It’s time for the most important post we’ll publish around this year’s Critters. The awards? A mere sideshow. The incredible entertainment? An afterthought. Now we know (and based on Twitter we really do know) that you’ve all been most perplexed by what to wear. Well, help is at hand, we’ve put together a guide to ‘what to wear for The Critters’  which means you’ll avoid any fashion faux pas on the night.

Dress Code – Black Tie

For those of you who are committing 100% to the theme, we applaud you. All of the Ubelly team will be rocking the full on Black Tie look and we’ve been drawing inspiration from this handy guide. That means dress shirt, tuxedo, bow tie and (polished) black shoes. A handkerchief tucked into your jacket pocket is optional, but highly recommended.

Also acceptable: Hollywood Black Tie or to 99.9% of the population – a suit and black tie.

The playing it cool alternative to full on black-tie, just pair your favourite shirt with a black tie and a matching jacket and trousers and you’ll be flying.

And if you need any more persuading as to why you should suit up:

We know for some of you suiting up is a deal breaker, so we’re willing to compromise. Penguins look an awful lot like they’re wearing a suit already, so if you come wearing a Penguin Onesie and some form of bow tie we’ll accept that as embracing the spirit of the dress code.

And for the ladies – We’re confident you don’t need our help to look amazing, but if you need  a starting point, we’d recommend your favourite cocktail dress and your best dancing shoes.

Of course if you want to don Onesies as well, we won’t hold it against you.

As for what not to wear. Well, if you could make sure your clothes are clean and you’re not wearing Pyjamas that would be a start. Basically if you’d wear it while lounging around your bedroom hungover on a weekend, it’s probably not going to be suitable for wearing to The Critters (Penguin Onesies excepted)

Still not got your ticket? Don’t miss out, grab one today!

A few weeks ago we headed north for Gavin Elliot‘s inaugural Industry Conference. Gavin was one of the forces behind Newcastle’s other web conference DIBI, which we’ve been to the last few years and loved, and Industry Conf is the product of his time after Codeworks. Taking place in the rather astonishing Turbine Hall, where Newcastle’s tram system used to be run from, Industry Conf saw 8 speakers from the UK and abroad share their views on the web design and development industry, via product design, cross cultural UX, education and, probably the strangest, insurance. The entire day was a great mix of speakers, and we’ve highlighted a few of our favourites from the day. I also managed to sketchnote a couple of the talks, which you can find at the bottom of the post.

Rachel Andrew and Perch

To begin the day, Rachel Andrew, co-founder of the tiny CMS Perch, took a non-design and non-development route to her talk by focussing on customer support. However, what came out of her talk was a great insight into how to build a successful product, how to use customer feedback and a few lessons and tips for anyone thinking of going into the realm of product. One aspect that Rachel talked a lot about was how much customer feedback affects Perch’s features and roadmap. She made the comment that “In business, you get what you want by giving people what you want.” However, she also went on to talk about how even though the more you talk to your customers, the clearer your roadmap gets, that you always need to protect the core use case of your product. If you only build in features that benefit the vocal minority, you’ll usually end up alienating and losing your majority.

There were two really interesting insights into how Drew and Rachel are trying to design support out of Perch. First, building in useful user feedback and writing solid documentation is one of the key ways of designing support out of your product. However, there will always be support requests. One of the ways that they’re looking at effective ways to scale is via their Registered Developers programme. Basically, they can advertise the skills of their passionate, skilled users to help the rest of their users when building or designing a Perch site. It’s a really good example of using your community to make your product better.

Christopher Murphy and Education

Christopher Murphy is one half of The Standardistas, the tweed-clad duo from Belfast, who as well as putting out various internet musings and writing great books on web design, also double as educators at University of Ulster. It was on this subject that Christopher was focussing on at Industry, and how we can make education in the web industry better. There were three key things that I took away from his talk: the benefits of a master/apprentice system, the skills we teach versus the skills we should teach, and the importance of paying it forward.

For the most part, the current way of learning in the web industry is either a solo-journey, where the student teaches themselves from a variety of different materials, or as a more traditional one-to-many teaching style, usually through conferences, workshops or courses. However, looking at the master/apprentice model, there are some obvious benefits. Not only is dedicated time given from someone who already knows their craft inside out, but there is also an exchange of skills and values going on between master and apprentice that shapes both parties.

Another interesting point Christopher touches on is that current ways of teaching design focusses on skills, techniques, craftsmanship and business. However, he suggests that we need to look at more fundamental aspects, including self belief, confidence, manners and politeness. He believes that focussing on these core values can help shape a designer much better than just tooling them with the practical aspects of the job.

Finally, Christopher echoed what I’ve been hearing a lot at conferences in the past few years, which is around the concept of paying it forward. Similar to Seb’s call to ‘Play, Create, Share‘, Christopher makes the point that the industry can only get better when we share and teach, whether it be through writing, speaking or just building and talking about it. I completely agree with the sentiment, and think it’s really important that there are people who are looking at what they can do to help shape our industry.

Josh Brewer and Twitter

One of the definite highlights of the day was seeing Josh Brewer, one of the design leads for Twitter, talk through the problems and process of redesigning Twitter. Firstly, it was refreshing to see a company being transparent about their design processes, especially a company as public and big as Twitter. This kind of insight is a great tool to teach others about key aspects of product design, and sharing your failures as well as your successes helps others learn the to dos and not to dos.

Josh took us through the original concepts they had for ‘new new Twitter’, including a key concept of content pivots, where you can easily swipe between your base feed, a photo feed, and a content feed. However, according to Josh, it was a classic example of design not talking to engineering early enough to discuss technical limitations for the platform that meant that a lot of the design features couldn’t be incorporated for this release. Another interesting insight was that a lot of the design features that get incorporated aren’t the result of endless meetings, brainstorms, testing sessions etc, but the insight of a single designer, who then prototypes their idea and convinces the rest of the team that it’s worth putting in. It reminds me of Jay Fanelli’s article for The Pastry Box Project, and how we should be mindful of the fact that when we complain publicly (and snarkily) about something in a service we use, there’s a good chance the single person who’s idea it is is potentially listening.

Wrapping up

This is just a snapshot of the day, and doesn’t quite sum up how inspiring the whole day actually was. From Ashley Baxter‘s debut talk about how she took over her dad’s insurance company at 18, and is now taking it down the software/service route, to the brilliant Noah Stokes talking about his journey as a designer, and the lessons he’s learnt along the way, it was a great day, without one flawed speaker. Special mention also goes to Jeremy Keith, who jumped in only a few days before to cover John Allsopp’s session. As always, Jeremy delivered a session with wit, flair and general awesomeness that few others match. Aside from the talks, it’s always lovely to visit Newcastle and talk to the folks who are building such an awesome web scene for the North East. A huge thanks to Gavin for having us at Industry.

As promised, here are the two sketchnotes I managed to pull together on the day:

 

If you’re into UX and design then May’s the month that just keeps on giving, from POINT to Port80 to Global Accessibility Awareness Day to the Future of Web Design.

2 –3 May – POINT Conference 2013, London

With luminaries like Erik Speakerman, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, amongst many others, POINT is not to be missed. This self-funded conference provides  forum for designers to “ …discuss the issues that design, in its many forms, creates on a day-to-day basis.”

9 May – UXPA UK May Event: Global Accessibility Awareness Day, London

If you want to learn more about how anyone regardless of their abilities can access information about your products and services then this evening event is for you. 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and to mark the occasion UXPA UK offers a one day event featuring two talks and a panel session including a case study from the BBC.

10 May, Port80 2013, Newport

Joel Hughes set up this web design fest right in the middle of Newport, hosting some great speakers including Andy Davies, Jack Franklin, Robin Christopherson, Paul Lloyd, our very own nUbellyer Rachel Shillcock, Sophie Dennis, Benjy Stanton & Matt Andrews.

13 – 15 May – Future Of Web Design London 2013
Now in it’s seventh year, the Future of Web Design provides in-depth workshops followed by a two day, two track conference with speakers like Seb Lee-Delisle and Peter Gasston gracing the main stage. Not to be missed.

14 – 22 May – UK Device Developers’ Conference, Bristol, Cambridge and Manchester

If you’re involved in Embedded Systems development or electronics design this even promises to give you info on the latest development tech from around the world. Oh and it’s free. Result!

31 May – Converge 2013, Edinburgh

Billed as a ‘pick your own style adventure’, Converge aims to encourage collaboration, conversation and enthusiasm across all the various disciplines in the technology area. This unique event has two tracks – one is a more traditional speaker/discussion track and the other is a hacking/making track. Sign me up!

31 May – .net Awards, London

On Friday 31st May the .net Awards will showcase the best in the industry as judged by a panel of 50 industry judges. The winners of these prestigious awards will be announced at an exclusive ceremony in London on Friday, 31 May. If you’re on the list to attend, lucky you – otherwise you can keep an eye out on the website for the winners as they’re announced, and a full list will be in the August issue of the mag.

We like to highlight events from around the country, not just London, so please drop us a line @ubelly if you want to see your event listed below.

So after much deliberating, in fighting and a little bribery (if the rumours are true) we now have our shortlist for the Critters 2013.

You can see the full shortlist on the Critters page

Now the shortlist is done, here’s where you come in – the actual recipients of the  awards will be decided on the night of the Critters, June 13th at Modern Jago  by you! Tickets are FREE and some details about the event are below. What are you waiting for get your tickets here, but be quick though they are selling out fast!

Here’s a few more details about the evening itself;

We’ll be taking over Modern Jago and decking it out as a fairytale wonderland, drawing inspiration from all your childhood favourites.

To really make the evening sparkle, the dress code for the evening is Black Tie, so we want to see you all in your  finest tuxedos or cocktail dresses – (we’re not picky about which). The drinks will be provided free of charge by the incredible Sipsmiths and Brewdog. Sipsmiths will be providing a range of  mouthwatering spirits including their Summer Cup, whilst Brewdog will be providing you with some of the finest craft brews you could ever hope to taste.

We’ll also be constructing our own mini fairground to test your skills in a variety of areas. we expect competition to be fierce, so start fine tuning your hand-eye coordination. The Ubelly team are already hard in training, with a vigorous regime of darts and other non-active agility exercises lined up for the next few weeks.

This is one party you’re definitely not going to want to miss – so sign up for your ticket today.

Recently I attended my first conference, “BACON” or “Developers Love Bacon”, a conference dedicated to exploring the things developers love. Around 300 people descended on the Mermaid Conference Centre in London for the two day, two track event and were greeted by the smiling Angie Maguire and Paul Fedory, organisers of the event.

There were over 30 talks across the two days; unfortunately I could not split myself into two, nor do I have a blue box that’s bigger on the inside so I could not see all of them. Also, if I were to go into detail about all the talks I saw, you’d be here for a very long time! Instead, I’ll give you an overview of the talks that stood out for me and my “best bits” of the conference.

Things to know about the users of your product

Jan Srutek‘s talk drew a lot from cognitive psychology so I was very interested at the possible parallels between my psychology degree and the field I now work in. Jan wanted to show us how we could use research on memory, learning and attention to create meaningful user experiences. Our short term memory is easily disrupted by a number of things including outside stimulus, our poor ability to hold a large amount of information in our minds at one time or by the distractions brought on by the website/application we are looking at itself.

To combat this we can do several things:

• Make things consistent and predictable so it’s not hard to follow along.
• Provide clear feedback for all user actions
• Feature personally relevant copy; we are more likely to stay interested if your product resonates with us on a personal level.
• Ensure learning by exploration; information analysed deeper will be better recalled
• Add an element of surprise: An emotive experience is a better remembered experience.

Helping or Hurting?

Christian Heilmann gave the closing keynote of the first day. He identified that one of the things developers love is to have a great workflow and solve problems & abstract tasks with the newest and coolest tools and toys. In his words, this can hurt new developers. New developers wont learn anything if they don’t have the opportunity to make mistakes.

Christian says that as an industry, we promise new users that everything in web development is magical by giving them plugins and tools that they can use without having to understand exactly what is going on in the browser. What happens when these tools fail? These new developers only have knowledge of using that abstraction so they are unlikely to be able to work past errors. Learning to fix problems is important for developers, we have to learn from our mistakes and the pain of something breaking is enough for us to learn not to do it again.

Magic: Tricks, Puzzles or Illusions?

James Merlin defined ‘Magic’ as having three parts: The Effect, The Presentation and The Secret; by changing any 2/3 parts of a magic trick, you can make the trick your own.

Ownership of a magic trick is something of continuous debate in the magic world. Is it possible to patent a trick? You can’t patent the effect of a trick, moving an object from one place to another is not something you can claim as your own idea. Nor can you patent the presentation of or the way you perform a trick. However, you can patent the method or secret of the trick, the mechanism you personally use to get an object from A to B or how you cut an audience member in half. Regardless of this, it is still hard to prove that the magic trick you perform is your own.

How can we truly protect the secrets of magic? The motto of The Magic Circle, a Magician organisation, is “Indocilis Privata Loqui” which can be summarised as “Don’t tell anyone”.

Developers are Superheroes and so can you

The closing keynote of the final day was by Vanessa Hurst. She told us that developers are superheroes and technology is the way in which more people can become one. Using various projects such as Usahidi as an example (an open source project that others can use to collate information during major crises around the world), she stated that developers have the ultimate power to do good.

The world of web is a vast and complex thing and so much is at our fingertips that we can use to help others. I loved this talk as it really put a concrete idea of what a developer is in my head. Developers aren’t people who just sit around tapping away at a keyboard, they are people who can create awesome things for the good of others. Spread the word: Computing is about helping people, we can save the world.

Other Bacon Bits

At the end of the final day of the conference, anyone who attended BACON had a chance to give a five minute lightning talk. Talks included a demo of the Twilio API that resulted in a mass amount of phones playing the Dr. Who theme tune, a dancing nodecopter, tips on how to get drunk on tea and how to become a better designer. The most enjoyable talk of the hour for me was from a colleague of Artem Avetisyan, the person behind the recently viral Starlogs, a page that collects your commits on Github and presents them like the opening titles of the Star Wars films. Whilst this may have just looked like a quirky demo, it resonated with me as it showed me that when I get an idea for an application, the best thing to do is build it and see where it can take you.

My favourite non-scheduled activity was with a speaker, Andrew Faraday, who spoke on “Defining Music, Recreational Programming and Pure Data”. Introducing me to a Ruby script that allowed me to turn any text I wanted into music, he grabbed a group of people and turned the “quiet room” into the “very not quiet room” where we created a small flashmob of people turning the conferences tweets into music.

Final Words

I’d like to thank everyone for making my first conference incredibly special. The devotion of the organisers and speakers to the conference was a real treat and the experience was wonderfully exhausting. I loved sharing the conference with people both online and offline and meeting lots of new faces. As someone who does not class herself as a developer (yet), I learnt a lot of lessons about walking the path to becoming one.

If you couldn’t make it and you’re interested in any of the talks I’ve mentioned or more, everything was recorded and will be available to watch soon. I hope there will be another BaconConf next year and I hope you can come!

A beautiful spring morning and a quirky venue by the Thames played host to State of the Browser 2013 – or #SOTB3 as it was to be known online. The 1 day conference, by London Web Standards, took over the majority of Ravensbourne College on Saturday 20th April for a mix of talks, breakout sessions and networking.

Welcome & Keynote

The day kicked off with a welcome from the organisers, followed by a keynote from Molly Holzschlag of WC3 delivered via video on 3 giant screens. Molly highlighted that “A monoculture does not allow for discourse – which is bad for the open web” yet was optimistic with “Regardless of the engine wars, the future and direction we’re headed in is powerful” in reference to the ongoing debate over WebKit.

Morning Speaker Sessions

Following the video keynote; Alp Toker of WebKit delivered a counter argument (of sorts) titled “Monoculture Isn’t Breaking the Web: You Are” which suggested that WebKit – due to its very nature and organisational structure – is a multiculture rather than a monoculture or monopoly. The term monopoly has been used widely around WebKit of late, in some ways driven by its 47.6% market share in desktop browsers (Q1 2013), however, “WebKit is diverse, it can be plugged into other applications (browsers, rich app containers etc) which is exciting, ” explained Toker, of the project’s “collaborative” ecosystem. He also highlighted the positives of market dominance in facilitating innovation adoption: “Internet Explorer innovated and the web developed in a whole new way. It birthed AJAX and CSS”.

Martin Beeby of Microsoft took the stage next, to look at the exciting direction touch is taking the web. Martin explored what’s new and different in Windows 8 and IE 10; from responsive design to device orientation and the elements that created the most chatter; multi touch and multiple inputs.

He asked “Inputs are getting diverse: Mouse, keyboard, motion, touch, audio and video. What can you imagine doing with these?” Another interesting area was the idea of “the web in the living room” and the evolution of the humble family television. Not to mention the inevitable evolution of “social touch” where multiple users interact with a single screen at once.

This is when things got a even more interesting, as he explored the idea of UX around touch. “Tap “A”, tap “N” and your phone will increase the hit target around “D” on the assumption you’re writing “And” – Martin revealed, before adding, “Touch is a human connection. Make it feel magical, human and responsive. People have way better sensors than computers.”

Paul Kinlan of Chrome, delivered a talk on the State of the Mobile Web and there seemed to be a widely held consensus that this is a hugely exciting. Stats such as “10% of the world already access Facebook on a mobile device” not to mention the shift in accessible technology responding to the needs and budgets of emerging markets (in terms of device cost, and also data bandwidth) the split between mobile and desktop browser use could hit “50% within the next year or so”. Paul highlighted the growing set of features that are allowing mobile browser to deliver better experiences.

This theme continued in Andreas Bovens’ talk on bringing “the world wide web to the whole wide world.” Andreas, highlighted that “The browser landscape is still significantly changing,” explaining how there are increasing needs for browser modes for emerging markets (but also western bad connections or data roaming) that intelligently crunches content and delivers speedy but positive visual experiences.

Despite suffering through a few tech difficulties (it wouldn’t be a conference without them) Christian Heilmann of Mozilla, explored the idea of making your HTML5 efforts worthwhile and examined why we still haven’t made full use of this area. Christian suggested that “we didn’t manage to bring the desktop web onto mobile successfully (so far) because we didn’t get what we expected from HTML5 – which he likened to the packaging of Sea Monkeys, in terms of results being disappointing vs the exciting initial promise. That said, he was quick to state that “It isn’t the browsers making us produce rubbish experiences. They’re all excellent. They show HTML the same way,” instead it may by our own focus on building for the latest hot device and forgetting everything else, i.e. the devices that the majority of people will actually be using. Christian also spent time looking at emerging markets and ways providers are finally responding to huge barriers to entry such as credit card requirements (even for free apps) that have hampered smartphone adoption. The good news is that “by brushing up on your HTML5 solutions you can reach millions of new users forgotten or limited by native hardware but eager to be online,” explained Christian.

Lunchtime & Modern.IE

Lunchtime saw a good deal of networking and catching up, both inside the spacious foyer of Ravensbourne and outside in the sunshine beside the Millenium Dome.

When sitting down at the various tables, attendees discovered racks of Internet Explorer branded test-tubes which contained information on http://modern.ie which makes testing for browser compatibility fast and simple. They also contained info on getting 3 months free browser stack subscription which lets you instantly view your site across browsers, across platforms. Because testing doesn’t have to be testing, geddit!?.

Two of the test-tubes also contained a winning slip of paper and by the end of lunch; two attendees were the lucky winners of an ASUS VivoBook with touchscreen each.

Afternoon Sessions

After lunch the attendees were able to dodge, duck, dip and dive into a variety of more intimate “Breakout Sessions”. These featured a great selection of speakers such as Jake Archibald and Peter Gasston covering everything from typography and design to the architectural aspects of HTML5 and getting started with Web Components.

Once the breakout sessions were over, it was back to the main room for Battle of the Browsers with Seb Lee-Delisle, followed by a panel discussion. Last year Seb pitted the browsers against each other by making millions of particles, in an impressive feat of live-coding. This year saw Seb live coded (cue much hilarity and audience participation) a Space Invaders style game with the ship and aliens replaced by browser logos as he (without prior warning) invited all of the browser evangelists up on stage to battle for their browser’s honour.  Whoever obliterated the other browser logos in the fastest time was the winner. It’s was a close, tightly fought battle but Martin Beeby took the glory for Internet Explorer with the fastest time.

Panel Discussion

A panel discussion rounded off the day as the audience threw out questions to the panel of 6 experts, including Chris Heilmann, Jake Archibald and Martin Beeby. The panel shared their thoughts and experiences on where the browser has come from and what’s next in browser and web development. “No one can be an expert in all of the browser technologies anymore,” said Jake Archibald. Whilst the use of libraries vs raw coding was discussed: “Things like jQuery have increased the number of people in web dev these days – which is a good thing,” said Martin Beeby, however, all agreed with the perspective of Chris Heilmann that “people need to understand that using jQuery is not knowing JavaScript.” They covered a lot of interesting areas, including; “Native app developers can build something for the few. Web developers can build something for the many which everyone can access,” so why not watch a full video of the panel discussion here.

Until Next Time…

Once a successful and fascinating day was wrapped up, attendees headed to post-conference drinks as a nearby pub, perfect for a sunny April evening. If you’d like to try your luck at the Battle of the Browsers game that Seb made, you can here. If you’d like to find out more about testing your site’s browser compatibility visit: http://modern.ie

 Photo credit: Steve Workman

Not all those who wander are lost

The Critters is a mere two months away and we’ve been beavering away over the last couple of weeks to make sure it’s worth the wait. We want to give you enough time to prepare your outfits, so we thought it was only fair to give you a sneak preview of what you can expect on the night.

Things never happen the same way twice

We want this to be more than just an awards ceremony, we want it to be an immersive, narrative led experience. That’s why we’ve chosen a theme with a difference, we’re going to be transporting you back to your childhood and recreating some favourite fairy tale settings. Explore three very different worlds as we take you on a journey through The Looking Glass, into Middle-Earth and around Narnia.

But that’s not all. As usual, we’ll give you the responsibility of selecting the winners on the night. Who wins? You decide. Our team of expert judges have been locked away with the impossible job of trying to narrow down all the amazing entries we received to a final shortlist of three for each category. We’ll be announcing this final list early in May, so make sure you keep an eye out for the announcements so you can decide your winners in advance.

Curioser and curioser

We’re delighted that some very special guests will be joining us on our journey. The awesome Ray Guns Look Real Enough, the UK’s finest stand-up/comedy/mash-up geniuses are coming along for the ride and will be performing live on the night.

We’ve got lots more still to reveal so stay tuned. We promise you won’t want to miss this party, so if you haven’t already register your interest now.

This month we’ve got Bacon and Whisky to keep us going on the events circuit – what more does anyone need? There’s some great web and mobile dev and design focused events this month, whether or not they involve bacon and/or whisky. Hope to see you at some of them! If you want to see your event listed get in touch @ubelly.

10 – 12 April – UX London

“I came. I listened. I stayed. Great event, great crowd, great venue. Learn, network, enjoy.” That’s what Dan Norman, one of last year’s speakers said about UX London. With such luminaries as Tom Hulme, Richard Seymour, Marty Neumeier and Jeremy Keith it’s not to be missed.

12 –13 April – Whisky Web II

The inaugural event last year went so well the organisers are promising an even bigger and better conference held in Airth Castle, Stirlingshire and then onto Edinburgh for a day of hacking. Billed as ‘a web conference created for the web community, by the web community’, Whisky Web has a great set of speakers lined up as well as the odd Shark to two. Say no more…

12-13 April – BACON 2013

BACON has no less than thirty-one tasty sessions on topics including rocketry, Go, infinity, data visualisation, and continuous deployment. Our very own Charlotte from the nUbelly team will be there to keep you up to date with what’s happening on Twitter and on the blog. Yum!

12 – 14 April – Úll

This 3 day event for mobile devs and designers kicks off with an afternoon of workshops, followed by a day long conference and then a restful Sunday BBQ (let’s hope the rain holds off).

17 April – HCID2013

You just need to take the afternoon off for this 1 – 9pm open day event run by the Human Computer Interaction Design department at City University London. There’s bunch of free talks and workshops around the ideas of creativity, usability, user experience, web accessibility, mobile design, multi-touch technologies and service design for UX professionals and designers.

18 – 19 April – jQuery UK 2013

Join Remy Sharp, Adam J Sontag and Brendan Eich for jQuery UK, which promises a day of workshops followed by a full blown conference that’s even bigger and better than last year.

20 April – State of the Browser 2013

State of the Browser is brought to you by those lovely chaps and chapesses at London Web Standards, this year held at Ravensbourne College, London. It’s a grass-roots event that our very own Martin Beeby is speaking at and we’ll be covering the sessions and live tweeting, so catch us online if you can’t make it in person.

23 – 24 April – Industry Web Conference

Yes, we’re heading up to Newcastle to wallow in the wisdom of web luminaries like Noah Stokes, John Allsopp and Rachel Andrew. Run by Gavin Elliott of DIBI fame, Industry Web Conf promises to teach you skills you can put into practice at work the next day. We’ve got the Soapbox (let us know if you want to speak for 5 mins on the world’s smallest stage*), some freebies and some good banter. We’ll also be covering the event on Twitter and on the blog. See you there!

*Not necessarily factually correct, but it sounds good

Last Wednesday we closed nominations for this year’s Critters. We’re now working with the judges to whittle it down to a shortlist of three for each category, which we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks. To coincide with the closing of nominations, we also quietly launched the Critters site for 2013…

Now, apart from being a stunningly beautiful and amazingly brilliant little page (I designed it*), it also has one big feature that hasn’t been seen in previous years’ sites. Yes, this year we’re allowing *EVERYONE* to register to come along to the Ubelly party to end all Ubelly parties. For anyone who hasn’t been to a Critters before, previous years have featured karaoke booths, mannequins, retro games, geeky dancing (with mannequins usually), photo booths and other assorted fun/mischief. This year, we’re taking over Modern Jago, and can guarantee an experience unlike any other awards night you’ve been to… (more details on this in the coming months)

Oh, and you’ll also be part of the select few who vote to decide who will take home The Critter at the end of the night!

Tickets aren’t quite ready yet, but you can register your email address and we’ll give everyone on the list a heads up before (the completely free) tickets go on sale to make sure they nab them first.

What are you waiting for? Click the image below!

*And boy, am I humble…

We’ve been amazed by the nominations we’ve already received for this year’s Critters, but to make sure we don’t miss out on a great site or developer we’ve decided to extend the nominating period nominations will now close at  23.59 GMT on Wednesday March 27th 

It’s really easy to nominate your favourite sites, apps and developers, just hop over to http://www.ubelly.com/thecritters and submit your choices (while taking a second to admire how good the critter looks in a top  hat) The categories are as follows:

• Indie Game of the Year - 2012 has been the year of the indie games developers. Which indie game blew you away in 2012/13?
• Developer of the Year – Without resorting to the cringeworthy phrase ‘rockstar developers’, it is clear that there are some amazing developers in our industry who constantly come up with new and awesome ways of doing things. Who’s your favourite?
• App of the Year - Whether it be web, mobile or desktop, which app stood above the others in 2012/13?
• Designer of the Year - There are so many ridiculously talented designers out there creating beautiful experiences for us to enjoy day to day. Who’s work has impressed you most in 2012/13?
• Voice of the Year - Across all the events, there are some speakers who really stand out, talking with a passion and knowledge that other could learn from. Which speaker got you inspired over the past year?
• Event of the Year - Which event was your dev/design London Olympics?
• Win of the Year - As simple as it sounds, what one action won the last year for you?
• Web Personality of the Year - While there are people who make their mark on the conference circuit, there are others who sit behind their screen and blog, create and share day to day. Who stands out in the community as a person who deserves recognition?
• Next Big Thing - Whether it’s developer, designer or just general web folk, which young whipper-snapper is going to come up and show us how it’s done in 2013?

We’ve got some great judges already lined up, including:

• Dan Oliver, editor of Creative Bloq and one of our industry’s leading voices. He used to edit .Net magazine and knows a lot about most things.
• AJ Grand Scrutton, CEO of Dlala Studios, all round indie gaming guru and one of the geniuses behind Janksy, one of our favourite games of the last year.
• Syd Lawrence,  co-founder of We Do Awesome Sh*t.  He lives up to his company’s name, most recently helping make the awesome Harlem Shake Roulette
• Keir Whitaker, co-founder of Viewport Industries, he helps produce resources which help web developers and designers know all they could ever want to about our industry.
• Sarah Parmenter, a world-renowned UI designer, Sarah designs website which look fantastic and are user friendly. When she’s not doing that she hops from place to place to speak at the world’s leading conferences.

So  what are you waiting for, get nominating now.