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FOWD Was Awesome

As I’m sure all of you know, yesterday I attended The Future of Web Design, and my god what an awesome event it was. I was really excited about it, but it still managed to meet all my expectations. Ryan Carson and his team ran a tight ship, everything was slickly presented and everything kept to the (slightly tight) schedule precisely.

Sessions

The sessions where obviously the main meat of the event, and most of them didn’t disappoint. Some of them felt more like pitches than actual presentations but to the most part they where all highly entertaining. I’m just going to highlight the bits that I loved quickly, which will hopefully give you a good taste of what FOWD was like.

Brendan Dawes (of magneticNorth) kicked off the proceedings with a talk on “Finding Your Creative Vein” he raised some excellent points on adding to the user experience and having fun with design. It was certainly a fresh point of view particularly after all the talk of cutting the cruft and only including what needs to be there (the sort of things 37signals preach). At the end of the day, all we really need to do to make cool stuff is just muck about a bit!

A threesome of Speakers where up next, each presenting a small presentation on “Designing for Web Apps”. In my opinion these where the most underused speakers, I’m sure they had so much more to give, but just didn’t have the time. 

Ryan Singer (of the aforementioned 37 Signals) was up first, giving us 10 tips for better sign up forms. This stuff was pure gold, things that can seems obvious but add so much to the tedious task of signing up for a new service.

Denise Wilton (from Moo) was up next, giving some great pointer on giving your wep app character using friendly language to convey a felling to your users and make them love your app.

Finally George Oates (lead designer at Flickr) talked about nurturing the people who are using your web app. Making things easy to find, and giving a simple way for members to explore other areas of your application and key.

The three talks where wrapped up with a really quick panel discussion and some examples of how current apps could be improved. This was one of my favourite sessions of the day, and included a heap of great tips which I hope to take advantage of in the near future.

The next few sessions didn’t really hook me into them but some where fairly entertaining and others where just boring. Mike Downey did do a talk on Adobe Apollo which sounds like a pretty exciting new technology.

After lunch Andy Clarke was up on stage, he kick started his session with a Top Gear style “Cool Wall” which saw us rating popular websites. Yahoo, Digg, MySpace and Microsoft where all rated as Un Cool. Whilst Twitter, DropSend and Flickr where the cool ones of the bunch, though DropSend was only cool for one reason; because no one uses it!

After this bit of fun Andy went on to talk about using XHTML wireframes to speed up the development process as opposed to creating numerous time consuming mock ups using Photoshop. It clearly makes a lot of sense, but is similar to the way I work at the moment anyway. Doing one design in Photoshop before jumping into the code and then designing extra elements as I go along.

People

What I was most excited about FOWD was not the actual sessions but actually meeting new people. So not only did I get to hang out with Ben Debnam and finally meet Matt Davey and his girlfriend Hannah but I also got to meet a couple of cool new people who I have never met before. So a big hello goes out to Daniel (whose surname I have forgotten, email me man!), Karl Dawson, Mark Wubben and [Nick Dunn][nd] it was great to meet all of you (if only briefly) and I hope that we can keep in touch. I also had a great chat with Lisa Price (from Carson Systems) who gave me some great advice and the encouragement I needed to pluck up the courage to speak to Andy Clarke, which was well worth it, he also gave me some great advice for the future.

To anyone I didn’t get to meet up with, fire me an email or leave a comment and we can have a chat, or if you are going to @media we could even hook up there instead!

Photos

I had planned to take loads of photos, but never really got round to it, it’s not that much of a problem though, as there already loads up on flickr and no doubt there are more to come, just search for all the photos tagged with fowdlondon07.

Next Up

I had an amazing time at the conference yesterday and am now even more enthused about @media now! If you are in the web business and have not yet been to an event like this then I can highly recommend it!

It’s not long now before @media, but I still have some exciting stuff to get on with. The May 1st Reboot is fast approaching, and it seems that I will be participating for the second time in a row. Guess I had better get on with it then!

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