This year’s theme was the many roles played by designers in their work. My slides of the event are at www.bath.ac.uk/web/fowd08
Patrick McNeil of designmeltdown.com began with a talk on merging technology and design. This struck a chord – inspiration comes from many sources – not usually the most obvious. Patrick is a regular columnist at .net magazine and has an ‘ideas’ book out later this year.
Andy Clarke of stuffandnonsense.co.uk and Steve Pearce from pokelondon.com explored user and brand experience. Andy is the author of ‘Trancending CSS: The fine art of Web design’.
Steve’s presentation showed the strong link between brand and user experience and how to design with that in mind.
Clearleft.com’s Andy Budd, described as a ‘retired shark wrangler’, stressed the importance of drawing visitors in to your website: “Concentrate on minute detail; make it a seductive experience”. He used examples of Apple’s ipod and Innocent drinks’ packaging. Unwrapping an ipod is perceived as an exciting experience and a discreet label underneath each Innocent carton says:”stop looking at my bottom”.
Larissa Meek of agencynet.com is a senior art director and standards specialist. Her ideas included leading design direction, limiting options, consolidating feedback and aiming for early design sign-off. She works closely with creative clients to ensure highest quality.
‘Print is the new web’ was Elliot Jay Stocks’ theme. Taking inspiration from print design, Elliot uses these ideas to create ‘beautiful and accessible’ websites. “Be brave – push boundaries – don’t compromise your design”….more at elliotjaystocks.com
Jon Hicks, a partner of hicksdesign.co.uk is widely known for his Firefox, Thunderbird and Miro icons. He is also very keen on cheese. Jon talked about standards, browsers and design. As part of his presentation, he built a page from scratch using CSS- its strapline:”….what a friend we have in cheeses….”
Inspired by more creative thoughts, I walked through Kensington park later with Graphic designer Phil. We had plenty to chat about. Yeah, it was cool…..
Earlier today I delivered a presentation to colleagues at the University entitled “Managing your professional identity”. As the first of our Web Sessions the aim was to raise awareness of the extent of our digital footprint through the use of web tools and technologies.
With a particular focus on social networking and blogs I talked about the importance of being aware how much information we are placing in the public domain and how that could potentially be used. Many people use these sites without understanding the implications of sharing such a wealth of personal information with the rest of the world which is a concern.
I was pleased with the turnout (particularly as it’s a new initiative) and was encouraged by the questions at the end which further enforced by view that we can and should do more to raise awareness to our colleagues.
Speaking about the negative side to new technologies/sites is always a worry though as I (and colleagues in Web Services and beyond) see great value in the range of tools now readily available to us. Therefore I ended the session with a positive… they’re great, we all use them ourselves yet we proceed with caution. If you’re fully informed these tools can really help you extend your professional ‘reach’ and prove extremely beneficial… but more on that at another session.
Unfortunately we didn’t get the opportunity to record the session as we’d hoped but the slides are available on slideshare:
It’s not just good design and functionality that make a website work. Content is what it’s about. Write sloppily and you’ll undo the rest. Be verbose and you will switch people off. Keep important information till last and visitors will miss it.
By writing less, you say more. Verbosity isn’t a measure of intelligence, just lack of imagination.. Keep visitors interested. Then they are sure to return.
The development arm of Web Services (arm sounds a bit grand, there are 5 of us) has existed for about 3 years. During this time we have created a development environment from scratch. Before we became a team there were a few individuals working on projects with application code kept in home directories and network drives. When we formed as a team it was obvious we couldn’t continue like this.
So we looked at ways in which we could manage projects and code collectively…
First in was Subversion, we considered CVS but at this time a lot of people seemed to be switching to SVN. We mostly develop Java apps so next in was Ant for writing build scripts. We needed a tool to track bugs and feature requests and we quickly settled on Trac in the absence of any Bugzilla fans. At the time we didn’t have a wiki so this feature of Trac was a bonus. A lot of the other things we have introduced support our move towards test driven development such as Junit, Cobertura and Bamboo a continuous integration server.
To use all these tools effectively we created a repository of common Java libs and developed generic ant scripts that build and test our applications. Some nifty Greasemonkey scripts written by the team also let us total our time estimates for tasks under a Trac milestone and drag ‘n’ drop tickets between milestones. We are always looking to improve the way we work so we have considered (and in some cases rejected), Maven, JIRA and TestNG. Let us know if you think we have missed a trick.
We are currently advertising for a Web Designer to join our central Web Services team. This new role has been created to allow us to strengthen our online visual identity and enhance the user experience on our website(s).
Full details can be found on our website and further details about the work of our team and the work we do can be found on our wiki.
For an informal discussion regarding this position call Alison Wildish (Head of Web Services) on 01225 385381 or email a.wildish@bath.ac.uk.
As part of our aim to increase communications we shall we running “Web Sessions” for staff and students. These lunch time (drop-in) seminars will provide information and guidance on a wide range of web related topics and give us an opportunity to interact with our wider community.
