Yesterday I was fortunate to attend the first leg of the FOWD (Future of Web Design) Tour which started in Belfast.
A great line up to speakers who are all experts in their respective fields included:
Andy Clarke who opened the event with with an excellent lesson on design and gave a makeover to the NI Direct website which looked great and can be seen over at his blog. Andy also ended the day by giving a talk on how to design for the browser, this was fantastic and got an interesting reaction from the crowd when discussing designing on the browser as an alternative to Photoshop. I agree with his approach…although I would being a developer.
Martha Rotter gave the second talk of the event which was an overview of a new Microsoft product called SketchFlow, SketchFlow is designed in order to help prototype user interfaces quickly and efficiently. In terms of designing UI SketchFlow looks top class especially when obtaining feedback from clients as they have the ability to add notes and sketches to anything that is produced.
Drew McLellan introduced us to Microformats which I was previously unfamiliar with until now and also provided an insight into cost effective web development which has given me a good perspective on how to avoid some potential issues that could otherwise arise with clients.
Chris Murphy and Niklas Persson gave us an excellent overview of web standards and they also have a whole book on the subject which is available now – HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas’ Approach
Lee Munroe was the local speaker at the event, he did a great job with his talk ‘Rounding the Edges of your Website’.
Morgan McKeagney showed us how we could effectively marry creativity and logic just like Steve Jobs!
During the day there was also time for 25 minutes of ‘Speed Networking’ where you could quickly hand out business cards and meet people working in the same fields.
Overall it was a great day and I hope FOWD makes an appearance in Belfast again next year.
Nice round up Jon. Cool hooking up for the day and meeting a bunch of new people as well. Catch you again soon.
Thanks for the roundup. All in all it was a great day and such a pleasure to see so much energy about web design in Belfast. Great to see Carsonified putting their energy into putting Belfast on the web design map.
One small thing, I know we pimped our book shamelessly, but our talk was less about web standards (which I can recommend a very good book for!) and more about the use of well-crafted words as part of the design process.
Other than that, good stuff. We’ll be posting our slides tomorrow, hopefully they’ll prove useful.