The latest event from Carsonified is The Future of Web Design, which was held in London this week. These are the notes from some of the speakers presentations.

The theme for the event focused on creative approaches for design:
The main ways for the speakers we by ‘changing your perspectives’ and ‘asking and collaborating with other people for ideas’.

Inspiration vs duplication - Often leads to designs being directly copied as its easier, but leads to abuse. How do we go about doing the right thing? By looking for elements that solve problems in intersting ways.

Inspiration. Takes practice and is never ending process. Lead to wealth of ideas that you can apply to web design

Future design trends:

• Softer colours - wordpress org
• Use of video - Ms Dewey
• Horizontal vs Vertical Scrolling - ie. Personal portfolio site site where you can push creativity

User experience vs brand identity - ‘The iceberg experience’

User Experience and successful websites are built upon the following values: Visual 10%, Interaction 90%.

• Top part of iceberg is amazing but underneath is terrible.
• Like code on some web pages. The main and rewarding part of experience is when they start interacting with the site.
• Looks do count but if not thought well the user can be left with shallow experience.
• Create good cohesive experiences, by paying more attention to whats underneath.

A great designer creates the tools to help a user achieve a task they need to accomplish. A user will validate the success of the designers work or design.

Inspired design: a usable design need not be a Safe design (back to horizontal scrolling? ;), as this is the way the limits of design can be pushed further online.

Hot Design Tips - from various speakers

• Make connections. Show your name, your company. Develop relationships. Build trust. - join communities
• Trust, passionate users, ambassadors, Enthisiasm - Be human
• Desire paths, don’t try to predict things - get the site out the door and see how people use it.
• Adapt to scale - its a great problem to have. Solve problems that you didn’t worry about before
• Subtraction is iteration too.
• Realign don’t redesign - users will lose their pathways if you remove/change important functions.
• Don’t panic - listen and learn carefully before reacting to latest release.

References to sites and books mentioned by the speakers:

• Society of Digital Agencies - Created best practices for our service industry.
• Ideas that spread are more likely to suceed. These are idea viruses. Best ones are by friends and recommendations. Purple Cow
• Designing for Interaction - New Riders
• Ways of saying hello - Business card book
• Juxtapoz.com
• Seedconference
• Revyyer.com
• Abriefmessage.com
• Shauninman.com
• Creativebits.org

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 1:14 pm and is filed under webcode, web standards, web 2.0, web services, usability, conferences, visitors, event, design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.