yves was showing us the film posters he explained the importance of cultural references when choosing typefaces. Typefaces and brands speak to you, they suggest a mood and an atmosphere.

Economic criteria

And last up was the economical considerations. This includes price, licenses, and the efficiency of the typeface itself. By efficiency, Veronika and José explained that there were economical implications coming from the size, and therefore loading time, of the typeface when used on a website, or even the quantity of ink used by that typeface when used in print.

Choosing typeface pairs

Veronika and José spoke extensively on matching typeface pairs. However they did first point out that, where possible, using one family is usually enough. They emphasised the importance of not choosing two typefaces just for the sake of it. One type family usually has more consistency: for example, one family would usually have the same stem thickness across all weights. However they warned that superfamilies are often there to capitalise on the popularity of one original family: just because they share a name, it doesn’t mean all the weights will work well together.

One of the tips that stood out for me was comparing whether each typeface in the pair, or even collection, has an organic or mechanic feel. Pairing organic with organic faces, or mechanic with mechanic faces, tends to work better than mixing the two. Bearing this in mind, two very dramatic display faces will inevitably compete, not complementing one another.

What we need to aim for is typefaces with similar features and proportions. This could be ensuring that the faces have similar sizes and x-heights, and considerations such as the ascenders and descenders not being too different if these different typefaces are being used on one line. It’s also very hard to combine sans-serif faces with other sans-serif faces, or serif faces with other serif faces, because the differences between them just aren’t visible enough.

Veronika and José made a great point that if the typefaces you’re using aren’t similar enough to use alongside one another, maybe try to emphasise their differences. For example, you could emphasise the difference between two typefaces through applying dramatically different colours to each typeface or using the faces at dramatically different sizes.

Practical and technical

Eek, hinting

Lucas de Groot gave an amazing talk about typeface hinting. Before this talk, I was vaguely aware of what hinting was and how it worked. Due to the technical nature of Luc’s talk (it was just over my head!) I came away no more knowledgeable about hinting, but after seeing the sheer amount of detail, hard work and effort that goes into the process, I was astounded. It can take an hour to hint just 20 characters, and yet there could be 4000, or even more, characters in a typeface. I already thought that I appreciated the amount that goes into creating a font but I came away from Luc’s talk with a new respect for those that do so, and even less respect for those that insist on only using free fonts, or even worse, pirate fonts.

Web fonts

Phil Baines made the point that web fonts are coming-of-age, we may be in a good position now compared to a few years ago but the situation is still only adequate. Reflecting on Ampersand conference last year, I realise that we may not have actually come that far in the past year. A lot of the OpenType features that heralded last year are still only in their infancy on the web. However a few of the speakers spoke more realistically about what we can do with OpenType nowadays.

OpenType

Yves Peters joined the theory and the practical sides of typography when he spoke about the impact of OpenType on the typefaces we have to choose from. For a start, OpenType allows a huge amount of glyphs. It allows fancy replacement features such as swashes and small caps, smart quotes versus dumb quotes, various numerals, and extensive positioning features which are good for accents (something us Brits aren’t terribly familiar with, but very useful for other languages!) It’s these little things that can make a font really valuable.

Yves made the point that an OpenType font can be like a toolbox: whilst the font might have support for OpenType, it’s no guarantee that the font will do everything you want, your tool box could be empty if very few of the OpenType features are included.

Elliot Jay Stocks’s talk included tons of information on choosing and using OpenType fonts. He recommended when deciding if you’re going to use OpenType you must first consider the typeface and the font file: are the relevant subsets included? Also it’s very important to consider the user: are the OpenType features be supported in enough browsers? Will the design break if loads of these OpenType features are missing?

Elliot gave examples based on experiments he’d created for his own site, working on pushing web fonts forward by using as many of these typographical technologies as possible. If we’re creating the demand for nice typography, hopefully the tech will rise to the demand. Elliot mentioned the usefulness of tools such as lettering.js and fittext.js but really focused on the value of OpenType through the working draft of the CSS3 Fonts module.

Ligatures

Ligatures can be turned on by using font-variant-ligatures;. This display is still completely dependent on the font having ligatures included, and the downside of this is that ligatures can make a font much weightier, increasing loading times. However it degrades to no ligatures which is perfectly acceptable for older browsers.

Small caps and old-style numerals

Subsets such as small caps and old-style numerals can be triggered using font-variant-caps: small-caps; and font-variant-numeric: old-style-nums; Again these rely on the font having these small caps and old-style numeral subsets included, but again also degrade gracefully.

Swashes

Swashes can be activated using fonts-feature-settings: “swsh” 2; This again depends on the font having swashes included: it may have one, it may have loads, and again it could make the font very weighty. I think at this point we’re starting to see a theme emerging…

Alternate styles

Lastly, alternate styles. These can be handy if the font you’ve chosen has some quirky characters. The alternate styles can be turned on with font-feature-settings as part of a subset, but really that’s quite hacky. What you really want to use is font-variant-alternates to specify a particular subset just for that element.

I’ve really brushed over the CSS in the examples above, but if you’re interested, Elliot has written a fantastic series of posts about these features on his blog.

Typecast

Lastly, Elliot recommended trying Typecast. The typecast team have recently introduced a handy OpenType testing tool. Bearing in mind that your browser must support the OpenType features in order to display them (Typecast tells you if your browser doesn’t) you can preview and test these features, as well as browsing web fonts across different font providers filtered by only those that support OpenType.

The potential in font stacks

As sad as it may sound, Laurence Penney’s talk on hacking the font stack really made me the most excited of all the talks of the day. We’ll know how CSS font-family fallbacks work:

font-family: ‘Fancy Web Font’, Lucida Grande, Arial, sans-serif;

Now we think that this is our fonts in order of preference: when a browser can’t access the first font on the system, it refers to the second. If it can’t recognise the second font, it refers to the third and so on… But Laurence Penney tells us this isn’t necessarily true. It’s not actually the fonts not being recognised by the browser that’s creating the fallback, it’s actually that the character in the text isn’t supported by the font. So when the browser can’t find that character in that font, it then moves on to the next font.

This has some interesting implications. If you take ASCII characters out of a font, the font-family declaration will then use the next font in the declaration for those characters. By using this subsetting method you could introduce numerals, small caps, symbols and much more, all from different fonts. This requires no extra HTML isolating these characters in the text, you’re still separating style and content in your markup, and it requires less attention to detail as the subsets are being applied automatically. Genius!

This does require you to use a font service that allows subsetting. MyFonts, FontFont and Font Squirrel all help you do this with their web font generators.

Web font performance

Jake Archibald gave a hilarious talk about @font-face performance. Looking back at my notebook, Jake covered such a huge amount of technical detail in such a short period of time. My notes are scattered mess. I really recommend to get the full benefit of Jake’s talk you should see his slides on Slideshare.

Relationships

There were a few topics and points that I felt didn’t fit so clearly into the ‘theory’ or ‘practice’ buckets, and one of these was relationships. Phil Baines mentioned relationships in his first talk of the day where he pointed out that this year there will fewer graphic designers than web designers present at the conference, last year was more of a balance. Phil suggested that maybe there isn’t a huge amount of communication between these types of designers and that perhaps if there was better communication us web designers could better understand typography, and learn from the history, and mistakes, that graphic designers have already made.

José Scaglione and Veronika Burian said, from a foundry point of view (as they form the TypeTogether foundry) that there should be more communication between designers and foundries. If you ask a foundry, they may be able to help you find the faces you need. The example Veronika and José gave was if you were looking for a lower contrast version of a type face to use at large sizes.

Bespoke typefaces

Jason Smith gave a short and very interesting talk on designing bespoke broadcast typefaces. This is a unique challenge in a couple of ways: first designing a typeface for television screens, and second convincing a channel to have their own typeface. As Jason put it, once one channel had one they all wanted one.

Designing a typeface for a television channel is all about capturing the personality of their brand. Jason likened it to trying to capture the essence of a character, matching that character to the channel’s demographic. As Jason said, “everything we do is about getting the right spirit, the right character.” When designing the typeface for Channel 4 they had to consider it in relation to the channel’s logo. This typeface was only going to be shown on Channel 4, it’s needed to be clean and legible, but edgy and provocative, following the Channel 4 brand.

What was really impressive was the success of the Channel 4 typeface. The identity of Channel 4 has since changed, but the typeface has been kept and is now the main identity for the brand. It’s distinctive enough to work by itself.

Oh, and Linotype the film

Linotype the film was screened the night before Ampersand conference and during the lunch break. Now I’d heard compared to Helvetica or Objectified but, whilst it was informative, engaging, and involved many different people, I was totally unprepared for the lovely, heartwarming experience that is the Linotype film.

I really recommend you get yourself to a screening, or at least ensure you buy the DVD when it comes out. The film tell the fascinating story of the Linotype typesetting machine, tales of people whose working lives were dominated or changed by the machine and those who still love it today. And all this with a sense of humour and sweetness that makes it completely charming.

A quick conference review

I loved Ampersand conference again this year, if there’s one next year, I’ll try to be there. I know that typography can be a wide field, but I really hope more conferences go down the focused theme and curated talks path. It really made for a lovely event.

Future Of Web Design London is a fantastic yearly conference which I’ve attended for the last four years, and this year I was incredibly lucky to also speak on the Track 2 stage.

As I do with most conferences, I live-tweeted all the sessions that I saw, and I’ve compiled these into a Storify stream for those who want a blow-by-blow account of my conference experience. This post is more of a digest, what I found to be the themes and threads running through the two conference days.

Unfortunately I could only cover the sessions I attended. As there were two tracks I missed some brilliant talks. Those I did make it to were:

• Notes On Design – Brendan Dawes
• Client-centric Web Design – Paul Boag
• Art Direction vs The Web – James Fenton
• Inform To Inspire: Perfecting Your Creative Workflow – Stephanie Troeth
• Web Typography: The Good Bits – Jon Tan
• Creating Wonderful Web App UX – Richard Shepherd
• Dr Weblove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Web – Remy Sharp
• You Are A Channel – The Standardistas
• A Responsive Process – Steve Fisher
• The Future of CMS: A Million F#%ing Dollar Web Project?! – Paul Bellows
• Organising Your Stylesheets – Chris Eppstein
• Failing and Doing It Well – Mark Boulton

In which I get a bit meta

On Day Two of the conference, the Standardistas gave a lovely and inspiring talk, ‘You Are A Channel’, in which they spoke about how we mold our knowledge and ourselves as individuals, where we want to be in life (and in our careers), and how we can use our values and output to get ourselves to where we want to be in a way that is true to our individuality.

When speaking about how we ‘are what we eat’ in terms of the input and output of ideas, inspiration and information, the Standardistas gave the example of being a cow vs being a squirrel. A squirrel will continually collect nuts throughout the year, creating many stores for winter, but when winter comes they will only be able to remember a few locations of the stores and most of those nuts will go to waste. This is like those of us who continually add bookmarks and images to ‘favourites’, collections and ‘Read it later’ services. We may bring all of this information together, but very rarely do we actually go back to these silos and actually get the value from them that we originally intended.

The cow, however, is continually grazing on the small amounts of grass that it needs. As a by-product of this nutrition, the cow is frequently producing milk that makes cheese which is not the same as grass, but is very nutritious to others in a different way. This was a lesson in how we should masticate our information. We shouldn’t take on more than our minds can manage, and we should synthesise the information to increase our understanding and make ourselves into better designers.

And how is this meta?

Well this synthesis is just what I try to achieve through my digest posts. Live tweets are really a way of sharing with others, and a form of quick note-taking. I directly share what I hear and throw these nuts out on Twitter. When I first wrote a digest mindmap after dConstruct in 2010, I was trying to get my head around the ideas that were shared with me.

It reminds me of those reading comprehension tasks you have in English lessons when you’re in primary and early secondary school. You’ll have to read a short story, and then are asked to write about a particular theme or element in that story to prove that you understood it. Now I’m not trying to prove anything, but I do find that the process of trying to connect the dots, link the themes and ideas, helps *me* better understand the ideas of the speakers, and helps me understand how I can use this information to make myself a better designer.

The fact that I blog this stuff? That’s the kick I need to actually get on and digest it. Well, that and I love being able to share what I’m lucky enough to experience with other people.

Craft and Care

One of the overarching themes of Future Of Web Design this year was definitely craft and care. In yourself, with clients or bosses, in your design and development work; as Mark Boulton expressed, having a passion and love for what you do and putting it into your work should be more important than time scales and money. Time limits and worrying about getting paid makes a project much harder to love.

Craft and Care: Yourself

As I mentioned in my meta opening, the Standardistas really focused around the craft and care you put into understanding yourself and your learning. The more you take time to be selective about what information you put into yourself, and the more time you take to assess which of your values are important to project to others, the easier you will achieve your goals and become a better designer.

Brendan Dawes really started off the theme of the value of the individual with an amazing quote he’d heard from Aimee Mullins:

Own what it is that makes you different

The thing we must remember when we’re starting work is you’re bringing *you* to the project. This was a great way to start the conference, empowering the designers, reminding us all that we’re not just an extension of Photoshop or Fireworks, we have value in ourselves.

Brendan also extended the consideration of craft to the world around us, reminding us not to get complacent about everyday things. Not only should we seek inspiration from our surroundings, we should give everyday objects the respect and acknowledgement they deserve, they only became so widely used because they’re such good design.

Craft and Care: in design

Richard Shepherd provided what I think was my absolute favourite thought of the conference:

Great user experience is taking our human desire to please other people and putting it into our apps and sites

Through the theme of craft and care, I see the care in design as being the consideration of user experience. User experience really is something greater than web design; web design is a small part of the experience of a product, but is also the single most important factor in the design of a website.

Both Richard Shepherd and Chris Jones (who won the FOWD Factor five minute talk competition) spoke about using humanity in experience design. Chris’s talk focused around the question “is it human?” and how important it is to consider this when designing or copywriting. Chris talked about something which Brendan Dawes had also mentioned; sometimes we get so immersed in tech, we forget that everything we’re doing is actually for real users.

Craft and Care: in development

Chris Eppstein discussed true craft in CSS development, talking about his experience working on caring.com. Chris pointed out that CSS frameworks aren’t the solution to unmanageable CSS, because CSS isn’t the problem, the developer is the problem.

It was clear that Chris is a true craftsman of CSS as his whole talk was focused around staying true to meaningful, semantic, well-structured HTML, and layering the CSS on top. Being realistic, Chris showed that some HTML needs to acknowledge the structure required by CSS and how he then opts for consistency over flexibility of markup.

As an advocate of SASS and Compass, Chris spoke about how these tools can make CSS stylesheets cleaner, and built upon reusable components, but he really ensured that the audience knew that these were only ways to enhance upon a solid CSS foundation which is well-named, structured, documented and regularly refactored.

The right tool for the job

Much of the talk at FOWD mentioned the tools of our trade. The emphasis however was always on remembering that tools are merely tools, and that our processes are really defined by us, not the apps that we use. In my talk on flexible web design I tried to share my thoughts on how we don’t have the right tools for responsive design, but we don’t necessarily need a killer app, it’s more about us understanding the processes and tools that make us most creative as individuals.

Steve Fisher summed it up better than me in a tweet during the IT/Web Education think tank discussion when he said:

Tools don’t produce great design, people do.

Jon Tan gave an overview of typography on the web, describing how we can learn to best use typography design to give structure and meaning to text. As designers we often think we’re being intuitive in our work, but usually there’s a reasoning behind it based on experience or fact.

Paul Bellows’s talk was a fantastic walkthrough of the problems that CMSs have trying to keep up with the future of web content, and more importantly, the CMS user. Paul pointed out that there are things that CMSs have done for years, but they don’t necessarily correlate with how ordinary people work. If you’ve done it right, a CMS must be sustainable, you get as much (or more) out of it as you put into it and it allows ordinary people with ordinary intelligence solve complex problems. A CMS is *just* a tool.

Both the Standardistas and Steve Fisher spoke about how vital it is to better understand what we do in order to grow as designers and design more effectively. Everyone knows *what* we do, most know *how* we do it, but very few people know *why*.

The definition of web design

It’s an exciting time to be a web designer, and there was a lot of buzz going round the conference about what actually constitutes web design. Steve Fisher said that he believes in as little as a year’s time, responsive web design will just be referred to as ‘web design’ because it will become the norm.

James Fenton also emphasised that graphic design on the web isn’t about adding pretty images. It’s about what we use to make our content easier to use and understand.

In my talk I tried to emphasise the importance of content in web design. Without real content, we are just decorating random text (such as Lorem Ipsum!) not creating anything of any use.

Content is king

Steve Fisher spoke about how a website is a black hole without content in it, and we seemed to forget that for a few years. Well-structured content makes a good website. And the structure is more important when you’re manipulating it responsively, which is why we’re starting to understand how central content is to our work all over again.

Process

The problem with a lot of design conferences past was that they could lose focus on design themes, and fall into predictable talks on web development trends. Luckily FOWD continued a run of recent conferences I’ve attended which ignored these kinds of talks and there was a lot more on interesting design theory, particularly around process.

Especially with the advent of responsive design, we not only need to revise our processes, but also examine what we’ve done in the past in order to formulate new better ways of working.

Ideas and problem-solving

Stephanie Troeth really lead the way on the process discussion talking about how to understand our creative workflow and find the most effective ways to trigger ideas. Stephanie explained how we can get too attached to ideas, and we can feel ownership of our ideas and price them at more than they’re worth. What we really need to do is let our ideas out, ensure they’re not being restricted by our surroundings.

Stephanie spoke a lot about the formulation of ideas as part of the problem-solving process and how framing a problem is the key to understanding it; working out who, what, why, how? Stephanie ended on the ultimate point that the creative process is not an assembly line, we can’t just push out great ideas but we must be heartened that the inspiration is in our hands.

Steve Fisher’s talk covered a huge amount on process. Steve spoke about the importance of research and exploration, explaining how understanding the story is an important part of the discovery stage of a project, it informs our decisions later on. In the strategic direction phase, all the information from the discovery phase is brought together, this helps define the project. The design phase is from sketching to working in-browser and everything in-between, particularly in the case of responsive design where working in-browser is even more significant than before.

Steve had an interesting point in that ‘visual design’ is really just a term used for clients. We know that this stage of the design process is so much more than that, and a culmination of so many stages that went before. Steve pointed out that really the significance of identifying a ‘visual design’ stage is the knowledge it comes later on. Following on from Stephanie Troeth’s talk, it’s understanding that the solution to the problem can only come after we’ve identified the problem itself.

Pattern Libraries and Style Guides

Steve Fisher, James Fenton and I all mentioned using pattern libraries and style guides as part of a solution when trying to express design ideas in a way that can be translated easily into responsive design. Steve explained how style tiles and guides help avoid designing for specific widths. They can help us get an idea for how elements work together.

Feedback and communication

Designer-developer relationships

Remy Sharp’s talk was incredibly popular, broaching many of the issues that developers have when dealing with designers. Remy explained that there’s an huge issue where designers and developers don’t talk to each other and just throw problems over the wall. This often ends in frustration on both sides and a suffering project, and Remy explained how the key to solving it really mostly good communication.

Of course, Remy suggested that learning to write code is the best way to try to understand where a developer is likely to come across problems, but he also gave list of solutions to common developer pain-points that designers should bear in mind when trying to make a developer’s life easier:

• Show hover states in your mockups
• Show where the error message would go if there’s an error
• Show what the logged-in state looks like if there’s a log in box
• Where complicated graphics are concerned consider if they can be made into sprites to accommodate dynamic text
• Use grids! That gives the development some structure and hopefully some reusable components
• Be wary of the fonts you use FLICK isn’t good tightly kerned!
• When using custom fonts, choose a custom font with an open license, so it can be embedded

With clients

Paul Boag gave a brilliant talk advocating client work, and ways to improve relationships with clients through client-centric web design. I was cheering from the front as I *love* working with clients. It’s not right that the ‘cool’ designers do products and the poor designers do client work.

Paul believes that getting our attitudes sorted out when working with clients is a big part of client communication, and it will give us more job satisfaction. At some stage on all client projects, we tend to have times where we feel like clients are ruining our designs but the client must be involved. We provide a service, we don’t just build websites, we provide a whole customer service experience and that should involve good communication with the client!

Controversially, Paul stated that client work was not about the user needs, but the client needs. I could see where he was coming from in terms of paying the bills, but not really in creating a better web! However Paul pointed out that there is generally an overlap between business needs and user needs, and only occasionally will there be a conflict between the two, at which point you must make a sensible decision (where he errs on the side of the client!)

Richard Shepherd gave somewhat conflicting advice when he stated that a good user experience *serves* business goals. It’s vital to success that the users feel a connection with our sites and apps which encourages use.

Paul Boag also discussed how sensitive our egos can be when designing for clients, and if a client has a good idea, don’t reject it because of your ego! James Fenton also briefly touched on democratising design and involving other team members and clients, using their ideas rather than being ruled by aesthetic decisions.

Critique

Mark Boulton spoke about feedback when working on a project. Mark had the idea that you’ll get more truthful feedback if someone doesn’t think you have spent much time on your mockup. And that this is where sketches are beneficial over more polished prototypes.

Leading on from online discussion over the last week or so, Mark also talked about critiques. Mark explained that design critique is not personal and not a dig; it’s a comment on the work, in public, and a conversation. This seemed like a good way to end the conference, a reflection on how we can use all that we’ve learnt to help each other grow as designers too. The benefit of working on the web is that we’re all part of a greater community all striving to make the web as universal and as good an experience as possible.

I’ve been having a look at some cool input technology concepts from Microsoft’s first ever PC Hardware Designs of the Future Project.

Twenty four MA Industrial Design students from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design were briefed to design innovative hardware devices with a focus on user experience, trying to create possible alternatives to the mouse or keyboard, or a more abstract consumer device.

Problems to be solved

The great thing about this competition was that the students had to try to address clear consumer needs, and there was a wide variety of problems considered.

Accessibility is close to my heart, so I really took to the couple of products that focused on helping make experiences better for people who are often limited by the world around them.

Making reading more accessible

Cai Jun Yang designed a beautiful multi-functional device, ‘Drag Fun – Easy Reader’ that could scan text and output it in braille, audio and translated audio. It also looks like the kind of object you’d want to own!

Assisting older generations with computer input

Digital natives and long-time users often forget how difficult the concept of using a mouse can be, particularly for older generations who are unfamiliar with digital hardware in general. Liliana Carvalho designed the ‘Double’ as a dual-input mouse pad, which looks similar in concept to a track pad, but allows another user to assist a struggling user without having to take the input device from them, an interruption which would limit the user’s chance to learn whilst completing a task.

Children spending too much time on devices

‘The Switch’ is a massive button designed by Lucie Barouillet that allows the user to remotely disable the internet connection on all devices on its network with one tap. I like the idea that you could just give a warning with a short press too, rather than a long press for the disabling action, and I imagine that this would appeal to a lot of parents!

Being unable to see a USB stick’s capacity by looking at the physical device

Chun-Ling Wu’s ‘Syringe USB’ is a potential solution to a problem I hadn’t even thought about before. We have indicators on batteries that show how much power they have left because otherwise you must attempt to use them in order to find they won’t work. USB sticks have that same problem, and the syringe element of the USB stick could be a fun visual indicator of available space.

Passive social media users

A lot of users on social networks will consume a lot without sharing. The ‘Social Media Dice’ designed by Rahul Boggaram, allows a user to share their digital content at random, but also based on gestures. This could act as a kind of gamification, encouraging users to share more because sharing is made more fun.

Digitisation of notes

The ‘Digipost’ designed by Yuhan Wan aims to help users digitise their otherwise easily-lost post-it notes through a pad that creates a digital copy of the note as it is being written on a physical piece of paper. I find this a cool idea because it doesn’t aim to completely replace physical items, as so much hardware and many apps do. The Digipost appreciates the throwaway nature of the post-it note but also finds the value in having a backup.

New input devices

A few of the products really took to the idea of a new input device. These are all focused around making life easier for the user, simplifying processes or allowing the user to interact with an object in a more relaxing way.

Freeing up the hands

The ‘Museo’ designed by Tom Maisey is an electric audio-visual interface which allows the user to adjust the sound levels and effects produced when playing their instrument. The idea behind the Museo was to allow the kind of control usually achieved through in-ear monitors and volume control, but using the feet so that the musician could keep playing, hearing their changes to the settings as they are made.

Malleable objects that react to being distorted

Both Martyna Bielecka with the ‘Bendy-Cam’ and Victor Johansson with ‘Keyflex’ (the winning product) explored interacting through twisting, bending and shaping the input device in the users’ hands.

The ‘Bendy-Cam’ particularly appeals to me in the way that the user sees the image on the paper-like screen in front of them, and it is this that they use to input the gestures. Something about it feels very futuristic!

The ‘Keyflex’ is clever in the insight of the designer, Victor Johansson, acknowledging that users will likely want to input a huge amount using the device, but only having a few gestures/ways to manipulate the object. Being able to combine gestures and using gestures in addition to a function button could prove hard on a users’ memory at first, but reminds me of all these new problems that mobile app designers are finding as they introduce new gestures for the first time.

Utilising existing human motion

The ‘Designer Gloves’ by Duo Zhang are an amazing concept that seems to belong in a sci-fi film. These gloves could be used to digitise the movement of the wearer, allowing them to replicate physical actions in a digital space. Two of the examples given, one of street artists recording their work as it is created, and one of sculpturers modelling with air, really made me start to think of loads of cool possibilities that would be brought about by these gloves. Imagine scanning 3D objects with your hands!

Creating immersive experiences

It’s often said that the problem with augmented reality is that it’s just used in too separate a way to actual reality for it to be properly immersive. This is why these last two products interested me in particular.

The ‘Ambient Games Capsule’ ­designed by Alexandra Sidorenko is something I would love to have in my living room whilst I was playing video games. The idea is that this glass ball would project images from the game environment into the real world. Reminiscient of the televisions that are backlit with colours from the TV picture, I could imagine this in people’s houses in the not-so distant future.

To me, possibly the most fascinating product design was ‘The Semaphone’ by Masami Lavault. This concept is a pair of shell-like devices linked via the internet. Each device records the actions of the nearby user and reflects them as a light output to the other device. These ‘light rhythms’ would then show the activity of the other user, aiming to overcome the barriers of physical space for people interacting virtually.

I love the idea of ‘The Semaphone’. The way in which it could give the feeling of the presence of another person, when they could be on the other side of the world, makes me think it could be very reassuring to those trying to maintain relationships over a great distance. It very much appeals to my romantic side, something which I wouldn’t usually associate with future technologies, which makes it all the more inspiring.

New Adventures in Web Design was a fantastic new conference last year. It was small, low-priced, the talks were all new and everybody attending had taken a risk, basing their decision to attend on their trust of the speakers and organiser Simon Collison. It was a huge success which meant that this newbie conference now had to live up to its reputation in its second year.

It was a brilliant event again. There are a lot of web-themed conferences in the UK, some with narrower themes, some associated with particular disciplines and some that cover the industry as a whole. One of the things that makes New Adventures unique is the connectedness of the talks, which are all loosely tied together under a theme, leaving a lovely feeling of a whole exploration of that theme through the many different speakers’ eyes.

Themes of the day

Whilst the theme across New Adventures isn’t explicit, I picked up on a few strong threads running through each talk. All of the speakers looked at our roles as designers, (or design-ish as Dan Mall put it) many touching on process and many discussing the driving force behind our work.

The role of the designer

As the web industry evolves and matures, it gives us a chance to go further than defining our roles as designers. Naomi Atkinson spoke about learning how to promote yourself. Using examples from the land of celebrity, Naomi showed that you’ve got to keep building on your brand language to stay memorable, know your market and how to sell to them, and use your knowledge to help others.

The idea of using your knowledge to do good was a big part of Naomi’s talk and she recommended trying to help the areas that really need our help; local and struggling businesses, education and the NHS. Naomi pointed out that business and doing work for the greater good needn’t be exclusive of each other, you can still make money helping others. Cameron Koczon also spoke about these areas needing help from entrepreneurs and how startups can be created in these areas to solve real problems that have a real impact on the world.

Cameron’s talk focused on designers in the founding roles of startups. He insisted that if you’re not doing something entrepreneurial, then you’re missing out, especially on an opportunity to effect change. Cameron explained that designers need to push to be seen as more important roles in startups, that design suffers from dogma, an association with client services and a general lack of understanding that results in there not even being a designer-founder equivalent to the developer-founder role of CTO.

The driving force

Trent Walton discussed the possibilities of doing good through expanding the web asking what would the web look like if no-one ventured out of bounds? Trent spoke about trying to push the web forward as a driving force behind your work. He compared our creating of websites as being like hobbyists working on cars, it’s our livelihood so we should treat it as such; working hard and not being scared of getting frustrated or breaking things. Many of the speakers discussed how failure is an important part of the design process, how we break so we can learn to make things better, break so we can understand constraints and break so we can ultimately learn from that failure.

The design process

Robbie Manson pointed out that this failure does not mean making mistakes. As long as we understand why our failures happened, we can learn one more way that doesn’t work and therefore be one step closer to success.

Dan Mall was an inspiring start to the day with a talk all about design process that featured fantastic case studies which really helped us understand the process behind his work. There was a time when showing work from your portfolio at a conference was boastful but Dan explained some of his work for Star Wars, Crayola and his personal site redesign in a way that covered genuinely useful advice about client work.

Hearing about client work was refreshing in an industry that is often dominated by talks from startups and side-projects. He spoke about the importance of empathising with clients and treating them as a partner in a project. Dan recommended that one of the best ways of doing this was to become a client yourself, run a project and hire other people to do all the work, as being a client is the only real way to understand how a client feels.

It was comforting to hear Robbie Manson talk about how it’s often rubbish when people talk about ‘process.’ He pointed out that, as creatives, we don’t have linear repeatable predictable processes. That’s not creativity. Creativity is logical but messy. Robbie explained that this is why it’s not so easy to design in the browser using CSS, as CSS relies on intent. By using rougher tools, and maybe those that aren’t designed specifically for the job, like Photoshop, we can experiment quickly and experience happy accidents which are the most endearing elements of software. Robbie told us that we rely on our tools to help us get our ideas down, we shouldn’t become preoccupied with our tools to compensate for our lack of creative thinking. The key phrase I took away from Robbie’s talk was “the more invisible the tools, the more creative the thinking.”

Creative thinking

By far the most memorable talk of the day was Denise Jacobs on the brain and creativity. A mad break from the format of other talks, Denise told an epic story with the moral of “Don’t force creativity, give it time and space and let it come to you.” Denise talked about how to bring your brain into an ‘alpha’ state to help activate it and encourage creative thinking, advising the best ways to activate your brain:

• walking
• going to sleep
• having a shower
• lying down
• closing your eyes and breathing slowly

Denise’s story covered a problem that I know very well; communication addiction, brought on by social networks and constant alerts. She explained that we really suffer alert withdrawal, and we need to learn the importance of lo-fi downtime to give our brains a break.

What makes good design good?

Frank Chimero finished the day with a huge overview of what makes design good and why it means so much to us as designers. One of Frank’s defining features of what makes good design was design that moves. Frank explained that good design moves the designer when it is being made, it moves when it is published, moves through its resonance, and moves through its proliferation. Good design gains a life of its own and moves on its own.

Frank spoke about how our medium differs from others in that our canvas of the web is always moving and changing, so what we’re designing is only a temporary solution to the problem. This means that when we’ve previously described ourselves as designers as problem-solvers, we weren’t right, as our output isn’t always the final and ultimate solution.

Overview

I could write thousands and thousands of words on the intertwined themes of New Adventures 2012, but this is my first uBelly post so I don’t want to put you all off! Needless to say, this conference was incredibly inspiring and, as all good conferences should, left me feeling eager to work and as if I understand myself much better than I did the day before.