FRONT - A Strategy, Design and Technology Studio

Special thanks to Andy McMillan for all his organisational efforts (and to everyone on the Front team who helped too).

We’ve published some images on Flickr and there’s a highlights video and slides from each talk too.  Feel free to share your own images or your own thoughts in the comments below - feedback is particularly welcome, and you can rate / comment on our talks via SpeakerRate.

There’s some good buzz about Refresh on Twitter and you can follow @refreshbelfast to keep up to date with future happenings.

Win a £100 Amazon Voucher

Sharing our expertise helps us all deliver better work, and the enthusiasm from everyone who came was heartening.  We want the idea of Refresh to spread, so to encourage people to blog about it and build interest in future events we’re running a draw for a £100 Amazon voucher.

All you need to do is blog about the event, include a link back to this summary and add a comment below to let us know.  We’ll put all the names into a hat and one lucky soul will be getting their Amazon voucher next week.  We’re nice like that, see.

Refresh Belfast is a monthly event for designers interested in refreshing the creative, technical, and professional culture in the Belfast area.

Paul McKeever - Be Where People Are

When I last spoke at Barcamp, I talked about how to see the web in terms of competitive advantage: that there’s a fundamental shift happening away from broadcast communication to a social web.

One of the ideas I covered then was that we should stop just building destination websites, and try to be where people are.  However, this is easier said than done, and a few people asked how you go about doing this.

I think that the shift towards a more social web can only be a good thing for anyone interested in user experience design.  The question is how to adapt our design processes away from sets of pages and towards designing experiences.

Topics I covered included

• Web Strategy - using balanced scorecard & strategy maps, competitive analysis & positioning, and developing an elevator pitch
• Social interfaces - how people organise around social objects and what this means for your site
• Building a community - how to get people interested, make it easy for them to start and encourage participation
• and lastly how to talk like a person, using examples of great content, tone and style from sites like Flickr and Wufoo.

Jamie Neely - Designing with Visual Language

Jamie talked recently about how Photoshop has nothing to do with web design. At Refresh Belfast he extended this idea to demonstrate how I believe we can tell a story with ‘visual language’ to create great experiences and even turn design sceptics into advocates.

Designing social experiences means that page-centred approaches to design are no longer good enough: users will see your brand elsewhere on the web and this requires a set of generalisable design principles that go beyond a page layout or photoshop comp.

Each decision we make around the core building blocks of a brand online (colour, typography, layout and style) should have a solid and user-centred rationale. Considering some of the more detailed design decisions against the project business case and user needs is a great way to check that you are going in the right direction. With this approach we can express the value of our creations and bring people with us for the journey.

Topics I covered included

• Good requirements: user and client needs, information architecture and sitemaps, wireframes and sketches
• Visual design: brand building, colour palette, selecting typography, choosing photography, layout
• Questions answered: how to deal with design feedback, breaking brand guidelines

 

Visit the Refresh Belfast website for follow @refreshbelfast on twitter for news on upcoming events.

Atto Takeover Refresh: Monday, 15th June

The very talented Pete Kerr, Heather Sloane and Karys Wilson will be taking over Refresh next month.  We’ve had the pleasure of working with them on the BBC Sesame Tree project last year and their work is nothing short of beautiful and remarkable.  Would highly recommend it and you can register now via Eventbrite.