New Adventures In Web Design Conference

He compared much older trades such as engineering and boat building, where in their beginnings they had similar problems where different words were used for the same things and there was no standardisation. It took time for the well-known and well-suited words to be established.

An example was that of "line height" and "letter spacing", a common CSS term, but in traditional print, these things are known as "leading" and "kerning", arguing why is there a difference for the same thing? One word that particularly griped with Dan was "page". Something which has edges, but in web design he explained that we have attempted to create the edges and that should not necessarily be the case (something which Mark Boulton also mentioned in his talk).

Some examples of "good" words to use were "Ajax" and "Web" - words which have been well chosen and cannot be confused. Dan’s example of a well-thought-out computer term was "scroll", something which Apple came up with in the early days of its operating system to describe the ability to move up and down the content. Dan put it to us that this word was not thought up instantly. It is such a well chosen word for its task that much research was spent going into its adoption.

mark boulton Knowing Mark’s involvement with Drupal, in particular his time on the recent redesign of drupal.org, he was a speaker I very much wanted to hear. His talk was titled "A New Canon," which in simple terms means that we need "a new set of guidelines" for web design. He had three key words to use as a basis: "respond," "connect" and "bind."

Dan had also mentioned that you get the impression that the buzz word at the moment is "responsive css," where, depending on your browser and device, a web site will "respond" and display it’s best suited layout. This is something Hydrant has already started developing on our higher-end web sites where budget allows.

Mark expressed his concern over "eBooks" and how the viewer cannot "connect" with them like a tangible book, in which you can feel its texture and inhale its aroma.

From a technical point of view, he put it to us that we should abandon pixels and use ems for everything as our unit of measurement. I can see exactly where he is coming from with this and believe that one day this will be possible as it is something I picked up on a good few years back, but there is still a way to go for example with Internet Explorer's poor ability to scale images smoothly.

andy clarke For many, the most anticipated speaker was Andy Clarke, having recently released his "Hard Boiled Web Design" book and being a well known voice of opinion in the web design world. I saw Andy last year in Newcastle at the successful Dibi conference where his talk was all about his new book and the sort of things you can expect from it.

With a very similar feel to his Hard Boiled talk, this time his talk was called "Once Upon a Time on the Web" and he obviously took inspiration from "Once Upon a Time in the West" with its cowboy/western feel. The main argument was about the constant talk of the web sites we build being all about delivering the user to the end point as quickly as possible, such as with a shopping cart checkout experience - the aim is for the user to enter their card details without any distractions.

This is totally valid, but at the same time, there must be cases when the viewer needs to be made to think a little and not be rushed. They should spend time devouring the design which makes them like a product even more. The size of frames in a comic book were used as an example. A large frame suggests more time spent looking at it compared to a quick succession of three short frames where action may be taking place. This can be easily translated to the web - the larger the area, the more time a viewer spends looking at it. It’s not just down to attracting your attention, but the time spent taking certain elements in.

brendon dawes Brendon gave off the impression that he’s a bit of nutter, to say things plainly. His talk was titled "Produced for Use" and for half of it he discussed his obsession with pencils, pencil sharpeners and paperclips – he's clearly a stationery addict!

But somewhere in the madness, the onlookers were taken in and there was indeed a message (I think!). This was that as designers, the things we are creating should be "perfection" and there should be no room for anything less. Compared to his pencil fetish, he explained that there is only one particular type of pencil he will have in his house and any other is not welcome.

Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here