Hickensian by Tag

Last week I had the pleasure of attending @media 2009 in London, where it has to be said, I had the best conference experience I’ve had for a long time. I prefer the more cosy nature of the event – a single track, not too large and overwhelming quantity of people, and simply great talks. I can’t pick one favourite presentation, as I came away feeling really inspired and energised by everything.

It was also the last @media curated by Patrick Griffiths, who is moving on to follow other passions (from next year the conference will be in the able hands of the Web Directions Team). I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick for encouraging me to talk, and giving the best possible environment to do it in.

After giving the presentation, I realised that there are 2 areas, only touched on briefly here, that should be expanded on: Icon Accessibility and Icon Usability Testing. Those are big topics for another day/talk/blog post, so until then here are my slides for my talk on ‘Icons for Interaction’:

Download the Icons for Interaction PDF (18mb). All links are available on my delicious account, tagged icondesigntalk. My speaking notes are also included in the PDF, hopefully this will be enough to make the slides meaningful.

The typeface I used for this was Comic Crafts Astronauts in Trouble.

Now that I’m back from Future of Web Design, I’ve got a chance to do more of a write-up.

The FOWD sessions were great, with sponsored Microsoft slot aside (“Please make the bad man stop…”). Andy Budd particularly engaged me with his presentation of the “User Experience Curve”, and Steve Pearce from Poke had the slides I wish I’d done. It was the first time I’d heard Paul Boag outside of the podcast, and I think he did a tremendous job of chairing the event.

My first duty of the day was the ‘live Photoshop Battle’ which I had a few misgivings about. The team weren’t keen on the ‘battle of the sexes’ idea, so we’d decided to collaborate in teasing Andy Clarke instead. It was a bit of an experiment, especially in the “people still wandering back in from lunch” slot, but afterwards I think all involved agreed that it didn’t really work. I saw one comment on Twitter that said it was “Cliquey in-jokes” which I think was fair-comment!

I had been asked by Paul to talk about the nitty gritty end of design – taking a design through to launch, which I was concerned would be teaching people to suck eggs. After all, this would be the bread and butter of everyones everyday work.

For those of you that weren’t there, I decided to do this via Cheesophile- a demo site to highlight a few of the choices we have make while creating a website. It was never intended to cover such things as dealing with Content Management Systems (where would you start?!), fluid vs fixed or ems vs pixels. In 50 minutes, you have to focus and I wanted to cover some topics like excluding certain browsers from seeing CSS, typography tips and image creation. Yes, it did turn into a bit of a Fireworks advert, just be glad I didn’t go on about how much I love Coda!

In the end, I realised that I had cut out about 15 minutes of the talk. Not intentionally, but once I got up there, I found I wasn’t looking at my notes and missed a few key points I wanted to make!

So, here are my slides in Deployment.pdf (21.9 MB PDF) for the talk. The demo page of Cheesophile is also live, with the accompanying files available to download (includes the layered Fireworks PNG files). Cheesophile is far from perfect – it’s not bulletproof and lacks some basic things (like a search field) that you would expect from a site, but it is what it is – a demo for the purpose of the talk.

URLs mentioned in the talk:

• MAMP
• Headdress
• Yahoo Graded Browser Support
• Matthew Pennells Grid Calculator
• Grid Layouts.js
• Firebug
• Position is Everything

I missed out on the last 2 talks, and the post-party as I felt as rough as 2 badgers – but I was really sad to miss out on meeting people that evening. The following day was not only my son Daniel’s 5th birthday, but it was our 10th wedding anniversary, so it was definitely time for the family!

Many thanks for the kind comments about the talk. If you have any constructive feedback, positive or negative, please leave a comment. I feel that I am gaining my confidence as a speaker, and I’m genuinely interested to hear any suggestions on how to improve.

Finally, as the PDF doesn’t include the movie clip, here’s the scene from Father Ted that was used in the talk!

I spent a thoroughly fulfilling hour last night watching Cabel Sasser’s presentation for C4 on how Panic started, developing my favourite tool Coda, and generally interface and icon design. I’ve never heard Cabel talk before, although I got an impression of his voice from his blog, but the reality was better than I had imagined.