Last Friday, set against the super-cool backdrop of Birmingham’s Austin Court, was Canvas 2013 – a design and developer conference that this year focused on “colourful ideas for the web”, and for those who were unable to go, we have picked out some of our favourite bits for you to peruse.

Household names

The conference featured talks from a collection of huge household names as representatives from Microsoft, Adobe, The Guardian, O2 and Nokia took to the stage to talk about new web technologies, projects and trends that are happening right now.

User experience

Adobe’s Terry Ryan gave us the lowdown on their Edge Animate program and showed us how we can make our web pages more interactive, fun and engaging by adding a few simple animation effects. Terry even did some live demonstrations to show us how even simple pieces of animation can make a huge difference to user experiences.

Responsive design

Developer Matt Andrews took us through the massive process of making one of the world’s most viewed news websites, The Guardian, responsive. The Guardian’s website has over three million articles on it, consisting of hundreds of images and components, so as you can imagine, this was no mean feat. Matt explained to us that screen size is no barometer of connection speeds, and therefore there can be no one-size-fits-all approach to responsive web design and development, as well as giving out some great tips on project management, and making us all aware of how well future proofed the London Duck Tours bus is.

Accessibility

“The web is dead” was the opening gambit of Microsoft’s Martin Beeby who said that he had increasingly heard this point made recently. He then went on to explain how ridiculous this point was. His talk on how emerging web technologies and how we interact with them (touch screen, voice recognition) is making websites and applications more accessible than ever before means that it has never been more important to think about user interface and user experience based on the target market you are going after. For example, Microsoft actually worked out the average fingertip size of an NBA player, and therefore made the touch boxes on an app made specifically for them fit that average fingertip size.

Of course, these were just some of my own key take-aways from the conference – there were many fantastic arguments and points made during the conference. We also we met and spoke to some great people between the talks.

Were you at Canvas? What did you take away from the conference?  

For more pictures from the event, go to our Flickr page.