Mark Boulton

Been rather busy since I got back from Lon­don — up to my eye­balls in Persona’s and Applic­a­tion flows… But here goes the very short review.

Simon and I headed up to Lon­don on Wed­nes­day after­noon and checked into the hotel. It was a relax­ing jour­ney right to the hotel door before we headed out for a pint and some scran before crash­ing early for the some­what early start the next morning.

So, there we were at 6.30 eat­ing some break­fast before head­ing down to Water­loo for 8.00am to register. The venue wasn’t too dif­fi­cult to find as there were so many oth­ers doing exactly the same thing (we bumped into one poor woman who came down from Skye and had just arrived!). Upon check­ing in we got the (still smelling of print) pro­gramme and a rather retch­ing fetch­ing orange bag emblazend with the @media logo.

I’m not going to go over the present­a­tions but I’ll skip through some of my thoughts.

Zeld­man was good, although I couldn’t hear him very well at the back (the con­fer­ence as a whole had a bit of a prob­lem with the sound).

Doug Bow­man was good as always with both his presentations.

Joe Clark was superb. It’s a shame I didn’t get to meet him as I’ve got a few import­ant ques­tions to ask him — maybe I’ll just send him an email.

Robin Chris­toph­er­son was very, very good. I think this was simply because he’s blind and it is always refresh­ing to see a screen reader user using the web.

Andy Budd’s, Jeremy’s and Ian’s present­a­tions were also excellent. 

One that really stood out for me was Andy Clarke’s present­a­tion. I guess this was because I come from a very sim­ilar angle being a designer who hap­pens to use web stand­ards. What I mean by that is WS doesn’t define what I do with design and this brings me on to my sum­mary of the whole conference.

The access­ib­il­ity side of the con­fer­ence was superb. A real eye opener to get some prac­tical advice on how to design for bet­ter access­ib­il­ity. Joe’s present­a­tion, ‘Zoom the Web’ was very good and I’ll be imple­ment­ing a zoomed lay­out here shortly. The Web Stand­ards side of things was a little dis­ap­point­ing. Only because I felt, judging by the amount of raised hands at one point, there was a large degree of ‘preach­ing to the con­ver­ted’. It was the wrong audi­ence to talk about the vir­tues of Stand­ards based design, and maybe this was reflec­ted in a lot of the ques­tions which were gen­er­ally very in depth with regards to syn­tax etc.

Now don’t get me wrong, the more Web Stand­ards is used by the com­munity the bet­ter it is all round, but don’t you think we are close to approach­ing the point where it’s ‘just the way it’s done’? Then what are we going to be talk­ing about? AJAX? Oh no, we’re doing that already.

Here’s my two pen­neth about where this is all heading:

I don’t think there will ever be a stand­ard plat­form for the web, not really. It’s simply not pos­sible for the indus­tries big play­ers to sort them­selves out because they are big, slow mov­ing er… (tries to think of an animal) cows (?) after feast­ing on grass for a week (what??). What I mean is, they can’t react quickly. But any­way, that’s a whole big mess that I’m not even going to get involved on.

We, as design­ers, are now emer­ging from a time when you needed to know php, mysql, flash, javas­cript etc. in order to make a liv­ing. I think we’re begin­ning to see a time of going back to core skills. Designer’s will begin to be employed for their design skills and hope­fully this will rekindle the the craft of design again.

Dur­ing the @media party Jon Hicks, Simon and myself were shar­ing a nos­tal­gic moment about Omni­crom and the dark and dis­tant past of print design. There’s some­thing about print design which still really appeals. I think it’s about the craft, it’s about mak­ing some­thing with your hands. I won­der in a few years time if we’ll be look­ing back on this period of our careers with the same amount of fondness. 

Famil­iar faces

It was great to finally meet some people whose stuff I’ve been read­ing now for a couple of years, so a quick shout out to them. If I appeared a bit sub­dued after about 9pm at the party this was entirely due to an empty stom­ach, after 9pm I became entirely focussed on get­ting some grub!

• Jon Hicks
• Denis Raden­kovic
• Guy Car­berry
• Colly
• Andy Clarke
• Veerle Pieters
• Andy Budd
• Richard Rut­ter
• Roger Johans­son

And a few more people besides (par­tic­u­larly the Uni of Glam­or­gan lot). If we didn’t meet this time, maybe we will next.

Right, I’m off for some lunch!