FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Well, yes. From our point of view Build was a complete success. The reaction on Twitter is a proof that we weren’t the only ones:

Conferences should make you feel really small, but leave you inspired to grow. Build is doing that.
@maxvoltar

Build was excellent. As a ‘client’ it really opened my eyes on a few things. Well done to organisers #buildconf
@ojedo

Yeah, I’ve never seen a set of talks that fit so naturally together while still maintaining reasonable diversity. #buildconf
@paulca

Whether by accident or design, each speaker’s talk seemed to BUILD on the previous one. The conference organizer Andy McMillan assures us that a video of the day will be available online in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here is a brief synopsis of our team’s thoughts on a jam-packed day of lectures:

Tim Van Damme - Passion

Tim Van Damme is a designer who freelances for Made by Elephant and writes at maxvoltar.com. You may remember him from such web designs as atebits.com and 24ways.org. His talk was focused on answering the question “why should we be passionate about what we do?”

Drawing from his own experience of commercial and self-initiated projects, Tim provided a digestible argument for being 100% committed to what we do. He explained that being in it for the long haul means we should share our passion with peers and clients, feeding off a passionate industry helps us get better and better with each new project.

We were really fired-up by the Tim’s advice and his, well, passion. Being aware of simple everyday opportunities to channel our love of the web into our work and relationships should show in the quality of work we produce for our clients and their users.

David Hughes Follow

Andy Budd – Seductive Design

Andy is the founder and Managing Director at ClearLeft, world renowned web agency based in Brighton. It was nice to see that he has as much presence when performing in front of a packed Waterfront Studio Build crowd, as we experienced in the more intimate workshop setting of the previous day.

Andy put forward the idea that creating seductive design was a key to success. Brands such as Apple have understood for a long time that this sells. The steps to being seduced are similar to those of the dating game: Being approachable, Building Rapport, Being Desired, Getting Commitment.
Gowalla.com makes a great first impression with an inviting introduction to a beautiful service. Its immediate attractiveness makes us want to use it.
Last FM builds rapport through social validation - by comparing our music choices with friends we can establishing how compatible we are with each other.

Desire can be more flirtatious through using visceral, and even sexually loaded language or visuals. It is only possible to register with ffff-found.com if invited by another user. This increases demand by limiting supply.

Finally Andy touched on commitment. How to keep our users in a relationship with us by making them feel worthwhile and loved. We deliver on flirtation, and users are won over. Simple.

Jordan Moore Follow

Mark Boulton - Font-Embedding & Typography

Mark Boulton is one of the world’s best known conference speakers on the subject of typography for the web. He opened his presentation by broadening our perception on the role of typography; revealing how it permeates through all elements of user experience.

He observed that the impending movement towards ‘font-embedding’ is an ‘opening of the floodgates’ to an influx of new fonts that will only compound clients’ desire for using their brand typefaces.

Our current repertoire of web-safe typefaces are here for a reason, and perhaps we should realize that they are fit for purpose. It is our duty to be ready & armed with rationales as to why font-embedding may or may not be appropriate for our clients.

Technical constraints shouldn’t inhibit us creatively, but instead these boundaries should encourage us have more attention to detail in our typographic work. Furthermore, a smaller number of usable typefaces will only help to limit bad design decisions.

As designers we should feel challenged to better understand the choices we make around typography, and create a richer, more mature typographic web.

Gareth Dickey Follow

Ryan Sims - Practice Makes Pixel-Perfect

Ryan Sims is a web designer best known for projects such as Virb, justwatchthesky.com and purevolume.com

Using the analogy of basketball, Ryan explains that good athletes only get better through practice. Being naturally talented is a bit of a myth and it takes a balance of focused study and play to be the best. None of this is possible without enjoying what we do.

Taking into account the commercial and project pressures that web professionals are exposed to, it is easy to see why we may pass off our daily work as practice, and Ryan suggests that we are missing an opportunity to ‘up our game’ by failing to make a distinction between these two.

It is difficult to argue with this theory. Especially in light of research such as the Dreyfus skill acquisition model that explains our typical journey to being really great at what we do. Ryan hints that it is essential to take time-out from the detail of our day-to-day duties to understand the whole picture and focus on where we are going.

Ryan left us with some recommendations for better practice. These include maintaining a personal blog or sandbox to push our skills within a safe environment, seeking mentorship and collaborations as a shortcut to development, and being a better writer and communicator to develop an organized mind.

Jamie Neely Follow

Wilson Miner - Design/Build

Wilson Miner is best known in the design community as that guy with a beautiful website who designed Everyblock. He is also known for blogging about design problems that straddle traditional and screen-based media such as Relative Readability. He rarely comments on technical and development issues.

So was interesting when Wilson revealed how he describes himself:

”A designer with code skills or, if the situation requires it, I’m a coder with good design sense.”

Wilson makes an observation that web industry professionals rarely know what to call ourselves. Designers? Developers? A bit of both? And in many ways, he is there is a case for us to embrace both, and be proud of the mixture.

Our industry is young, and like other industries before it, tends towards specialisation as a reaction to the widening Of our offering. And although a set of well defined, tightly specified job titles are good for recruitment and career progression, Wilson questions whether these titles are accurate (or even necessary).

The conclusion Wilson comes to is that wherever our core strengths lie, we should ‘lean in’ to overlapping areas of expertise. It is this hybrid that makes the web and web professionals unique. This agility will help us understand more of the needs of our industry and create a better web.

Jamie Neely Follow

Eric Meyer - A More Tangled Web

”The Web has Won”, these four words were looming on the huge projector screen as Eric Meyer walked on stage. Eric illustrated how the Web’s relative simplicity is what has made it so successful. Our basic web tools - HTML, CSS & Javascript have all found their way into many of the products and services we use today, the Kindle, Adium and iTunes LP to name but a few.

Even though HTML5 wont be fully implemented until an estimated 2022 and CSS3 is likely to be in development far beyond that, Eric explains this doesn’t stop us from using elements of it already. Developers are ingeniously using Javascript to emulate methods and functions of HTML 5 and CSS3, for example, Alexis Deveria created a jQuery plug-in which provides support for the CSS3 Template Layout Module.

As designers and developers we have the responsibility to start utilizing these methods and using them in our work. If we can show that users will benefit from these CSS3 methods and HTML5 attributes we can speed up the process of getting them available, tested and approved by the web’s custodians and working groups such as W3C. Working together as a community, we have the unique opportunity to drive the direction of the web. Eric is convinced this will be from the bottom-up, not the top-down. So what are we waiting for?

Charlie Neely Follow

To find out more about the build conference visit www.buildconference.com or follow @buildconf.