Sessions

Designing Virtual Realism

The real world is rarely flat and devoid of texture, yet our virtual designs often do little to mirror what lies beyond the monitor. Tasteful use of lighting, shadows, gradients, and more traditional arts such as photography, oil, water colour, pencil and charcoal can help us mimic the world around us.

Learn to use and create realistic textures and media, and make your designs leap off the screen.

Presented by Dan Rubin

Font Embedding and Typography

Font embedding is slowly edging towards a possibility, from both a browser perspective and from a technical perspective. But what about a typographic design perspective? We’re so fixated on the on the ‘could’—on surmounting the hurdles of font foundries and their immovable licensing structures—has anybody stopped to ask if we ‘should’? This session will do just that.

Typography expert Mark Boulton be dispelling myths, challenging preconceptions and detailing how we, as web design professionals, can not only make font embedding a reality, but how we can move beyond simple font embedding to a much richer typographic web.

Presented by Mark Boulton

Guerilla Usability Testing

Usability tests are an excellent way of discovering problems with a product or service. Commissioning a dedicated usability lab will provide a high degree of scientific rigour, but comes at significant cost.

But usability testing needn't cost the Earth. Instead of a single academic evaluation, why not bring your usability testing in-house and run it alongside your design and development process? Two or three quick-and-dirty usability tests will not only provide great results but will also allow you to iterate your product between tests, ultimately leading to a more refined product.

In this presentation Andy Budd will explore techniques and tools for effective low cost, high value user testing.

Presented by Andy Budd

Hot Topics

In what has become a popular @media tradition, the final session will feature a handful of speakers discussing questions posed by conference attendees.

Moderated by Jeremy Keith

HTML5 for the Markup Agnostic

From a different and updated perspective to last year's popular HTML5 presentation, industry savant Molly Holzschlag will present an unbiased and thorough appraisal of the increasingly important but frequently misunderstood language, covering:

• Why HTML5 is important to today's developers, and why it isn't
• What we need to understand about HTML5, and what we don't
• How HTML5 is not really about markup at all
• Why HTML5 is not semantic
• Why HTML5 is causing some accessibility experts to throw things at the HTML5 working groups
• What HTML5 features are already available in browser, and which browsers might surprise you!
• How JavaScript plays a critical role in HTML5

Presented by Molly Holzschlag

Icons for Interation

Icons aren't just for decoration, they're for interaction too.

More than simply aesthetic decoration, they can aid user interaction in your sites and web apps. This session looks at both the theory and the practice of using icons - when it's right to use them, choosing the right metaphor to use, and how to create them.

Presented by Jon Hicks

New Approaches to a Modern, Accessible Web

AbilityNet's Robin Christopherson will discuss the current state of accessibility in the modern web landscape and how, as web designers and developers, we can build upon our existing knowledge and skills to provide web sites and applications that can be utilised by an even wider audience than before.

Through unique insights and practical examples, topics covered will include applications of WAI-ARIA, new, innovative ways of dealing with CAPTCHAs, and best practice treatment of video and mobile access.

Presented by Robin Christopherson

The Process Toolbox: Traditional Techniques with a Twist

If every project is different, then every project demands a bespoke, empathetic approach. But how can we confidently work this way without losing time and money and incurring other problems? How can we ensure every designer, developer and stakeholder is able to add value at every stage?

What we need is a toolbox - a selection of flexible approaches that ensure a project has a clear roadmap, but allowing for organic and collaborative process throughout.

Simon Collison will offer some unique twists to existing methodologies and present his take on agile development, audience modelling, and doing exceptional things with post-it notes, magnets and other tools.

Presented by Simon Collison

Quality

Software, on the web or otherwise, is the most complicated stuff that humans make.

In this presentation Douglas Crockford discusses the 40-year-old Software Crisis and the grand subject of "Quality" - the processes by which we engineer quality into our software and, of course, the processes by which we often fail to do so.

Presented by Douglas Crockford

Thinking Small

Even the most useful and usable websites can stand improvement. As designers, we're all focused on the big picture of what a website has to say, but that big picture is comprised of countless tiny design choices behind its creation.

In this talk, we'll look at common design misconceptions, visual design strategy, and small and achievable ways everyone can improve their website designs by thinking smaller.

Presented by Jason Santa Maria

Walls Come Tumbling Down

Whether you work by yourself, in a small business team or for a larger organization, are you concerned by how the economic slow-down might affect the job that you love?

Should you be pre-occupied by worrying about the future or could you instead find new ways of working? Could you improve your methods to give you more time to be creative? Could you work more efficiently, be more profitable and help safeguard your job or your business?

In this positive presentation, Andy Clarke will explain how limitations and constraints can focus your mind and help you to develop more creative approaches. He will present his take on why designing in the browser, using practical conventions, progressive enrichment and other modern web design methods can liberate your thinking while also making creative and business sense to you, your managers or your employers.

Presented by Andy Clarke

The Web Platform Just As It Is

In his new role as Open Web Platform advocate at Microsoft, Chris Wilson will provide unique insight into the current state of the web platform and the challenges posed by its deployment as well as the opportunities offered to web developers.

With a few bits of history about how we got here thrown in based on experiences as the HTML WG co-chair and a Microsoft employee, Chris will look at the current realities that we need to work with as well as what the future might hold.

Presented by Chris Wilson