The Interlink Conference started with designers dodging balls

The following article was published on DesignEdgeCanada.com on June 2, 2011:

Web design veteran Shawn Johnston was frustrated by a lack of local forums for progressive conversation and collaboration aimed at propelling the web from a new industry into a mature and self aware craft. His response to this angst was the Interlink Conference, which launched this week with a dodgeball game. That’s right, dozens of the best and brightest in the field of web design and development from around the world kicked off what Johnston calls “an adult conference for serious adults” by throwing rubber balls at each other’s heads.

Taking place June 2 through 4 at Capilano University  in North Vancouver, the Interlink Conference website promised “discussions to inspire the web we imagine”. But aren’t there already a bunch of conferences with a similar mandate?

“SXSW was a disaster for me,” said Steve Megitt, a web designer from Toronto. “To me most conferences like SXSW or HOW feel more like hero worship with designers on stage showing off portfolio work more than a real learning or dialogue and debate opportunity.” This sentiment was echoed by others at the conference who felt that many large conferences have evolved into big parties better suited to industry juniors than anything suitable for a seasoned professionals seeking new connections and paradigms.

“My body is sore all over from dodgeball last night,” said designer Dan Rubin who kicked off the workshops on a rainy Thursday morning with a presentation about hands-on prototyping and user testing. The primary takeaway of this case study-based presentation seemed to be a focus on designing for user goals before company goals as an approach. In another popular workshop, Washington DC-based designer Samantha Warren lead a group through her approach to working successfully (and efficiently) with web clients. “She presented really well and gave awesome advice & tools” said recent interactive design grad Stephan Rosger. One notable example of this was Warren’s “style tile” approach of rapidly creating multiple examples of colour options, patterns, button styles, navigation treatments, and typographic possibilities on a single browser page. Inspired by swatch boards commonly used by architectural and interior designers, these early conceptual style tiles allow a client to consider and approve early expressions of mood, tone and style for their website design before much time has been invested in a particular interface design, essentially eliminating the need for multiple design mockups.

In another classroom across the beautiful Capilano University campus among the trees, a packed room of eager webbys hung on every word from Brooklyn-based designer Meagan Fisher. Attendees to Fisher’s workshop were treated to a peek into a master’s CSS toolkit, showing the power and capabilities of CSS beyond common simple effects. Fisher, who famously argues that web designers should literally ditch Photoshop (gasp), demonstrated in real time how to design rapid prototypes directly inside a web browser, where changes can happen quickly and evolve to better suit user needs or project parameters as they come into focus. Her argument is that not only is it faster with some practice, but leaves your developer with a solid framework for production without needing to slice and dice pixels.

As the gloomy rain gave way to a beautiful Vancouver sunset, webfont expert Ethan Dunham  closed the day with a workshop called Web Font Revolution. Dunham, who is the man behind
FontSquirrel.com and FontSpring.com, presented a three-hour crash course on the history of webfonts and demonstrated that web designers have essentially run out of excuses for bad type online, with nearly 100% support for webfonts and the technology to deliver and create them. Even so, he explained why it is continues to be a challenge to render fonts well in Windows, and encouraged attendees to join him in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and demanding greater simplification of the current fractured licensing landscape. Shocking to many in the audience was Dunham’s disdain for fonts-as-service providers such as Fonts.com and Typekit. “Users should be trusted and offered webfonts the way desktop fonts have always been sold” argues Dunham. Dunham concluded with a challenge to the audience to take the time to learn the art and rules of beautiful typesetting and apply them to the web better than has been the recent norm.

“My goal with Interlink was to connect peers to peers rather than teachers sharing their wisdom with a room full of students.” says Shawn Johnston, “No craft is ever mastered.
We are all students.” Perhaps this youthful perspective is what motivated Johnston to kick off the conference with a game of dodgeball. Will the main conference day of presentations truly break down this teacher/student paradigm? We’ll see in the coming days. But the theme seems to have been embodied in the first day of this new conference with ideas and techniques delivered like a dodgeball thump to the head. Only in this game, everyone goes home a winner.

For more on the Interlink Conference.

I’m basically a print designer, and even though I have done web design I worried that they would be “talking in code” and I’d be lost. I was pleasantly surprised—the presenters who showed some code did it in a way that I could understand. Even Eric Meyer’s chat on “CSS for evil” was presented in a way that made sense to the print designers like me!

Monday morning started with AEA founder Jeffrey Zeldman giving a history of Emoticons. From the simple smiley face to winking emoticons with hats and mustaches to the difference between eastern and western styles, we were impressed with Zelman’s vast knowledge.

Just joking :)

Seriously, you know that the next two days are going to be great when you hear things like “Beautiful no longer means flash-based.” Zeldman’s passionate opening on the history of the web—Web 2.0—set the tone of the conference. He kicked off AEA by showing inventions from history that led to the web, and showing why we stand at the dawn of a newer and more mature web powered by standards.

Following Zeldman, we heard from Sarah Parmenter on Crafting the User Experience. She discussed principles from human psychology, such as speed, simplicity, surprise, social behavior and stirring emotions, and she gave practical advice for using psychology when thinking about web design and user experience.

Rounding out the morning was Jason Santa Maria’s session On Web Typography. He began by talking about what makes a good web typeface and major typography considerations, such as dimensions, special features, prolonged reading and internationalization. “Good typography is invisible. Don’t make me think about reading, just let me read!” Then he talked about the advances and choices we now have with web fonts. Even though those advances are exciting, he cautioned, we still have to use good design and web standards.

The afternoon started with Scott Berkun talking about Why Designers Fail and What to Do About It. He gave us his thoughts on how we’d never learn and move forward without failure. He said all designers fail 95% of the time, but design suffers from a lack of failure analysis—how to look at the reasons we fail and what to do about it.

One of my favourite sessions was A Content Strategy Roadmap with Kristina Halvorson. She provided valuable insights into how we spend a lot of time on strategy, wireframes and design before obtaining content for our websites. Content often comes last, when it should come first. The bottomline: “Start designing from the content out, rather that the canvas in,” she said.

Finishing off the day was Luke Wroblewski, whose presentation Mobile Web Design Moves left me eager for his full-day mobile web design course. It was exciting to hear about the huge growth in mobile usage, the immense possibilities of mobile web design and how we need to think differently when designing for mobile devices.

Day two started off with Eric Meyer and his talk The CSS3 Anarchists’ Cookbook. Basically, he gave us tips and tricks on how to use CSS for “evil”—how to mess with your co-workers by changing up code in their browser’s user stylesheets. I was a little scared of this talk, but whenever Eric showed the code he showed examples of what it did so it made sense. It was a cheeky way to show the new tools in HTML5 and CSS3.

Jeremy Keith followed with a discussion of Design Principles. He talked about how your principles and design should match, and how this will help you reach your goals—“The more you can boil down your design principles, the better.” Aarron Walter then did a presentation titled Idea to Interface. It was great to learn how those iPhone apps you have in your mind would translate from just an idea into actuality. He said you need to give yourself permission to be the person with the idea, and he outlined how you would carry it through.

The afternoon continued with Andy Clarke and his presentation Smoke Gets in Your Eyes about CSS3 web animation. We learned about the latest CSS animation techniques, and he showed some entertaining videos, such as the Flash vs. Web rap battle.

Alexa Andrzejewski, the founder of Foodspotting, followed with an intriguing presention The Dimensions of a Good Experience. She talked about evaluating experiences using 10 principles from urban planning, and how these same qualities could be applied to digital experiences—“Design influences our experience of the world.” It was the process that led her to create the Foodspotting app.

Finishing off day two was the humourous and incredibly passionate Tom Coates talking about Everything the Network Touches. He reminded us all about how exciting and powerful the web is and how the network is not only extending to people but to objects and places. His final thought: “I am going to say something controversial: I don’t think we should have web standards. It’s only with the ability to explore and not be bound by rules and regulations that we going to create and discover new realms.”

With our minds on overload from these two days we headed into day three, Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski. Again, I had no reason to worry that we’d be doing something super techincal. It was all digestible information. Talking to a crowd of 300, Luke did a great job of getting us to interact with him and each other. He started by asking the audience what we’d like to learn. We also did a few interactive projects by sharing in small groups. Throughout the day, Luke took us through the major considerations when designing for mobile: what the constraints are, stats on usage, what behaviours drive the use of mobile devices and how they are used.

AEA, you know how to throw a conference: 12 exceptionally fantastic speakers, a live Twitter feed, three parties and a soundtrack! If you’re looking to attend a fun web design conference that runs seamlessly with loads of exciting and passionate people, check out An Event Apart. Having attended many design conferences I found AEA to be among one of the best experiences I’ve had. I went from not knowing anything about this conference to coming back with practical experience and tools ready to be put to use in our office.

Further reading:
A List Apart
World Wide Web Consortium
Luke Wroblewski’s Notes on AEA Presentations

Big news in the web world as Typekit was launched last week. For those of you who missed news of the launch, it serves to bridge the copyright issues associated with the CSS3 Property @font-face (hotly debated issue among foundries and developers recently). Solutions like sIRF and Cufon have greatly pushed the industry in this direction and, while we have used them on projects, they have limitations, particularly when it comes to body copy. The hole with @font-face is that it makes it possible for the end user to download the font in question, which in virtually every instance violates the license.

The concept behind Typekit harnesses @font-face but protects the font files on a separate server. The designer/developer/client would purchase a license (per site? per month?) to use the font. With an expected to launch sometime this summer, the major draw back seems to be the issues surrounding the storage of the font information on a different server from the website. (required to satisfy DRM licenses) The anticipated problem with this surrounds the issues associated with the uptime (and downtime) of this font server. No server is up 100% of the time, it just doesn’t happen. But what happens when this server goes down? Potentially all websites linking to this central database will lose their font definitions.

Sharing code snippits on a central server hasn’t presented a prohibitive problem in the past as the jQuery library, CSS Resets and other snippits are all available hosted on a central server and used on major sites world wide and downtime hasn’t presented itself as a problem. Although we might be comparing apples and oranges between Google’s servers and Typekits. Time will tell. Certain some exciting developments for sure!

Yesterday I saw Jeffrey Zeldman tweet about his inclusion on Big Think. Big Think heralds itself as way to cut through overwhelming amounts of information and gives you access to information directly from experts in their field. I’m still exploring the site but it looks to have some great resources and videos and is worth a visit. Here’s a talk from Zeldman about the future of journalism to get you going!

Of interest to coders is a comparison of the old robots.txt file to the new one. As if the case with many of the comparisons between the outgoing president, and incoming one, the old robots.txt file is pretty exclusionary having over 2,400 lines hiding specific content pages or folders from search engines while the new one has only two lines of standard exclusion rules. (via sherrett on twitter)

Data Visualization seems to be all the rage these days and there is a great summary of some of the instances of it from 2008 over at Flowing Data. (via MS on Twitter) Some of these were already familiar to me (Wordle and House of Cards) but there were some new surprising ones, most notably I Want You To Want Me by Johnathon Harris.

New ways or displaying and interacting with information seems to be on the rise. We just launched a new project called Branded Life with our own take of visualization inspired by Wordle. Developed with Jer from blprnt and Ryan Ilg, for Egg Strategy, the site allows focus group users to log their brand experiences through a day, and then visualize the results.

Almost a month ago, we launched our new identity: new logo, new website and blog, door sign, nice t-shirts and jackets, a big paaarty….and when you think it’s all over, here it comes: an amazingly long list of financial documents and internal forms that must be re-branded too. Welcome to the wonderful world of Excel and Word! As a designer and used to a friendly Adobe-Mac interface, that was tough. I may have been brainwashed by Adobe, but these softwares just don’t make any sense to me.
Then I found that: the world’s first music video in an Excel spreadsheet!  An AC/DC video — Black ice — converted into ASCII format. Wow Excel rocks!
You can watch it here or if you don’t have excel (shame on you) watch it on youtube.

Work on the web? Then you’re (hopefully) familiar with A List Apart. (if not, shame on you!) Last year they ran their first survey for Web Professionals (results located here) and it’s back this year. Go take a whopping 10-15 minutes out of your day and answer some questions about what you do!