IMP at the future of web design

Last Monday afternoon I grabbed my bag, bought an infamous £3 Tesco meal-deal and headed to the Manchester’s bus station for a 5 hours megabus ride, to attend the annual Future of Web Design conference in London.



Future of web design is a world class conferences about web design, but not only. Some satellite subjects such as UX design, system design, animation and web development were widely covered by the 28 speakers. The conference was held at the brewery, a fancy conference hall in a great location in central London.

Something I personally really liked at this conference in general was its balance. From one hand, you could get great technical talks about web design (debates about CSS frameworks and why we hate them), web development (great Javascript tools and libraries introduced) and new technologies (CSS Masks, anyone?). From the other hand, there was plenty of conceptual talks about the role of web designers, what design is and new great ideas about what we can all do with it.


Simplicity in design and other great insights 

A very interesting session I’ve quite enjoyed was a talk by Stephen Hay from the Netherlands. He talked about simplicity in UX design, and gave some bad examples for how many web systems make a crappy experience just by complicating everything for no reason.

Bonny Colville-Hyde's talked about using comics in UX reports. She has an interesting theory (which I very much agree with) that nobody likes to read a boring 40-pages report. So instead of boring her clients, Bonny writes her UX reports in a comics format. According to her, this method is always very successful even with the most unexpected clients.

Robin Hawkes’s data visualisation talk was quite inspiring, talking about how to make data visualisation work and how to do it in practice with d3.js. He showed some amazing examples showcasing the power of d3.



Overall, it was an awesome experience. Hundreds of professionals from all around the world attended Future of web design, it had a chilled and friendly atmosphere and above all, it included great food, free booze and a great after party!

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