Last night, I spoke at the latest Opera back standards>next gig, hosted at MadLab in Manchester.

Chris Mills put the call out months ago, asking if I’d like to take part, and could I herd up anyone else to speak. I recommended my fellow skating (albeit inline-blader!) and Fudge front-ender Mike Byrne as he’s a lively character, and certainly knows his shit, and that made four. Chris kicked off, followed, by myself and Typography Online.

Next up, Opera’s own Patrick Lauke talked (and talked) about media queries and viewports, which is very topical to work we’ve been doing this last week. Finally, Mike rocked up and went balls deep with CSS3 animations and transforms, loads to learn.

So, as promised, here’s my slides, and here’s some of the example code… enjoy.

Example type effects with CSS3 code

• 3D text 1
• 3D text 2
• 3D text 3
• Retro 3D
• Inset 1
• Inset 2
• Neon
• Stroke (webkit)
• Stroke and glow (webkit)

This week Howie and I attended a new conference in Nottingham, New Adventures in Web Design, organised by Simon Collison, or Colly as he’s better known.

Since Colly is possible the nicest guy on the internet and well respected, finding quality speakers wasn’t going to be a tough job, and for the conferences first show, the list was impressive. There were gripes from some quarters that all these speakers have been seen before, it’s the usual industry pundits, but I think that’s just sour grapes and being picky for the sake of it. Out of the ten speakers, I’d only seen five before.

In an effort to make conferences affordable and accessible, the venue was Colly’s hometown of Nottingham, which is in a great location, allowing access to people travelling from all points of the UK, the likes of Cole travelling from near Edinburgh, or Remy from Brighton, plus of course the foreigners who always make it over.

We hung out with Chris Mills, Dan Donald, Rob O’Rourke and of course, my long term partner in crime, Phil Sherry. On a side note, it was Phil’s 40th birthday last week, and I needed to get him a present. What can you buy a loud mouthed smart arse who likes to make his opinion or cutting wit known, especially in a crowded venue? Why, a megaphone of course! The look on a few people’s faces (especially the ones who know Phil) when we unveiled it before the conference kicked off was utter gold. Any situation is instantly made ten times more funny by adding a megaphone. Even the bouncers in the boozer the night before had to agree.

The Speakers

Dan Rubin – The New Language of Web Design
Cool, calm, collected, with a great delivery, Dan was an inspired choice to kick things off. His talk was about the language we use to define our trade, and how it’s about time this language matured and became “ours” instead of borrowing phrases or meaning from other trades, such as “page”, “fold” and “bleed”.

Mark Boulton – A New Canon
Mark talked about the need for a New Canon, a new set of rules for design interactive content in today’s digital age. Screen sizes and content delivery devices are all different sizes and shapes, meaning a lot of old ideas and methods are clunky. We need to design from ‘content out’ – not ‘canvas in’ as traditionally is done – to create connectedness and bind the content to the device. Mark’s delivery was a little nervous to begin, as he himself has acknowledges on tweets, but he soon found his stride. I’d not seen Mark talk before, and admire his design and typographical approach, so found this enjoyable.

Sarah Parmenter – Crafting User Experiences
I missed Sazzy‘s talk at DIBI, having stayed in a Build track, so it was a first for me. Sarah focused on the more emotional level of design and UX. Rapid cognition, sensation transference and how to connect on an emotional level to influence actions and reactions. A few good branding examples involving Coke and Pepsi showed where she was heading, and the colour chart that maps colours to different emotions around the world was great (for instance, while red may mean love in the West, it’s green in some Eastern countries). Unfortunately, I think the session lost it’s way a little towards the end, a few more strong examples of execution would have been good as Sazzy alluded to how you could use the emotional ties in UX for a shopping cart system, but while the ballon and card marketing for her agency was good, but I’d have preferred a more recognised brand, and not self-focused.

Refreshments –

Elliot Jay Stocks – With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
I like Elliot. He’s one of these people who can design, program, draw, play musical instruments and basically – I think – turn his hand to anything creative. He’s also really bloody modest. His session was a rant, a rebellion against the over use of the Web 2.0 look that is prevalent in online design. He calls it the “distraction of the real”, trying to make everything look like a real object by overuse of bevels, shadows and no real consideration to content. Good examples about traditional design styles, a look at print design, humour, typography and actually admitting that “giving in was ok” when a client wanted some of these drop shadow and real adornments, based on their audience. He’d get on well with our Creative Director who bloody hates the over embellishment by designers who’ve learnt “on the job”.

Jon Tan – Language and the Lizard Brain
A comment Jon‘s friend made to him, about the brain having a small area that literally had no language. This struck a chord with Jon, and he talked about connections on an emotional level, and how we can elicit response from colour and shape, without knowing meaning. He used a couple of typographical examples for this with the words love and hate (written in a foreign language) in fonts that said exactly the opposite. He showed how the designer for Blue Note records could design a cover that spoke volumes about the audio content of the record, despite not particularly liking jazz, because someone had written what kind of emotional response and feeling the record should produce. He even wove in a Bruce Lee slide and quote to illustrate his points. Good stuff!

Q&A session 1 –
A few questions that had been sent in via the twitter back channel, and a few from the crowd.

Lunch –
Interesting point about lunch. Because the conference was running a little behind schedule, Colly and the organisers had been following the back channel on Twitter – #naconf – and adjusted timings accordingly, cutting things short when people were complaining about being hungry around 1ish. Very smart.

Tim Van Damme – Designing On Solid Foundations
Tim tackled the issues of  one hit wonder, pixel heavy sites compared to relatively clean and minimal design on sites that keep you coming back for more. Calling us all Web Bums, for doing the same kind of job and getting paid as we do for free for our own projects, he urged us to make lists about the Good and Bad after a project, see where we can refine our processes. He talked a lot about best approaches for handling clients and the process in general. Tim’s delivery was a bit stilted, not because English is not his native tongue, but because it felt like this talk was brand new, and he was still getting to grips and trying it on.

Greg Wood – Art Direction & Editorial Design on the Web: Does it Work?
One of Greg‘s first slides had us laughing, about being able to piss a 50 mile bike ride, and his slides were all beautifully presented. Greg set out to illustrate the connection between seeing and experiencing, and how good art direction will connect and resonate with a reader with greater impact. And he was right, as he backed it up with stats from his own personal test with styled and unstyled content. Very interesting results, and I know Howie really got a lot from this talk. I think this may have been Greg’s first talk to a big audience, as he began brightly, but his delivery dried a little as he neared the end. Biggest reason for this, I reckon, was that he literally read out what was on the (well designed) slides. Still, the actual message and stats were very enlightening.

Veerle Pieters – Unraveling the Mysteries of Inspiration
Veerle‘s choice of subject was going to cause problems. Inspiration is unmeasurable and almost indefinable, you set the conditions up time and time again, sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. Her artwork and illustration was beautiful, and I found her lilting accent a little hypnotic, but it certainly did not get in the way of the delivery. Veerle talked her way through a piece of work, how she got started, how she was inspired, how she mixed it up to change track and put her mark on it. Good slides but nothing earth shattering. I think the best takeaway from Veerle’s session was the sources of her inspiration, her Firewall. She chose a tough subject to articulate, and that did show at times.

Refreshments –

Andy Clarke – Once Upon a Time In The West
Like him or loathe him, Malarkey can tell great story. Confident, well dressed and sharp wits and words, he is a great speaker. I’ve seen him twice before at Speak the Web and DIBI, and enjoyed them immensely. This talk was different. There wasn’t one slide with code on. There was no rant about supporting IE and designing in a browser. He talked about telling a story, using comic books formatting to speed up, slow down and give sense of size and space through clever boxing of content. He did apply this to how design can be expansive and let the brain fill in the blanks and how this may work on new devices like the iPad, but generally, we were there to think a little differently than we may normally do, sans grids.

Brendan Dawes – Produced for Use
I’ve known Bren for about 15 years. I’ve seen him on his soap box and riffing in a studio and on stage, but bloody hell he was on fire at #naconf. Bren’s been trying to declutter his life, and get rid of consumer products he doesn’t use, but get excited about the inherent beauty in products that do their job well. Crap tea strainers and paper clips from different countries, delivered in his “favourite uncle” style, I tell you, he had us all in stitches. Stand out line was when advocating a bit of digital play time, he said “Yeah, it’s in Flash, and guess what? Nobody died!” to which we gave him a round of applause. Bren’s approach to work is very creative and not tied to a platform or medium. He just makes things. A few glimpses at actual live projects and his latest acquisition, a Maker Bot, added oomph to his ranting, and showed he’s not full of shit. Great pick to be on last, he really gave the conference a massive, massive finish.

Q&A session 2 –
Again, a few questions that had been sent in via the twitter back channel, and a few from the crowd.

Thank you and goodbye –

After party –
The after party was at Escucha (Spanish for “listening”) where we got to catch up with all the online friends you don’t see often, or have yet to meet. Great bunch of people, from luminaries like Jon Hicks (taller than I thought) and Elliot mixing it with the crowd and chatting, to a bunch of Irish design students, who had the balls to introduce themselves and listen intently to industry advice.

Thoughts –
Colly has undoubtedly given the best inaugural birthing to a conference he possibly could (sorry DIBI, he just about pinched your newly acquired crown!) A brilliant community feel, great mix of speakers, lovely venue and exceptionally good price point made it all very worth while. If I could change anything, I’d move the date, as so soon after Christmas, some people’s pocket have taken a pounding, but I am really looking for a reason to be pick on here. I’m very much looking forward to next years event, and seeing how other people can up their ante in the aftermath of such a high quality event.

Thank you Colly and team, it was awesome.

Links –
Flickr group
Twitter stream

Time for another conference road trip!

The inaugural DIBI Conference took place at the Sage in Gatehead on the 28th April, with a fantastic crop of speakers and promising bunch of attendees, judging by the twittering.

DIBI’s format is a little different than a traditional conference, being a two track event. DIBI, which stands for Design It. Build It., was aimed at both developers and designers, with two sets of sessions running all day. Attendees could chop and change and “jump tracks” as they liked, and since a lot of the crowd were front enders, this seems quite a logical thing to do.

The journey up involved the usual road-tripper Chris Mills, but we picked up Dan Donald too, and headed up to crash at Phil Sherry‘s house, since he’s now resident in Gateshead. Yes, this small fact did make the trip more appealing!

We went straight to the venue when arriving, to pick up Phil, who’d been on an HTML5 Doctor course, taught by another mate of ours from Northern Digitals, Rich Clark. A quick wave/face pull at the window to put everyone off their stride, we then disappeared back upstairs to grab a drink. Here we met Gavin, Ellie and a few more of the DIBI organisers. I’d met Gav briefly at Speak The Web, but he was happy to chat with us while we quaffed a drink. This attitude from the organisers was there every moment of the conference, you could go ask them anything, and they were more than accommodating. Big props to them for this, as it made the whole gig feel a lot more accessible. Paul from Technique in Manchester also caught up with us for a pint, whom I’d met at a Transmission event in Manchester, and was to stick around with us for the next day.

Back to Phil’s to dump our gear, then after a veggie curry and a few cans, we headed off to The Forth to meet another mate from school who Phil and I hadn’t seen in around 15 years. There was no mistaking Simon Slater when he walked in, he’d hardly changed a bit! So we stayed in the excellent Forth pub for a few and caught up with him.

On to the pre-party, which was on the Tyne at Pitcher and Piano. Up the stairs, blag Si in at the door, get the beers in. Then start craning around to see who’s about! The pre-party was pretty well attended and it wasn’t long before we were bumping into twitter contacts and putting names to faces. The atmosphere was really laid back, and I think this helped the approachability for everyone.

I think we partied a little too hard at the pre-party, as I kinda remember heading to bed at 3.30am, and didn’t really arise ’til after 9am…

Anyway, hungover, and late to the conference, we skipped the keynote and Wolfram lecture, going straight for coffee and muffins, pocketing many little bags of Haribo for sugar fix rushes throughout the day.

I decided to go for the Build It track to kick off, the first session of which was run by Elliott Kember on jQuery. I’ve used jQuery a total of once, since our nerds at JP74 prefer MooTools (they can actually code javascript!), so there’s no need for me to get involved really. I learnt a lot in Elliott’s class, but it was not without it’s floors. There was a lot of code, but no visual examples of what was happening, and I think it may have been technically aimed a little low for some of the attendees, but his style and enthusiasm was irrepressible.

Next up, nearly half the hall exited for Sarah Parmenter‘s iPhone design session. I was too hungover, and felt well up on the HIG rules for iPhone interaction, so decided to stay for the Last.fm vs Xbox360 class. This was wryly and dryly delivered by David Singleton, who nearly thrashed my head when he said it’d be more technical than Elliott’s jQuery sesh. He lied, though not on purpose. It was about scaling the API and hardware to meet demand of an Xbox version of the Last.fm service. Really insightful process and decision making about how many features you can cull in moments of intense use before a user drops your service. Good stuff.

Lunch, burger, juice, coffee, more chat, meet more faces, both old and new.

Design track for this afternoon, as the speakers all looked excellent.

Tim Van Damme. Photo by @drbparsons

First off was Tim Van Damme, recently of Gowalla fame, urging us to keep evolving with not only our design, but the tools we use to create our designs, lest we become lazy monkeys. Good thinking, excellent art, Tim’s talk was enjoyable, although he himself admitted it was brief. Gavin stepped up and asked plenty of good questions to finish the session.

Next up was Simon Collison. I’d seen Colly talk at Speak The Web, and both his presentation and delivery were excellent. A very measured speaker, it serves to underline he knows what he’s talking about. This session drove at the principles of designing to communicate, highlighting basic rules, methodology and why we do things a certain way. Well worth a watch when the sessions are streamed on the DIBI site.

Short break, laugh that Phil fell asleep twice in that last sesh, cans of Red Bull.

Dan Rubin took the stage to host a talk on usability testing, in which he sighted two examples of real live client work and how they made a difference. Really insightful stuff, I thought Dan’s talk was excellent. Usability is something we should all do more of, but tend not to because of the perceived time it takes. Dan explained how they mocked up sites with a static PNG graphic as the background, then skeleton HTML & CSS to map out buttons on the page. Users were told it wasn’t finished, so only certain buttons worked, which kept expectations in check, and the format made updates and tweaks near immediate, ready for the next test subject. Not rocket science, and something you may think was a bit “ghetto” if you ran a usability session this way, but proved that the big boys have to Blue Peter their way through a job too!

Time for the tour de force that is Andy Clarke, with his Hard Boiled Webdesign. I’d seen malarkey’s talk before at Speak The Web in Leeds, but damn, I was quite happy to see it again. Andy is at ease under the spotlight, and knows what he’s talking about, which makes compelling viewing. The talk urged front end developers to start using the CSS3 progressive fanciness now, because if we didn’t, these cool things like border radius and animation would not make it into a browser spec. The W3C is holding everyone back, browsers include and work on things that devs start to use regularly, which then in turn become ratified into the spec. Excellent working examples, rallying of the troops and generally inspirational. I possibly enjoyed it more the second time round as I was ready to pay attention at the right times!

More refreshments, then time for a musical interlude from Sancho Plan. An interesting mix of live music triggering animations in a live on-screen virtual world. My ears were enjoying the music, whilst the brain was working out how to do what they’re doing. My route, use Director to catch MIDI triggers from the instruments to fire off animation sequences for sprites on the stage. If you understood that, that was the gig. Good, not offensive in anyway, but not my music of choice.

One last speech, by a usability company called What Users Do, which was interesting, but not as engrossing or hands on as Dan Rubin. This was followed by one last Sancho Plan performance, plenty of thank you’s from the organisers, and directions to the after party.

The after party was at Sea, over the other side of the Tyne, and the beer was free. All night. And there was free pizza. From Pizza Hut. Someone had our number and knew exactly what we liked! Everyone got together and exchanged views on how the day had been, high points, low points (if any) and got a chance to say hello to anyone you’d missed during the day.

I also gave a mate of mine who collects Sega Mega Drive games a ring and dragged him down for a beer. I’d talked to Ian online, swapped games and knowledge and envied his game collection, so it was great to meet him in person and to talk about more than just games too.

The after party was well attended, but people started to drift out and leave after the pizza, and we moved onto the Quayside for a swift pint with a few of the speakers. Colly, incidentally, is more than happy to chat with most people, about design and football (Notts County in particular) which was ace. The stragglers carried on the chatter and said good byes, we hopped a taxi and headed back to Phil’s, and I do remember getting to sleep shortly after 1.30am. Quite sensible.

So, to summarise. DIBI was excellent. The venue was class, easy to get to (though the walk with a hangover up all those steps would have me believe otherwise), the speakers were excellent. The crowd was fantastic, and you may have realised from some of this write up, the people you meet at conferences are just as important, if not more so, than the people you go and see. The conference itself was so professionally ran, so much so that it belied the fact it was the first DIBI. The team have ran many conferences before, and it moved smoothly.

Tickets are onsale for DIBI 2011 in June, and I’ll be there.

I’m really pleased to say that the whole Liverpool session of Speak The Web went down really well.

I managed to get through 30 minutes without committing social hari kari or making too bigger tit of myself. Pat Lauke was in full on Opera and HTML5 brainwash form, but energetic and interesting enough to be different from Chris Mill’s session at Leeds. The coup de grâce was obviously Simon Collison of Erskine Design, with his In the Pursuit of Magic presentation, and fair play to him for being drugged up but persevering and putting on a really thoughtful and inspiring presentation.

I really enjoyed my 30 minutes of fame and cannot believe how quick the time flew by. Starting at slide 1, with a counter at 00:01, it’s quite scary, but I felt that after a few slides I got into step quick enough. I’d seen Andy Clarke at Leeds, and had heard that Elliot Jay Stocks and Andy were coming to the Liverpool session. No pressure then! Fortunately, I’d had a few beers with Elliot in Manchester a couple of weeks before, and he turned out to be a thoroughly down-to-earth nice bloke, and we share a lot of common ground with our musical tastes.

There were *loads* of things I’d tried to remember to say, but completely forgot, but also quite a bit I just threw in on the spot. Preparation made this possible, and knowing your subject material!

A bit about why I chose my subject matter, to give you some idea of the decision making as a speaker. When writing the presentation, I didn’t know how the room was going to be split, in terms of designers, front end devs and coders, which is why I asked for a quick show of hands. That made it clear that front end devs were out in force, so hopefully I pitched that well.

I was also aware that I was merely the warm-up act for this gig, and it was my first time speaking at a conference for a long time, so I couldn’t afford to be too esoteric or banal (no, I’m not suggesting Colly was!) but knew I had to be fairly straight forward, but be competent in what I was presentating.

So thank you very much to Dan Donald and Rich Clark for organising the Speak The Web events and inviting me to be part of it all, and thanks to everyone who said hello on the evening, and to all those who’ve followed me on Twitter. I hope you stick around…

Here’s my presentation from the night, and you’ll find Pat and Colly’s on the slideshare.net site.

A Thursday night out? Drinking? …Again?

But wait, you were out on Monday night too… what gives, Smith?

Ok, I will come clean. Monday’s drinking was less about the drinking (hah!) and more about talking with Chris Mills and Patrick Lauke about presenting, presentation material and subjects around validation and general geekiness. We did not at one point mention any rumour or conjecture about the iPad, which I feel is very important to mention. Leffe and Hoegaarden were order of the evening!

However the Transmission 3 (#tx3) event was different. It was all about the mobile web, the pleasure and the pain of being in this field. There were 3 speaking slots, starting with Chris Mills from Opera giving an overview of mobile to date. Peter-Paul Koch of Quirksmode whose done a ridiculous amount of research on the state of mobile browsing. Finally, two likely lads from down south, Polls and Mills from usTwo, would look at the world of iPhone app dev.

Developing for Mobile Platforms – The pleasure and the pain (ker-tsscchhhhh!)
The talks kicked off with a good overview of mobile history from Chris Mills, the beginnings of mobile browsing, the reasons why it’s prevailant and reasons why it’s a current fave for marketing folks. Good content from Chris, like WAP, earliest networks and general do’s and dont’s about developing for mobile platforms. Interesting to be reminded how far we’ve come with mobile browsing in a short space of time.

PPK on the state of mobile browsers
The amount of time PPK has put into testing mobile browsers is insane. He’s tested, prodded, poked and broke pretty much every flavour on every device. A very interesting sentence from PPK was something along the lines of “on the mobile web, IE does not matter”. IE on mobile is so utterly shit, everyone who has it instantly goes and gets something like Opera Mobile.

The mobile browser usual suspects usually fall into one of two camps, Opera or WebKit. However, that’s not quite as simple as that sounds, there’s about 10 flavours of WebKit browsers, running various Javascript engines, with different switches set at compile time. Still, 95% of what you do in a browser will work on all WebKit devices.

PPK also got quite excited about Widgets and their future potential. Supported by Opera, a widget is a collection of HTML, images, CSS and JS, which is zipped and the extension changed to .wgt. His main gripe is that at the moment wdigets are not allowed device level access, to things like GPS, address book etc, as it’s a massive security concern, but if this can be solved, it’ll be quite the revelation, apparently.

usTwo and a story of iPhone how not-to’s
Polls and Mills were the only iPhone specific talkers of the night, and they had some stories to tell! Completely self-depreciating, the lads put a very funny spin on all the things the did in terms of marketing that would do amazing things like generate sales of… 150 apps.

They build the apps out of pure love, as they don’t spin much money, but as a marketing tool, they get their name out and in the press and chip chip chip away at the media. The apps are cool toys to show current and prospective clients, and open the door to branding and promotional opportunities.

They openly admitted they from a design background, and didn’t talk technical, but their approach to everything was very funny, beating themselves up, but with the underlying current of “yeah, but we’ve learnt loads in the process”.

Comedy moment, when they were talking about their Ben10 MouthOff app, I had bought it a week earlier while sat on the couch on a saturday morning with my son. I fired the app up and had it ready when they asked if anyone had seen it, it was only right to respond with the MouthOff app over my mouth!

Conclusion
All in all, tx3 was great. Very insightful, very inspiring and an area that we as JP74 are actively getting into, very important. More of this please, Digital Sparks!

I’m honoured to have been invited to speak at an upcoming web “gig”, by my two mates Rich Clarke and Dan Donald.

Speak The Web aims to break down the barriers that prevent a lot of people getting to the bigger conferences. Travel, time off work, hotels and the bar bill can all be quite prohibitive, so the lads have started a grass roots collective of local talent and are hitting four venues in the North.

Being a scouser, they asked me if I’d be interested in the Liverpool venue, and of course I said yes.

The tickets are all very reasonably priced, and the whole atmosphere is hoping to be more like a gig than a conference, with speakers hanging round for beers and chat after the shows. I intend to get to the other three, as all the speakers are insightful.

Find out more info at the speaktheweb.org site, or follow them on Twitter, #speaktheweb. See you there!

Finally, just a shade over six months after being propositioned by the mighty Chris Mills to do some writing, my article is online!

The site, dev.opera.com is a resource aimed squarely at people who are web-literate and happy to get their hands dirty in code. However it’s quite techy, and not too design-led, either theory or practice.

Chris asked me to get involved and write an article that fused a bit of design know-how with technical ability, and since we’d just finished the GDR Creative Intelligence web site at work, which features sIFR heavily, I thought sIFR would be an ideal candidate.

The article didn’t actually take six months to write, it was done in fits and bursts, mostly while in Spain on holiday, but took a while to get edits done as Mills, in his capacity as Opera’s Developer Relations drinker is all around Europe at conferences and spreading the good word.

So, without further ado, here’s my article… I hope you find it useful.