Once again, I’m pouring over my notes from another fantastic @media web design and development conference, this time the sessions with the world’s top designers and developers were hosted at the lovely South Bank Centre in London.
The folks at Vivabit put together a stellar line-up including some great talks like Jeffrey Veen’s “Designing Our Way Through Data“, Bronwyn Jones’ “The Book was Better : Writing as Source Material for the Web“, Dan Rubin’s “Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference” and Nate Koechley’s “Professional Front-End Engineering“.
Andy Clarke’s comic book themed session “Underpants Over My Trousers” was was of particular interest to me as it covered the idea of taking design and layout cues from comic books and applying them to the web. With both being great passions of mine, this is something I’ve been thinking about some time, but have always struggled with the execution.
Here, he details down some fantastic ideas to control the user experience through subtle but effective techniques rather than overt ones that have been employed in the past like animation.
These concepts like border breaking, in which a character or item bursts out of the confines of a comic panel to attract the reader’s attention seem simple but when you think about it, the typical reaction in web design has been to put the most important info into a box.
I think Andy Clarke will be doing similar sessions at a few other conferences this year, so I highly recommend web designers to check this one out, and I’d also like to add a note of interest in seeing a book on the topic too!
Traditionally this conference has really given me a boost during somewhat difficult periods in my work and this year was no different. So I want to say a huge thank you to all the speakers this year for sharing their considerable knowledge and to the organisers for putting on consistently great shows year upon year.
