articles tagged with atmedia

I’m a bit late to the party with this round-up, since @media ended last Friday. But I have excuses you see ..

In short I have to say I enjoyed @media 2006 more. This year seemed (to me) to be much more designer focused with fewer technical topics. It was an excellent event, well executed with some great speakers – but with the huge amount of sketching going on, I found myself surrounded by those who ‘push the crayons’ – so to speak.

Leaning for power cords

On leaving I had the feeling that I had heard most of it before, yes, possibly at last years event. I also preferred last year’s venue, the grand scale of the Business Design Centre in Islington gave the impression that there were fewer attendees. Although I’m sure if you counted up, you’d find more people here this year. The absence of wi-fi seemed to be another common complaint.

All-in-all it was definitely worth going to. I only took a couple of photos (many more on flickr) and notes during the whole event (rumple.. crumple..) To sum up a few of the talks;

Beyond Ajax by Jesse James Garrett – After explaining a bit about some of the interesting work going on at Adaptive Path, Jesse talked about the ‘elements’ of user experience, mentioning MeasureMap as an example for gathering site data and VisualVocab as a useful tool.

Designing from the Outside In by Tim O’Reilly – A great talk on focusing on the outer layers first, and working in through UI → Logic → Data. A few good examples included the iPod vs. Earlier Rio MP3 Players, Google Calendar. He also pointed to Flickr’s User Experience Strategy. Experience is the product or real source of value for users.

Diabolical Design by Jason Santa Maria – I considered this the best talk of the event. I do not consider myself a designer by any means, but I am very keen to see the mindset and processes they go through. Design is intent, pointing to some favourite sites, AIGA, Ellis Lab, AFilm, Good Magazine. Gave great examples of colour choice. Repeated the fundamentals, left to right, top to bottom, big to small. Spiralling out from a focal point and attention to layout. For approaches to layout and colour design, work with grids and breaking them up in different ways, and grey box approach (more than just a wire frame). To feel out relationship of type with the chosen grid.

Interface Design Juggling by Dan Cederholm – A solid talk on re-use in the design process, using a fictional example site ToupeePal.com to show off techniques. Some good sites mentioned: Web Typography.net, TanyaMerone.com and Delta Tango Bravo (favicon collection)

“When Web Accessibility is *not your problem":http://joeclark.org/appearances/atmedia2007/ by Joe Clark* – A bit of a controversial talk from Joe, with, ‘font-size is not your problem – it’s the browsers’, ‘html is inadequate for all possibilites’ etc. He also mentioned he was ‘retiring’ from web accessibility. This talk got a fair bit of stick from some attendees in the Advancing Web Accessibility
talk the following day.

Technorati should point you to more complete summaries of the event, and full pod-casts will be available soon. I should also mention that Jon Hicks presentation on How to be a creative sponge and High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation by Drew McLellan and Simon Collison were very entertaining.

Some recommended reading suggested; Elements of Typographical Style and Thinking with Type

The final day of @media was a little more packed with talks, having slightly re-arranged the schedule the previous day to account for the World Cup match.

Highlights included the panel debate during the JavaScript Libraries: Friend or Foe? talk, and Tantek Çelik’s bit on Microformats – Not really knowing what to expect from an event like this, I think managed to get something new out of most of the talks and it was great to see so many people enthusiastic about where web design and development is headed (for the next year at least).

Along with better wifi, something I thought was lacking – was some kind of online chatroom for attendees to communicate with – during the 2 days of the conference. Campfire or even just a formal IRC room would have been great.

I have uploaded the rest of my photos from the event, but unfortunately audio recording the talks myself, just wasn’t happening. Apparently a podcast for the entire event (and possibly videos) will be made available, most likely on the @media2006 website

Edit: All presentations are now available via this official Audio/Video feed

Today I was attending the first day of the @media2006 conference in Westiminster, London. Stephen (from Front) was also over for the 2-day event – and he has already posted a decent round-up of the today’s talks.

It’s been thoroughly enjoyable so far, the highlights for me being – Eric Meyer’s keynote address and Jeffrey Veen’s talk on ‘Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps’. After much messing around with finding a decent audio tool, and working with a very poor wifi connection, I managed to record all of Mr. Veen’s talk – which you should be able to get here;

• Jeffrey Veen’s talk on ‘Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps’

Veerle Pieters, who does some outstanding work, was also present talking on ‘Good Design vs. Great Design’. I managed to snap some shots of the event with my camera phone – and I may add some more to this pool tomorrow.

The day rounded off with a trip to Picadilly Circus – where the England vs. Trinidad and Tobago match was available for everyone to watch at a bar booked for exclusively for @media attendees.

Im looking forward to tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll have mastered podcasting enough to offer a feed with more than just one presentation.