Looking on the right of my blog you may have seen that I a small web button fot @atmedia. Anyways, I was fortunate to attend the conference on Thursday and Friday and quite frankly it rocked.
I journeyed upto London on the Wednesday night and stayed with a friend from uni over in Fulham. A few beers and a night of watching Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on a massive projector was a nice start to my days off, the weather being nice also.
On the Thursday I was up at 6.30am and travelled to the event very quickly, getting there early so I could get my bearings. I grabbed some breakfast (muffin and a coffee) and went to watch people arrive outside. At 8am approached, people suddenly started entering the centre, I ventured in and managed to get my pass and my free goody bag and head up to the event floor.
I sat down with a cup of coffee and looked at the little pamphlet that showed me what presentations were on that day, you have to decide what presentations you want to watch as they have two “Tracks” that run side by side and the same time, obviously you cant goto both. As I was deciding, I asked the person next to me what he was going to attend, he named the same presentations as me so we both introduced ourselves.
The dude I met was called Matt and he was from the US, he works for a non-profit company in the US and was sent over here specifically for the event. We chatted a little and then headed off to the first keynote speech.
The first speech was by Eric Meyer, one of the pioneers of CSS. His speech was more of a gentle easing into the conference, really weird to see the guru’s of CSS praise each other and mention that if it werent for some of their innovations, we wouldnt be seeing such rich visual websites.
The rest of my day consisted of:
- 10:45am - Good Design vs Great Design with John Hicks, Cameron Moll and Veerle Pieters
- 12pm - Fine Typography on the Web with Dave Shea
- 2pm - Bug Hunting with Andy Budd
- 3:30pm - Desiging the Next Generation of Web Apps with Jeffery Veen
Good Design vs Great Design was good, elements were discussed on what makes the difference in layouts, ways to make your pages better and what mentalities should be employed when designing both personal and professional websites. John Hicks was the star of this presentation, the other two even though they are very skilled, couldnt present very well in my opinion but their points were valid.
Fine Typography was a bit of a non-starter, I didnt enjoy it and I didnt make much of it to be honest, he is a good presenter though, Dave actually being the force behind http://www.csszengarden.com/.
Bug Hunting was good, it was interesting to look on a professional’s way of stopping the small problems you seem to get when working with CSS. His slides were very visual, lovely photography of various insects.
The highlight of the day had to be Jeffery Veen. His presentation on Web2.0 was fantastic.
After that, myself and Matt headed off into Trafalgar Sqaure as Matt needed to get some trainers and I was meeting some other friends to watch the England game. I went to this little pub in Piccadilly and managed to get a reasonable viewing angle on a big LCD screen. The game itself was crappy but at least England won.
After that I went to the after party which was just down the road. Inside I managed to find Matt and met some new people, we used our free drink tokens and got a few beers. Then myself and Matt started feeling very hungry, the food at the event was minimal so we headed off into Chinatown to get a big meal. Matt shouted me to a large Chinese meal and we discussed quite a few bits, its good to hear an American’s perspective on things.
We then walked home and got some much needed sleep for the next day.
Friday was a later rise (9am) and the first presentation was Bulletproof Web Design with Dan Cederholm. This was a clean presentation, it raised some good ideas as he was speaking, all of course noted down so I can carry it through into my own work.
The rest of the day consisted of:
- DOM Scripting: The Next Level with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch (PPK), Staurt Langridge, Dan Webb and Simon Willison
- Mobile Web Design with Cameron Moll
- Strategic CSS Management with Rachael Andrew, Roger Johansson and Dave Shea
- Microformats: Evolving The Web with Tantek Celik
They were all very good but didnt address as much as I thought they would, they rarely used code examples but they gave some good points with again allowed me to take some ideas back with me.
All in all, it was a very good conference. I was a little surprised at how few code examples were used but thats obviously not what is done in this environment.
One thing I did have a problem was with the Q+A questions, many attendees found it necessary to question why people used percentages instead of em’s etc, they didnt ask questions instead they tried to put one over the speakers. As they all said themselves, a design can be achieved 3,452 different ways, who cares how you did it!
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