I was a web designer for a day
September 2nd, 2009
Today was the first of the Future of Web Design (pronounced FOWD) UK Tour by Carsonified; a company who love large type and are “love with the web”.
I’m not a designer.
I’m not a developer.
Why did I attend?
Well, I too love the web.
Unfortunately I’ve pretty much always lacked that part of the brain that’s able to comprehend what the fuck’s going on with code and the general infrastructure of the web and so am a little behind on my knowledge of CSS containers, line-heights (leading), web suitable fonts (sometimes I have to Google ‘Serif’ and ‘Sans Serif’ as I forget. Yeah, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to build a website from scratch; the best I can do is alter a WordPress theme.
I’ve been interested in the web for quite a few years; semantics, design, typography, trends, social media, social marketing, cloud computing, as well as the future of traditional media – which has quite naturally led me to attending various conferences, where such industry professionals teach other industry professionals (and would-be professionals) how to do it right, by their way of thinking anyway.
Of course it wouldn’t be fun if there weren’t a few topics brought to the table that led to some healthy debate, the age-old ‘Kill IE6‘ along with one that is fairly new to me; designing in Photo Shop vs in the Browser – the browser being very well argued by Andy Clarke.
What did I learn:
- Some CSS structure.
- Leading/Line-heights.
- Typographical hierarchy.
- Using the correct glyphs.
- Microformats (though largely irrelevant at the minute, a potential for change in the future).
- That it’s possible to specify more than one class for an element.
- Good website copy.
- That Microsoft create awful applications/programming languages that are just like others available, and present them awfully, and make me think ‘are they sponsoring this event’ before I find out that in fact they are.
- That I’m so very glad I no longer use Windows…
Though I do feel for Martha Rotter who got all the IE6 abuse directed her way.
With quite a lot to think about in the ways of the web as well as some inspiration for the new design I’m currently constructing for this blog, I hope to put much of it into action.
As with many conferences, I did find that, there was a good bit of time spent on topics that were either not interesting, not relevant to available tech (Microformats) or end up being too basic (even for me) – but overall, I had a good day, and met plenty of interesting and talented people whom I hope to meet again.
It has made me look forward to Build even more.
