Just come back from the FOWD (Future Of Web Design) Tour in Bristol, the event was held in the Watershed which I would describe as a art house cinema, housed along the waterfront in the city center of Bristol. I had a fantastic time, talks from Elliot Jay Stocks and Paul Boag were of particular interest. Elliot talking the attendees through the recent creation of his portfolio, and what he learnt along the way was really inspiring and made me want to go and re-design my own site all over again.
Boag had a interesting talk, and it was great to learn how an agency such as Headscape approaches a brief, however I did feel (as stated by himself) that they are more of an exception than a rule. For example he talked of how they interview a client’s stakeholders to gage their opinions on the existing site (if their is one) and on what they would like the re-design to feature. I fear that for most agencies there wouldn’t be enough room in the budget to allow them to undertake such interviews.
Bruce Lawson of Opera was also there, giving a interactive talk on the future of HTML 5, encouraging everyone to code along with him, which was great its always nice to learn while doing. The fact that the <head> and <body> tags are not required for the doctype was an intriguing revelation. And I was keen along with most in the room to go back and re-code existing sites in html 5, as all major browsers except one display the spec fine, however the fact that IE requires javascript in order to display it correctly I think deterred a lot of people including myself.
All in all, great day, learnt a lot and meet some cool people along the way.
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