I’m going to Amsterdam next week for the Mobilism conference. Bizarrely, there are still tickets available . I say “bizarrely” because it’s such an excellent event—it’s like the European equivalent of the Breaking Development conference. Don’t worry; I won’t be giving a presentation. I’ll leave that to experts like Remy , Lyza , Brad , and Jake . … Read the rest here
I was up in the big smoke last week for UX London . It was excellent: a thoroughly superb line-up of smart speakers and lovely attendees. Kate did a great job of making sure everything ran smoothly. But there’s no rest for the wicked. With UX London done, Clearleft is gearing up for the other two events we’ve got lined up: Ampersand in June —there are still some tickets available —and dConstruct in September . … Read the rest here
I’ve been huffduffing talks from this year’s South by Southwest , revisiting some of the ones I saw and catching up with some of the ones I missed. There are some really design and development resources in there that I didn’t get to see in person: Phil ’s talk on Excessive Enhancement: JavaScript’s Dark Side , Samantha ’s talk on Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles , Josh ’s talk on Tapworthy Touchscreen Design , and Scott ’s talk on Why Mobile Apps Must Die . One talk I did get to see was Andy ’s CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices . CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices on Huffduffer It was excellent. … Read the rest here
When I went to Webstock , I prepared a new presentation called Of Time And The Network : Our perception and measurement of time has changed as our civilisation has evolved. That change has been driven by networks, from trade routes to the internet. I was pretty happy with how it turned out. It was a 40 minute talk that was pretty evenly split between the past and the future. … Read the rest here
If attending a web conference is like going to a concert, South by Southwest in Austin is like Glastonbury: a massive multi-track event where the people on stage aren’t as important as tracking down the friends you know are somewhere in the crowd. An incredible amount of work goes into the event. When Jessica and I showed up in Austin last Thursday evening and headed straight to The Wholly Cow for a burger, there was a group of Southby volunteers at the next table, planning the next day’s activities like soldiers on the eve of battle. Make no mistake, South by Southwest is a triumph of planning and execution on a scale I can’t even begin to comprehend. I’m always amazed when I see Hugh wandering about looking cool as a cucumber—I’d be freaking out if it were me. … Read the rest here
South by Southwest has become a vast, sprawling festival with a preponderance of panels pitched at marketers, start-ups and people that use the words “social media” in their job title without irony. But there were also some great design and development talks if you looked for them. Samantha gave a presentation on style tiles , which I unfortunately missed but I’ll be eagerly awaiting the release of the audio. I also missed some good meaty JavaScript talks but I did manage to make it along to Jen ’s excellent introduction to HTML5 APIs . Andy ’s talk on CSS best practices was one of the best presentations I’ve ever seen. He did a fantastic job of tackling some really important topics… Read the rest here
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. –W. Somerset Maugham Pressing ‘Pause’ on this site for a while has afforded me time and distance to realign my writing objectives. An invitation from Chris Shiflett to join today’s “ Ideas of March ” has afforded me an opportunity to break the silence… Read the rest here
I had a whole day of good talks yesterday at South By Southwest yesterday …and none of them were in the Austin Convention Center. In a very real sense, the good stuff at this event is getting pushed to the periphery. The day started off in the Driskill Hotel with the New Aesthetic panel that James assembled. It was great, like a mini-conference packed into one hour with wonderfully dense knowledge bombs lobbed from all concerned. Joanne McNeil gave us the literary background, Ben searched for meaning (and humour) in advertising trends, Russell looked at how machines are changing what we read and write, and Aaron …um, talked about the helium-balloon predator drone in the corner of the room. … Read the rest here
I spent most of February on the far side of the world. I had the great honour and pleasure of speaking at Webstock in New Zealand. This conference’s reputation had preceded it. I had heard from many friends who have spoken in previous years that the event is great and that the organisers really know how to treat their speakers. I can confirm that both assertions are absolutely true. … Read the rest here
I’ve published the transcript of a talk I gave at An Event Apart in 2010 . It’s mostly about interaction design, with a couple of diversions into progressive enhancement and personality in products. It’s called Paranormal Interactivity . I had a lot of fun with this talk. It’s interspersed with videos from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy , Alan Partridge , and Super Mario , with special guest appearances from the existentialist chalkboard and Poshy’s upper back torso . If you don’t feel like reading it , you can always watch the video or listen to the audio . … Read the rest here
I was really disappointed to see a recent post from somebody I admire and respect defend the validity of the new UX Developer job title that has been cropping up of late. As well as being misleading, the title, UX Developer has implications that are damaging to the field of User Experience and will hasten the current devaluation of the term. Despite what many newcomers to the industry may think, User Experience Design is a well-defined specialism as distinct from visual or interface design. The practice of user experience design is a specific field of study with its own books, conferences, membership organisations and college courses. User experience designers therefore have a distinct set of skills and practices that form the core of their profession. That being said, user experience designers don’t own these practices any more than developers own the ability to code up wireframes. … Read the rest here
At last November’s Build conference I gave a talk on digital preservation called All Our Yesterdays : Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss. The video is now on vimeo . The audio has been huffduffed … Read the rest here
Though I certainly do not support SOPA or the PROTECT IP Act (the complete, rather contrived acronym of PIPA), I will not be blacking out meyerweb. This is largely because the vast majority of my readers already know about these bills, and very likely oppose them; as for anyone who visits but does not know about these bills, I feel I’ll do better to speak out than to black out. (Which is not a criticism of those who do black out. We all fight in our own ways.) Instead, I will reproduce here the letter I attempted to send via contact form to my state Senator this morning, and which I will print out and send by regular postal service later today. Senator Brown: I grew up in Lexington, Ohio. I moved to Cleveland in pursuit of a career, and found success. … Read the rest here
Aral recently released the videos from last September’s Update conference . You can watch the video of my talk if you like or, if video isn’t your bag, I’ve published a transcription of the talk . It’s called One Web, Many Devices and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a short talk—just under 17 minutes—but I think I made my point well, without any um-ing and ah-ing. … Read the rest here
A little while back, Andy wrote : Even if you happen to be a genius in the waiting, there are no svengalis to pluck you from obscurity and put you on the pedestal you know you deserve. … So if you want to contribute to articles, write books and speak at conferences, you’re the only person in the way. You can contribute to A List Apart . You can write for Smashing Magazine . You can also put a resource written in HTML at your own URL that is retrievable via HTTP …write a blog post, in other words. If you prefer dead trees, you no longer need a publishing house. … Read the rest here
It is once again that time of year where I reflect on the year that has passed and contemplate the year the come. Professionally On a professional level, this has been a fantastic year but still not without its ups and downs. This year capped my second and final year with Yahoo!. Yahoo! has been a great experience for me and exposed me to an environment that I hadn’t worked in before. I was able to work with large teams on a large scale across multiple products. To know that I had a big part to play in the success of those projects is very rewarding. … Read the rest here
I flew out to San Francisco last week for An Event Apart . This was the final event (apart) of the year so it was something of a bittersweet affair. This year the line-up for AEA was—with some minor modifications—consistent from city to city: Seattle Boston Atlanta Minneapolis Washington DC San Francisco It was like a travelling roadshow, a carnival of web geekery. Next year’s AEA line-up will be very different from city to city, showcasing lots of new speakers, so last week’s San Francisco gig felt like the last concert of a tour before the band breaks up. Well, we went out with a bang. … Read the rest here
I spent last week in Belfast for the Build conference , so I did. The fun kicked off with a workshop on responsive enhancement which was a lot of fun. Toby has written a report of the day outlining all of the elements that came together for a successful workshop. The day of the conference itself was filled with inspiring, uplifting talks full of positive energy …except for mine. My talk— All Our Yesterdays —had an underlying sense of anger, especially when I spoke about the destruction of Geocities. If you heard the talk and you’d like to explore some of the resources I mentioned, here’s a grab-bag of links: Stock and Flow by Robin Sloan. … Read the rest here
I’m on a bit of a sojourn in the United States right now, and I’m having a rather lovely time. It all started with Brooklyn Beta which was a jolly gathering in New York. It reminded me a bit of the Reboot events of old: grassroots gatherings that may be rough around the edges but are put together with much love and affection. There were plenty of inspiring talks and repeated entreaties to go out there and change the world. As with Reboot, I think Brooklyn Beta is an excellent part of a balanced conference diet: other conferences will give you more detail on how exactly you can go out there and change the world. In fact, my trip is perfectly balanced by two complementary events at either end… Read the rest here
I spoke at the DIBI conference back in June . It was a really good event, despite its annoying two-track format. My talk was entitled One Web : The range of devices accessing the web is increasing. We are faced with a choice in how we deal with this diversity. We can either fracture the web by designing a multitude of device-specific silos, or we can embrace the flexibility of the web and create experiences that can adapt to any device or browser… Read the rest here