designing stuff and writing codes
We just booked up tickets for my two favourite conferences, The Highland Fling in Edinburgh and @Media 2008 in London.
I’m really looking forward to both this year, last time was a blast, especially the Fling, it’s fantastic having a conference of it’s caliber in my home town.
Hopefully we can swing a few more this year as I’d love to attend dConstruct and FOWA .
The one major rule I have in both flash and html design is, do not resize my window with javascript ever.
If my window is not full screen or has task or status bar, it’s probably like that for a reason, it’s my browser, not yours. It’s impolite, your website is a guest in my computer, so don’t make a mess of it!
Rant over and out.
Almost travel recovered from my trip to @media 2007. It was a great event actually, lots of wonderful talks, I especially enjoyed the ones from Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, Simon Willison, Simon Collison, Drew McLellan, Hannah Donovan, Tantek Çelik and Andy Clarke, who did a bit about taking design ideas from comics, heh I knew those 18 years of reading was leading up to something!
Some food for thought to bring back to work, things like the scrum management process and getting php installed on our servers so we can use those cool little scripts for hCard and hCalendar transformations. Not to mention continuing my fight for changing our site from asp.net to django (never happen, but I can dream!).
Tantek’s talk enlightened me to the Sandbox theme for wordpress, which I’m now using on this design refresh, it’s chock full of lovely microformats.
Well that’s two fantastic days of web stuff over with. Wednesday, Andy Clarke held a fantastic workshop on markup and CSS for our development team, which has really opened the team’s eyes to the possibilities inherit in good semantic markup and separation of presentation from structure. It’s going to be a pleasure working on future projects that follow up this workshop. So I’d like to say a big thanks to Andy for taking the time to work with us on this.
Today was the Highland Fling conference, which was simply amazing, Alan White and the rest of the people involved did a brilliant job putting together both a fun and informative day on progressive enhancement and I’d like to extend a thank you to all involved with that too. I walked away with lots of notes and tons of ideas in my head. Most of which relate to this site and improving it, it’s gonna be fun!
Working as an internal web designer/developer as I do, it’s often easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of the web world. Standards and new technology tend to get pushed aside due to the tight deadlines that tend to occur. Because of that I can find myself very disillusioned with my job, I think that’s why conferences like these are so important. Hearing other experiences and even that other people are having the same ideas and have the same belief in what the web can be is invigorating and re-establishes for me why I wanted to become a web designer in the first place.