We are always looking for ways to support the UK web design and development communities and when we heard about a brand new web design conference being organised we immediately become a sponsor to provide financial support. The founder and organiser Simon Collison has been kind enough to put some time aside in his hectic schedule to answer some questions…<\/p>\n
I’m a freelance designer with over a decade of experience working on projects for bands, record companies, explorers, magazines, the government and so on. I’m back in Nottingham after stints in London, Reykjavik and other places, but find myself working all over the place. I co-founded Erskine Design, but left a year ago in search of fresh challenges. I\u2019ve written a few books about design and web standards, and I speak about the design process at conferences. Before all that I went to art school, became a visual artist, had some shows, and ran an arts organisation. My web career started when I got a job making websites for a company called Agenzia back in 2001.<\/p>\n
A decade ago when visual art was my primary concern, I organised two city-wide art festivals in Nottingham, so I have some idea of the workload involved. Regarding web events, I\u2019m fortunate to speak at and attend many, so I see how things are done, what it takes, and also often think \u201cI\u2019d do that differently\u201d. Ultimately, I value the potential of these events, and think that with great speakers, topics and attendees, it\u2019s possible to work together to find real outcomes and truly inspire. I\u2019m in a fortunate position where I can reach out to a lot of people to make something like this happen. I\u2019ve basically been Bob Geldof circa 1985 for the last six months.<\/p>\n
Generosity. The world is full of good, selfless professional people who will support an idea if it\u2019s good, whether there is any financial return or not. From the speakers to the volunteers, from graphic and print folks to sponsors and beyond, I\u2019ve been stunned by how willing people are to help and offer their services or products. This level of generosity is essential if something this ambitious can truly work.<\/p>\n
Not a lot really. I\u2019ve had so long to think about this and see others do it, plus I\u2019ve had great support from other conference teams. Whilst making money is not a motivation, I\u2019d maybe have charged a little more for tickets to allow us to add a few more thrills, as we\u2019re just about gonna break even.<\/p>\n
Since leaving my own company (Erskine Design) in February 2010 I have afforded myself more time to work on projects like this. So, I pretty much finished all my client work by Autumn and refused any more until after the conference. It may have been possible to do more client work, but ultimately I\u2019m sure it would cause me to lose focus, and an event like this needs constant love.<\/p>\n
You have to really care about your topics, or have a line of inquiry that fascinates you. With that in place, you end up at occasional points where it helps to collate all the thinking and ideas and present this to your peers. For me, that\u2019s the great thing about speaking; it helps me validate my ideas. I\u2019d warn against public speaking of any kind if you don\u2019t know what to talk about, or you\u2019re just not that passionate about a topic. Some people seek out speaking opportunities to further their career, get noticed, or travel. That\u2019s fine, but an audience can tell when you don\u2019t really have anything interesting or new to impart, and equally you\u2019ll probably end up frightened to death or receive a negative response. Certainly, avoid the old cliche of imagining the audience naked, as they\u2019ll usually be a few hundred sweaty geeks, and that ain\u2019t pretty.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m always wary of trying to identify trends. The lazy answer is \u201cmore HTML5 and even more crazy CSS3\u201d, but that\u2019s true of the last few years if you look hard enough. Thinking broader, I\u2019m excited (as are a number of others) about a greater urge to expand our web design vocabulary in the coming years, working towards a more eloquent way of describing the interactions and design patterns that are uniquely ours as web designers. I hope we\u2019ll also get smarter about how to design content, using everything we have available to provide a better visual context to tell stories and share information.<\/p>\n
You can find out more about Simon on his personal website https:\/\/colly.com<\/a> and follow him on Twitter here https:\/\/twitter.com\/colly<\/a>. The conference’s website with details about the event (which is all sold out now!) is here https:\/\/newadventuresconf.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are always looking for ways to support the UK web design and development communities and when we heard about a brand new web design conference being organised we immediately…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8189,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-interviews"},"yoast_head":"\n