Looking back at the Future of Web Design 2009

I’ve had a few days to reflect on my experiences at this years Future of Web Design conference here in London. This is the third or fourth year I’ve attended but unless some things change very drastically I won’t be dishing out upwards of £220 to go again.

Historically, I’ve always felt that the conference never gave any answers to the question its name poses. But, as I’ve blogged before, it didn’t really matter because there were often very useful and insightful presentations from very talented practitioners and speakers. That was enough to keep me going back wanting more year after year.

This time round, however, I didn’t feel that I got anything of true substance out of the conference. With a few notable exceptions the presentations lacked any depth or insight and on a couple of occasions the future of web design turned into a history lesson with a couple of (well known and respected) speakers delivering retrospectives on their work from the last decade. Not good enough. We attend these conferences to hear some gems of insight into what these guys and girls, who are supposedly at the top of their game, think the future will hold or at least what direction it’s heading. I’m not talking about crystal ball gazing, but a few ideas about emerging trends would slake the audience’s thirst which is derived from the very title of the conference.

In a whole eight hours of presentations not one person mentioned ideas around designing sites and services from APIs and open data. Nothing about designing for UGC. Nothing about service or utility design. Nothing about designing apps for the Air of Silverlight platform. These challenges are the future of web design. This is what’s happening out there in the wild but it seems that the very conference whose job it is to address these issues is failing. There was one presentation about designing on projects using agile methodologies which didn’t get nearly enough stage time and was levered into a dead space early on in the conference. Too many of the presentations seemed very lightweight with little substance or evidence.

Having said all that, there were a couple of notable exceptions – presentations which exhibited a great deal of preparation on the part of the speaker. Mark Boulton’s talk on web typography was knowledgeable, insightful and he showed feeling, passion and opinion towards his subject matter. Molly Holzschlag, similarly, displayed great passion about web standards, but did drift towards web development. And Robin Christopherson gave a superb demonstration of the frustrations of browsing the web with a screen reader.

But these were scant compensation for the failings of the rest of the conference. And judging by my Twitter search stream at the time (#FOWD) and retweets of my own comments, there were genuine pockets of disappointment around the room throughout the day.

How to mend this broken conference? Well, better briefing of the speakers would help. Allowing them to present a re-hashed agency creds. presentation is lamentable. And, if you get a print designer to talk to a room full of digital folk they better have something really interesting to say and not just hide behind some nicely designed slides.

If this conference is to work long-term then I feel they should get the direction right or change the name. The web is a tremendously exciting place to be working at the moment with an incredibly exciting future. We have the conference to celebrate this. What we seem to be lacking are the speakers.

What people really think of brands

Although I posted it to del.icio.us yesterday and hence, it appeared in the link fest in the previous post, I thought this deserved a post of its own.

Bentley brand tags

Brand Tags is a great site that crowdsources opinion on various brands. They’re mostly very predictable, well-known companies but it’s interesteing to see what some people think of when a brand is presented to them.

For example, and I was ‘guilty’ of this. The most popular ‘tag’ for the Virgin brand is the name of the founder, either ‘branson’ or ‘richard branson’. This is similarly the case for Microsoft. However, Steve Jobs languishes down the list of Apple tags.

If I was the Pizza Hut marketing chief at the moment, I’d be panicking.

Although hardly scientific, I like the principle of this. Throw a lot of people at it and more interesting insight would come out of this than 100 online brand satisfaction surveys.

Macbook Air – initial reaction

Well, the speculation was true. Apple have today announced the MacBook Air.

I must admit it looks like an exercise in packaging, as with all Apple products. One thing to point out is that the ‘real’ images on the Apple site look loads better than the camera phone shots on the streaming news feeds from the actual Keynote address.

Things I like about it. Well, the size for a start. I use a 15″ MacBook Pro at work and having one at home seems like overkill for my domestic Flickr, iPhoto, iTunes and Safari activities. Especially as pretty much all of my home mac use is literally laptop-based. The ability to connect to another machine’s optical drive will save £65 by not having to purchase the separate drive. Let’s face it, I rarely insert CDs or DVDs into my machine at home, preferring a portable hard drive for storage and for the rare occasions when I install software, doing it wirelessly will be fine. The development of the track pad to include more sophisticated gestures akin to the iPhone and iPod Touch is a nice development.

What I’m not so sure about, however, is the price point. The entry level model seems to sit awkwardly, hovering £100 below the base MacBook Pro which is faster, can drive a bigger external display, has a larger hard drive, upgradeable memory, removable battery etc etc. The 1.8 GHz model is £229 more expensive than a 17″ MacBook Pro! Looking at the options, that solid state memory is over 600 quid! I know producing something on that size is expensive but this might end up being a repeat of the days when users were confused as to whether to get a 14″ G4 iBook or a 12″ G4 PowerBook. Didn’t take long for Apple to kill the 12″ pro-level machine.

I don’t know, what I’m pretty sure of though is that this will suck loads of mac fans in and probably points to the future of their laptop development in the omission of the optical drive and a reliance on faster wireless networks for reading and writing files. Remember what people said with the first iMac omitting the floppy drive? And look where we are now!

Suffice to say, mine’s on pre-order! The base-spec one if you were wondering.