Overview
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Future of Web Design conference in NYC. The conference was 2 days and offered a third day of workshops for those who were interested.
Future of Web Design – New York City
While I feel I am decent at design, I definitely consider myself a developer above all else. That being said, I wouldn’t recommend this conference for people hoping to get very technical with code, as most of the sessions leaned more towards design and UX than they did towards development. Luckily I happen to have a strong interest in design, UX, and typography, so I still enjoyed the sessions and learned a ton.
[NOTE] If you are hoping to get more technical or could care less about design, go to JSConf or jQuery Conf instead – I immensely enjoyed jQuery Conf when I went this past April.
Speakers & Sessions
Funnily enough, my favorite speakers weren’t the ones who dove into more technical topics (they were still good), but were the ones who talked about user experience and trying to do more than just simply satisfy users. I’ve always been a fan of adding a bit of fun into things and never understood why companies have always felt the need to be so uptight and serious (must be why I love working at Zappos). This seemed to be the theme of FOWD 2010, and at least 3 sessions were geared towards going above and beyond – “Designing for Emotion” by Aarron Walter, “Design to Delight” by Doug Bowman, and “Beyond Usability: The Art of Experience Design” by Aral Balkin. All interesting sessions, all great speakers.
Future of Web Design – Speakers
I also very much enjoyed Ethan Marcotte’s session on “Responsive Web Design.” Ethan talks a bit about it in his chapter of Dan Cederholm’s book, Handcrafted CSS, and also wrote a very good article about it on A List Apart back in May. I’ve recently become a big fan and proponent of fluid design (even though my current site isn’t at the moment… I know, I know, I’m working on it…), so I loved listening to and watching Ethan’s code examples.
Matt Smith’s “The Changing Face of Typography” session was also very interesting for a typography novice like myself. Sure, I know how to use and implement TypeKit, but I was really interested to hear about font pairing and how and why different fonts can work well together – stuff I know nothing about.
The End
Overall I enjoyed the conference and walked away very inspired to try some new things with design, but didn’t necessarily learn a lot (that I wasn’t already familiar with) development-wise. Ah well, there’s always Future of Web Apps to look forward to!