This is my short review of the Future of Web Design conference which I attended last Thursday in London. Originally this post was nowhere near short and got so detailed that I was going to have to split it down into two parts! After reading over what I'd wrote again, this is a slightly slimmer version.

I'd never attended any of the Carsonified events before, I had been to a few local events around the south coast but this was my first event of this scale - I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, I had heard very mixed reviews, but I really wanted to have my own opinion; if I didn't have a good experience then at least I'd tried it once. The event itself was held at Kensington Town Hall, after breakfast we headed to the venue where we were greeted by the Carsonified team.

After registration the event kicked off with a great presentation by Jim Coudal from Coudal Partners. Jim spoke about quite broad topics, such as taking design inspirations from the print industry, and that short attention spans are a good thing and he encourages it in his colleagues, he said it can help us have a diverse set of skills and can help us find other passions we never knew we had, he then showed us a video about regrets. Jim went on to explain why he liked design, and when he gets a flash of inspiration and makes something cool is when he gets addicted. And finally he spoke briefly about the Seed Conference.

Next up was Meagan Fisher, a web designer from SimpleBits - she spoke about designing effective mobile interfaces and gave us some great tips and reason why our clients need to have a mobile version of their website - The basic concept was that your mobile website is your site but without any style, just the raw HTML, this is due to most mobile devices not supporting CSS and some HTML and the mobile sites would also load faster; once you've stripped everything out just add a little bit of colour and your basic branding, a logo and perhaps a background, then your done. The other good thing she suggested is that your mobile website shouldn't be a recreation of your normal version, but instead a specially tailored version, perhaps with unique mobile-only content.

After Meagan was Brett Welch from the eCommerce service GoodBarry - I was looking forward to seeing Brett speak since I already have an interest in eCommerce - his presentation was titled Beyond Pixel Pushing and gave tips on how to build better websites and have happier clients - The main thing I remember from Brett's speech was his break down of clients into two categories, the know-it-all type, the ones who "think they know everything, because they read about ten blog posts on the internet" and the type who isn't too bothered about their website, but they know they want one. He suggested we try and dilute the over enthusiastic clients and then try to encourage the ones who aren't fussed.

Next we had a short break where I got to use some of my free coffee vouchers and also meet up with the FileShareHQ crew from Slipstream Studio - then it was Mark Boulton's time to speak; this is another presentation I'd personally been looking forward to seeing, I'd found out a few weeks ago that my dad went to university with Mark, both studying Typography and Graphic Design, my dad moved on to become a typographer and a playing card designer; since my dad had taught me a lot of the things I know, I figured I would enjoy Mark's talk. I was correct and Mark's presentation turned out to be one of the best of the day - he spoke about typography on the web, and about how many successful websites are mostly just content with a little bit of branding; a great example of this was when he switched off everything on Flickr and YouTube except the text and the website looked basically the same, proving that in these examples, the websites were the typography. Mark also taught us some great tips about which typefaces to use and when, what is most suitable for body text, titles and also which were created for the printer and which were for the screen.

After Mark's presentation was Robin Christopherson the founder of AbilityNet who's presentation was about designing for people who are handicapped, despite being blind Mark uses the web everyday with tools such a screen-reader, he demonstrated many problems he comes across with major websites such as YouTube and GMail - the results were completely jaw-dropping.

The next presentation was by Carsonified's own Lead Designer Mike Kus; Mike's speech was titled Graphic Design: The Forgotten Web Standard - overall I felt the presentation was quite light hearted, although he did have some fantastic slides and also played a nice song at the end with a high speed video of how he created the slides - Mike also gave everybody a poster of slide one from his presentation.

Francesca and Louise from Redweb had been invited to have lunch with Paul Boag and asked me to join them, Paul wasn't speaking at the event but instead was conducting interviews with each of the speakers for his podcast; we ate in a restaurant called My Old Dutch, which serves an odd variety of pancakes, there was chicken curry pancake to prawn cocktail pancake, I decided to have an Italian Dutch pancake, which was fairly straight forward.

The first person to speak after lunch was Sabrina Dent, a freelance web designer from Cork in Ireland, although she sounded like she was from New York City - unfortunately I really didn't enjoy Sabrina's presentation, she decided to read directly off of a piece of paper and sounded completely monotone and unengaging; she even admits that she didn't do a very good job on her own blog.

Next up was Folkert Gorter from Superfamous Studios, I've been a huge fan of Folkert's work for a long time, I regularly visit QBN and SpaceCollective both of which he worked on - Folkert's presentation was mainly based around his portfolio and previous work and there weren't many great tips; although overall it was enjoyable.

The next presentation was my Microsoft where they recreated the movie Watchmen using their Microsoft Surface product. I felt it wasn't anything to do with web design or designers - I unfortunately didn't enjoy it; here's a tweet which captured the general opinion of everyone:

After a short break we had two more presentations to go - overall I felt the morning speakers were much more enjoyable than the afternoons, but I did realise I was getting pretty tired towards the end of the day! The next person to speak was Simon Sankarayya from AllofUs. His presentation was very similar to Folkert Gorter's - where he mostly showed us his portfolio from over the last 13 years, much of which was out dated and not very relevant to the future of the web, but I did find his presentation fun to watch and it had to some good tips.

The final presentation of the day was by Molly Holzschlag, everybody seemed pretty tired by this point but her talk was very engaging, she had a very similar style to Jim Coudal; she knew her stuff and she spoke directly to the audience - Molly's seemed to be one of the only presentations focused on the future of the web, she discussed web standards and where she believes they are going - she's an expert in the industry and I think everybody learnt something new about web standards. The one thing she said that stood out to me was "It is what is implemented, not what is specified that becomes the true standard", meaning if we all start using cutting edge techniques then it will be adopted as the standard.

At the end of the event we were all invited to an after party at a bar called Onanon in Piccadilly Circus - this was a great opportunity for networking and to chat with the speakers from the event; there was a free bar for everyone who attended and overall this was one of the highlights of the day. And although Elliot Jay Stocks wasn't speaking at the conference he made an appearance at the party and spent time chatting to everyone!

In conclusion I feel I got more out of the networking and having a chance to meet new people than I did from the presentations; I'd have to say about 50% of the presentations didn't cut it and if I was attending for the presentations alone I'd not have got value for my money - I don't think I'll attend Future of Web Apps, only because I'd get even less out of a development conference than a design conference; but I'm in two minds about the next Future of Web Design, it all depends on who's speaking, if they seem good I'm likely to get a ticket.

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