FOWD Conference 2007

I spent today at the Future of Web Design conference in Kensington, listening to 13 different presentations. Andy Clarke gave an interesting talk about being creative with the creative process itself, and suggested that producing large sets of design visuals for a site in Photoshop – which are then signed off by the client and passed on to a developer – is an inefficient and wasteful way of working. Instead he told us how for a recent project he had switched to designing with XHTML pages directly, and pointed out that this made it far easier to demostrate interactive aspects of the design that cannot be easily shown on a static image. I think this might work in some cases, depending on the project and the client, although the downside of this approach is that revising and altering the graphical design of a page is going to take more work

Apart from Andy Clarke, I found most of the other presentations quite disappointing. There was a lot of self-promotion, with speakers just telling us about their own company and showcasing their own work. There’s nothing wrong with this, if it is used specifically to illustrate a point, but I felt that in many cases the self-promotion was the key point, rather than saying anything interesting or educational about web design.