Last week myself and Darren attended the Future of Web Design 2008, the event was really interesting and informative.
Highlights included Steve Pearces’ presentation on Brand Experience Vs User Experience, Andy Budds discussion on the User Experience curve and Jon Hicks creating the cheesophile site during his ‘from design to deployment’ presentation.
We listened, scribbled notes and learned a lot, although I have to say that I was slightly disappointed at the lack of ‘Future’ from the Future of Web Design Conference.
In contrast to the above the workshops the next day were superb and extremely well thought out, well presented. Miguel Ripoll talked us through ‘Elastic Thinking: adaptable design in a world of uncertainty’ which was really thought provoking, if a little scary for us designers when he suggested that you should leave design until last.
The afternoon session from Andy Clarke was all about Microformats – The Building Blocks for a Beautiful Web. I’ve heard people say how good a speaker Andy is and we weren’t disappointed, he was engaging, informative, knowledgeable and funny. Microformats are “designed for humans first, machines second” and provide a way of making data portable between applications from flat html. I believe they are currently be on the edge of web design but could make a big impact soon if large organisations begin to adopt them. However for this to happen I feel that browser developers have to start integrating tools directly into the browsers and not rely on extensions like the Operator toolbar or tails. Hopefully this will happen soon and open microformats up to the masses, meaning we can instantly add events we see on the web into our calendars for example. For now we’ll just have to implement them as we design & develop and wait to see how they get used…..
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Regarding Microformats, since Yahoo have announced full support for microformats (Yahoo local has done so since 2006) there is something of a landrush on the subject. Standardistas like Andy Clarke have been promoting the usage of microformats as purely a best practice approach for future-proofing web markup but with bigger players like Yahoo and Microsoft joining the movement (IE8 supports many current microformats) it seems silly not to use them.
we also attended the future of web design 2008 and agree it was very informative… i actually thought it was awesome, but maybe that was the geek in me
. im not really upto speed on the micofortmats, and i guess its just something else that we will have to start using.