Webvisions 2007: Rockstars of design?
The main reason I am “blogging” this event (besides the fact there isn’t enough other useless drivel out there about it already) is because I know for a fact my good friend Mark Wyner is trolling Technorati right now to see if anyone is writing about his presentation or as he stated it to me “talking shit”. So call this an experiment to see how long it will take Mark to notice this particular post (Vegas bookies have it about 30 min). Others have already noted and repeatedly blogged that Mark has many tattoos and also is a “big dork”. Mark reads everything you right about him…so if you call him a “big dork” he will find you and probably “kick you in the nuts”. Mark’s presentation “Experience Design as the Sum of it’s Parts” was basically (very basically) an examination of how the design process has evolved into a design experience progressively over the years, and how designers deal with these different platforms etc. You can learn more about this lunatic web genius and what he does from him directly as he loves to talk about himself and is always looking for an unsuspecting listener. Notice this picture of Mark and how BIG he really is, he barely fits behind the podium…Imagine trying to fit in a Honda next to him for the ride into town from Beaverville or wherever the heck podunk suburbia he lives…and you will know the beginning of my pain.
I decided to visit Webvisions this year as I happened to be traveling to Portland anyway, knew Mark was speaking, and had heard wonderful things about the conference from him. I was excited to possibly see some of my more recent design heros, Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman, and other pioneers of this religion of CSS Web Standards design hoopla. I scanned the paid workshops and selected one on Ajax, was a bit disappointed to see none of my American Idols (of design) listed as speakers, packed up and headed off to the great rain belt of the northwest.
The first thing I attended was a “workshop” (something you pay extra for) on Ajax. This was a bit disappointing as the presentation was rather scattered, and we started off the workshop by asking everyone what they wanted to learn about Ajax. I refrained from mentioning I wanted to learn about Ajax and why i should use it, which I felt was pretty obvious. We were then giving some random examples, borrowing acode from a great third party javascript library Prototype. In the end we learned some basic things I pretty much already knew, but received some hopefully helpful code samples to use. I attempted to get the presenter to demonstrate some of the widgets he had created, but was left hangin’ after another question came up.
After attending the entire conference I am a bit confused as to why we had to pay for the workshops, as many of the free sessions had much more experienced speakers, and were far more informative. The speakers in general were all over the map, I actually attended one lecture by a girl who had never given a presentation, and was painfully nervous. Her presentation was on “sexy CSS stylesheets”, and it randomly had some good information, however it suffered from her continuously referencing other peoples style sheets while trying desperately to work her presentation hardware. I could just choose to write nice things, but I was really pretty disappointed with this conference overall, and the seeming randomness of the speaker selection. I’ll list quickly here some of the ones I felt were well done.
Web Application Page Hierarchy Luke Wroblewski
This was a solid presentation from Luke on Page Hierarchy, basically identifying the important elements of the page, and figuring out how to give each element the right amount of visual strength to make the overall page function optimally. He provided some great examples of page makeovers he had done, and was a well paced engaging speaker.
English: Web 2.0’s Universal Language Kevin Smokler
This was a very interesting session dealing with a simple concept that is often overlooked. Communication, and how important it is in this day and age to really make sure your product description does just that…describe the product as quickly and concisely as possible. Kevin had some excellent examples as well of some completely insane product descriptions that were simply baffling. Kevin was a lively speaker, who was very articulate, and forced us all into a good audience participation type discussion at the end.
The two keynote presentations were stimulating and well done. First up was a presentation on information overload (something about sucking on a firehose) by David Pescovitz of Boing Boing. He brought up some great points about the direction of data collection and how the recent massive increase in data will affect us all. Friday’s presentation was by the two guys responsible for the sensational podcast video series “ask a ninja”. They discussed their rise to fame and offered some pretty well worn info on how to profit from a successful video series online throwing to the wolves some of their peers as examples of success and failure. I’m not knocking their presentation hard, just stating the most important part really is the fact that they have a great content idea, not any great new way to profit from one.
In closing this ramble, I’d like to say I probably missed a few other good presentations (i wish ((wish might be a strong word)) now I would have paid for the flash video demo instead of the Ajax one) and hopefully the organizers of Webvisions 2008 will be able to lure some of the big design names they have had in the past. One more irrelevant suggestion…lose the lame marketing hype “Rockstars of Design”, I totally didn’t see anyone puking backstage…
