At @media 2006

This week I attended the @media 2006 conference. With a ticket for the 2 day event weighing in at £460 it’s not cheap, especially for a freelancer. Back in April when I was trying to decide whether to go, I was slightly doubtful as to whether it would be worth the money. But overall the standard of presentations was very high. And although the billed opportunities to ‘network’ weren’t quite what I’d hoped for, I did meet a few cool people

The conference was held just up the road from me at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster. One of the first things that struck me as we shuffled in on Thursday morning was just how many people were there. I’d kind of expected 200 or 300, but there must have been around 800 people. I actually think this made getting to know people harder because once you’d broken the ice with someone, you were quite likely to never encounter them again. The many coffee breaks were billed as ‘valuable opportunities to network’ and I have to say I was surprised at the number of freelancers I met, presumably like myself looking to find potential contacts. I did meet some really nice people, and managed to strike up a few conversations about in-depth topics in web design.

I also got quite a lot out of the presentations. One highlight for me was a session called Good Design vs. Great Design with Jon Hicks , Cameron Moll and Veerle Pieters. It was interesting to hear these well-known designers talking about their own design processes. One question that came up was, ‘is it possible to produce Great Design on a budget?’ to which the answer from all three was ‘no!’. Great design takes time. It was also intersesting to learn that Hicks often does a first draft of his designs in black and white, only moving on to adding colour after working out the initial layout. Veerle Pieters showed us a design mockup after the first day of work, then showed us how she came back and reworked it after a night’s sleep.

Another session that I found surprisingly enjoyable was a talk by Chris Wilson, group program manager of the Internet Explorer Platform at Microsoft, who spoke to us about the upcoming release of IE7. You might expect that a Microsoft person standing up in front of a crowd of people into web standards might not get an entirely smooth ride. But things were friendly and I thought he handled the situation with a lot of good humour. It was quite something to hear him admit that he personally had been responsible for the * HTML bug in IE6 for Windows. I think he had to walk a fine line between retaining the open and friendly atmosphere of the conference and not transgressing any restrictions imposed on him by his company, but he did really well, and managed to get a warm round of applause at the end. To be fair, his job was made quite a lot easier by the fact that IE7 appears to have solved a large portion of the bugs that have plagued web designers for the past 5 years in IE6. No firm word on a release date for IE7 yet though, the best he would give us was ‘second half of 2006’.