Yesterday I attended the Carsonified Future of Web Design 2009 conference in Kensington, London – a now annual event showcasing trends in designing for the web, be that the desktop version or the mobile “3rd screen” one.
I’ve been to a fair few of these events now (I think this was my fifth in total? Three FOWD and two FOWA?) and as time has gone on they’ve certainly got more and more slick, but followed the same quite casual yet confident approach that Ryan Carson, one of the founders of Carsonified (a digital company based in Bath), is so good at projecting (even down to his trademark hat which you have to be pretty confident to wear all the time).
Unlike previous conferences, and even the recent IDM event I attended (entitled Emerging Trends in Digital) I didn’t take a lot of notes during the day, and as such I’m not going to write a long review of the event.
Instead, I suggest this time you check out a twitter search for the hashtag #fowd which should bring you back a fair collection of comments, opinions and other random stuff thoughts all based (sometimes loosely) around the event – and who knows, if you’re one of the many I suspect who hasn’t enjoyed one of the great benefits of twitter, or even fully aware yet what twitter is really capable of doing in a collective sense rather than just being (in some opinions) a “I had a cheese sandwich for lunch” tool, this could be a good introduction?
The day went smoothly in the most – the morning certainly was great, with outstanding presentations from Mark Boulton on the subject of typography for the web (who knew Times New Roman was deliberately designed to bleed into the cheap paper that newspapers are printed on and become more legible because of it?) and an excellent, if short (but we knew it would be) talk on a radical new agency model being developed basing the entire creative process from brief to delivery on agile methodology borrowed from that commonly used in the programming world – I really hope to hear more on this in the future.
The afternoon, sadly, wasn’t quite so good as the morning (certainly at the start of it) with a few presenters (no specific names) tanking big time, some reading from printed sheets the whole way through a presentation and really not doing a very good job (I really hope that person doesn’t pitch present too much where they work!) and another, rather large corporation, deciding to do a truly dreadful presentation based on the book/film Watchmen, by Alan Moore (as if I need to tell you) and a) doing it really badly and, b) spoiling the entire story for a lot of people (me included) who haven’t yet seen the film!!!!!!
It pulled itself together at the end with a great pres by Molly Holzschlag and judging by the twitter backchannel at that time it was most appreciated by all.
I didn’t attend the after party, and I’m not attending the university sessions today, but as far as the confernce day went yesterday it was certainly a success.
Well done to Carsonified and the team who put it on – looking forward to #fowd 2010
