@media London 2008 round-up. Day 1
I’d really love to write an insightful, in-depth review of @media London 2008. Instead, here’s a bumbling, quick-fire round-up of my thoughts from this years’ @media conference in London.
Jeff Veen kicks off the proceedings with a keynote. Jeff was a great choice for this — he’s a really good speaker. I saw him speak at both @media 2006 and dContruct2006 and they were both highlights for me. It’s just a shame that two years on this presentation contained so much of the same material.
Following Jeff was Indi Young, once a colleague of his from Adaptive Path. Indi was talking about Mental Models and I honestly didn’t get this at all. It’s all about talking to your users and collating the information, then creating 10 foot long diagrams or vast walls of sticky notes. I’m sure this is really valuable stuff for enterprise-size companies looking to splash the cash, but somehow I think @media wasn’t really the right audience for it.
Following this I went to Getting Your Hands Dirty with HTML5. It was interesting, and extending the HTML spec does make a lot of sense, but I think most people were left with the feeling that it just isn’t going to happen any time soon. Modern browsers might start supporting it in the next couple of years, but since a huge number of people are still using the 7-year old IE6… Well, you know.
I’ve seen Andy Clarke speak quite a few times now and his talks are always entertaining and insightful. This session, called Underpants Over my Trousers, showed how Andy took his comic book passion and used it as inspiration for a design for a newspaper who wanted ’something a bit different’. That’s certainly what they got! I think the content management developers at said newspaper will have had a heart attack when they saw the solution, but hey, that wasn’t the point! Some really good examples of tight CSS too.
My favourite talk of the day was Dan Rubin’s Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference. Dan is an excellent speaker, and I’m a stickler for detail, so this was like my perfect talk. Discussing proportion (so obvious yet so overlooked, by me anyway), typography, kerning, grids, textures, subtlety and depth, this is exactly the sort of talk I attend conferences like this for. Inspiring stuff.
Posted by Olly on May 31, 2008 at 7:40 am in conference and tagged with @media, @media2008, atmedia, atmedia2008, london
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