Web Directions South 2010
I recently attended my third annual Web Directions South conference in Sydney (October 14 & 15, 2010).
Web Directions is one of the world’s premier Web industry conferences, bringing together experts from around the country and the world to educate, entertain and inspire attendees.
There were 3 streams of presentations to follow including Design, Development, Big Picture and W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). Of the presentations I attended, the following were stand outs for me.
Designing Obama by Scott Thomas
Scott Thomas, Design Director of the Obama Campaign, delivered a fantastic keynote presentation. His presentation skills and ability to engage and inspire the audience were immaculate.
Scott (known online as SimpleScott) discussed the impact of consistent design and the importance of making complex online tasks simple (a complex task in it’s self). A specific example which was discussed was the Obama campaign website ‘Vote for Change’ online enrolment form, which asked a series of required and personalised questions one at a time based on the previous answer/s. The form in turn generated one million new American voters and helped win over the state of North Carolina.
Scott also discussed the processes and planning behind the creation of his book “Designing Obama”. The whole process interestingly started with him raising funds using Kickstarter – an online service which reaches out to regular people for donations of as little as one dollar to fund creative projects.
Even faster web sites by Steve Souders
Steve Souders, Web Performance Evangelist at Google, former Chief Performance for Yahoo! and author of O’Reilly published books: High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, discussed web performance best practices.
Steve focused a lot on aspects away from the usual and obvious “compress your images etc” advice. Order and structure of code and scripts, were the centre of attention. We looked at resources such as Yahoo’s Yslow and Google’s Page Speed (Firefox developer extensions which report on the load time of a page) along with performance waterfall charts which show the series of actions that occur between a user and web server in order to view a specific web page. Simply taking the time to utilise these tools or factor in this process during a project can results in file load times which are reduced by around 40 percent.
Steve was a fantastic and quite obviously experience speaker, he delivered a clear lasting message and simplified a fairly technical/complex subject perfectly.
Setting standards – friendly web type by Simon Pascal Klein
Pascal discussed web typography and the options available today for getting a typeface on the web. It turns out these options, including accessible, standards based options are quite extensive and we are certainly now in a day and age where we are no longer limited to the browsers commonly used ‘web-safe’ fonts.
There was focus on the importance of research and awareness of type faces you may select to use and why you are using them. More fonts does not mean instant good typography, many available fonts are not designed or optimised for web, hence they may not render well and may reduce legibility and readability. Basically, like any aspect of a web project, well informed decisions should be made around your website typography. This could be guided by the notion that “Web experiences that feature good typography are easier and more pleasurable to use”.
Pascal showed us what is possible with some beautiful web typography examples. He also went into some of the finer details and tricks of the trade for enhancing typographic details.
As a graphic designer by trade, an Online Communications Officer by day and type lover at heart, this presentation basically rocked my socks off.
Pascal’s presentation slides are available on Slideshare and you can see some of his fantastic web typographic work in practice on his website klepas.org.
Perhaps I shouln’t be so exited, perhaps if it were another company I wouldn’t be. I took my first drive through Melbourne today, went from Coburg to Chadstone so that I could attend my 