I say, what is this Britpack and what do they want?

Malarkey wrote about The Britpack recently and I spent way too long posting a response. This post is a regurgitation of said comment for my legions of readers.

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The Britpack: The Masons of web design ;-)

*nudge nudge, wink wink*

I’ve always thought the Britpack thing was a little eccentric, very British, and only a little exclusive. But I don’t think exclusivity is a bad thing, at least not in this case. It’s just a bunch of mates working in the same area having a bit of a lark.

But the Britpack has come to mean more than that to many. After countless books and worldwide speaking agendas by Britpack members (fnar), the Britpack logo has become a stamp of authenticity, a badge of honour, a symbol of skill.

These days there are are loads of amazing, standards-compliant, British, web-designing bloggers out there who don’t proudly ‘boast the briefs’, and they probably feel left out. If you’re that good, where are your Brit pants, eh?

So what do you do? You have three choices. You either bin the Britpack (’burn the pants, burn them!’), keep it, or change it.

Binning it would be daft. They’re great pants.

Keeping it the same is only going to cause you more of this grief.

Changing it, therefore, is the only way. Give the pants a touch of Blairite reformation and start handing out a pair to every righteous British subject. Tally-ho chaps!

You shouldn’t need to invent the one true layout to be invited, or have to put your face about at the right conferences (trust me, it’s an expensive habit for lowly freelancers), you just need to have passion, dedication and devotion for the web, standards, and all that malarkey.

Oh, and you need to be British.

And you have to like cheese.

Posted by Olly on March 20, 2007 at 10:26 pm in britpack, uk, web
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@media 2006 - Day Two

A perfect London summer morning for the second day of @media 2006 meant I could stroll to the venue and I arrived just in time for Dan Cederholm’s insightful presentation, Bulletproof Web Design. Not only does Dan have heaps of experience and a stunning portfolio of work, he has a seemingly endless attention to detail. Inspiring stuff which I’ve definitely taken to heart. I’m still not sure what DigDug is though :-)

Next up was Javascript Libraries: Friend or Foe? with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge, Dan Webb, and Simon Willison. As primarily a software developer, I found this rather frustrating. The entire session was a discussion of whether Javascript libraries were useful or not, but I found the arguments on both side lacking in rationale: “I don’t like libraries, I like to cut & paste the code I need”, for example. There was a lot of focus on the Dojo Toolkit but I didn’t really take much away from this.

Enter Cameron Moll presenting Mobile Web Design.

This was of an excellent presentation (and Cameron wins the ‘Slide Design’ award hands down), introducing the issues surrounding designing for mobile devices, discussing how such designs should be approached (think: “What is contextually relevant?”) and introduced me to a worrying number of new acronyms and buzzwords (Flash Lite, LBS, RFID, XHTML-MP, .mobi). There’s no escaping the fact that mobiles are going to be an increasingly large target market for web designers and this was a perfect introduction.

Lack of time management skills (and talking to Cameron) meant I missed the first part of CSS Project Management with Rachel Andrew, Roger Johansson and Dave Shea, but I took a lot out of what I saw. It was a panel discussion of different techniques and tools for managing CSS projects and it was interesting to hear people’s differing approaches. When the topic of development environments was raised, I didn’t get a chance to plug Karlis Blumental’s astonishingly good WeBuilder product, so there’s a quick plug. If only it were available on the Mac. Gah!

The last presentation was the Modfather himself, Andy Clarke, who was looking seriously sharp:

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design was great, taking Andy’s scrapbook inspirations and applying them to the web, questioning and challenging designers to take the initiative and push CSS to the limit. In essence, forgot trying to make sites look identical in IE 4, IE5 and Safari 1 and instead, make them look awesome in Firefox and Safari 2 and leave them to just work in older browsers. This is just so right that I’m sure this will be the next web design movement. Look out for the book (”Transcending CSS”) in the autumn.

To wrap up, Molly Holzschlag, Jon Hicks, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik held a “hot topics” panel discussion about AJAX, the World Cup, cheese and the Next Big Thing (Microformats - you heard it here last). Here’s the panel, minus Tantek (sorry dude):

You can probably tell I had a great time. I’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years and this was, without question, the best I’ve been to. Not only were the presentations superb, but the atmosphere was friendly and the speakers wanted to talk to people over coffee. If they weren’t speaking, they would have been there anyway! And that pretty much says it all.

Posted by Olly on June 16, 2006 at 10:22 pm in @media, atmedia, css, news, web
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@media 2006 - Day One

Some very good presentations today, kicking of with Eric Meyer’s trip down CSS memory lane, Ten Years of Style. Following that was an interesting panel discussion, Good Design vs. Great Design with Jon Hicks, Veerle Peiters and Cameron Moll. Focusing on grids, typography and colour, the panel provided some thought-provoking insights and Jon declared his love for Comic Sans. Here they are:

Following that, I listened to Chris Wilson talk about what to expect in IE 7. Although this product is always going to be seen as Microsoft catching up with the rest of the browser pack, it does look like it has some rather cool features, namely Open Search. I expect this will be one feature Firefox, Opera et al will all be looking at with interest.

After lunch (nice cakes) was The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 with Andy Clarke, Patrick H. Lauke, Gez Lemon, and Ian Lloyd. To be honest, this was the one presentation which didn’t work for me and I got the impression that WCAG 2.0 was rather unpopular with the presenters. The gist I got was that the guidelines are complex, hard to understand and, unfortunately, inaccessible. Shame, but perhaps they’ll improve before they’re finalised. Here’s three of the panel:

The final presentation of the day was Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps by the thoroughly energetic and inspiring Jeff Veen. It was an excellent explanation and demonstration of the latest Web 2.0 (i.e. AJAX) applications, providing real insight into the techniques used by the leading companies, using Jeff’s own experience working at the forefront of the web. Go Jeff!

Shamefully I didn’t go to the after party and instead skipped out immediately after Jeff left the stage to watch the match which, for the last 10 minutes at least, was a perfect end to the day. Super Stevie!

Posted by Olly on June 15, 2006 at 8:49 pm in @media, atmedia, css, news, web
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