Hollidazed

Last friday I attended d.construct 2006 at the Corn Exchange in Brighton. It was a really good conference and answered many of my questions about API‘s as well as addressing the usefulness of the various services to designers/developers working in real business situations.

Without wanting to review everything that happened in fine detail my highlights of the day were the Jeremy Keith and Jeff Veen sessions:

Jeremy Keith’s – The Joy of API – simply looked at having fun with web services and what is actually possible. This was the most inspiring talk of the day and he also taked about Microformats with great enthusiasm – something I’ve already begun to implement on the sites I work on. I agree that it’s a real benefit to open your data up as much as possible using Microformats. Unfortunately I didn’t make the Microformats picnic though as the call of the Gormet Burger Kitchen was too hard to resist.

My other highlight of the day, Jeff Veen’s session about designing the complete user experience, really helped put everything else into context and looked at making sure that we still focus on user-centred design when working with API’s and creating mashups. This session is especially worth downloading when the the podcasts of the event are released.

Overall the event was really well run and everyone I spoke to was really friendly – Brighton was even really lovely and sunny, something that never happened during the entire month of August. If your a web designer or developer and havn’t been to d.construct yet I’d definetly recomend going next year simply because of value for money for the quality of presentation.

Finally there’s also a really good podcast largely focused this week on reviewing d.construct and interviewing some of the key speakers (especially covering Microformats) by Paul Boag on the excellent Boagworld podcast.

Since launching this blog I’ve unfortunately struggled to find the time to work on what is ultimately most important to me as someone who works making websites… the design. I love working with web standards and am committed to accessibility and usability but most of all the reason I choose to spend 4 years studying art and graphic design is because I care about how things look visually. It’s therefore long overdue that I finally made some time to work on an initial template for this site.

I really hope the design will evolve over time and see this space as the place for trying out things that I perhaps wouldn’t lean towards on commercial projects… just because I can really. I think it’s healthy for designers to look at what inspires them and I guess as well as talking about the web I almost hope this space can become a kind of web sketch book for me.

I’ve deliberately started with a simple design and wanted to use white space well to balance the artwork I devised for the header and logo. The image used was inspired by a postcard I picked up in Berlin of the Sony Centre. I love the architecture of the roof which is like a giant tent of steel and glass that almost floats over the building. I really liked the idea of trying to work with this image out of context.

My idea with the colour scheme was to keep things really simple and almost sway towards primary colours… this was simply because I wanted to work with a bold pallet that wasn’t part of my usual day job.

Anyway hope you like it and come back to watch it evolve over time any comments are always welcome.

I’m pleased to say I’m the proud owner of one dconstruct 2006 ticket. I believe they sold out in 36 hours so it will be great be there… especially as it’s in Brighton!

Well I’ve finally got around to writing a blog. As you can see we’re currently running on the good old wordpress default template… but I have always said that content was more important than style (cough!)… but no really, good things shall come of this and I thought that it might actually be nice to document in the blog how I designed the blog as we go along. Expect further updates over the next couple of weeks on that one (hopefully!).

In other news… what better way to start than by saying I’m pleased to say that I’m off to @media 2006 tommorow which will be my first ever web conference so I look forward to discovering the world outside of life as a in-house graphic/web designer for a large FE College.