This year was my third visit to @media and possibly the best one yet.
Spending money on going to conferences isn’t something you do lightly, especially in hard times but for me @media’s been invaluable. There’s no doubt that every year I’ve taken a lot from it. This year I thought the talks from Mark Boulton, Simon Collison and Andy Clarke were particularly relevant, although others from Andy Budd, Jason Santa Maria and Jon Hicks were also favourites.
It’s great to hear people talking so openly about their design processes. Maybe not something a lot of businesses do enough of or well. I think both Simon Collison and Andy Clark made a strong point about collaborating and not competing behind closed doors. Erskine Labs and For A Beautiful Web respectively being fine examples of that.
There was a lot of talk about process and working efficiently throughout the two days. It was perhaps the theme of the conference but if the theme was ‘process’ then I think the message was ‘quality’.
Clearly it wasn’t just Douglas Crockford talking about the importance of quality. Mark Boulton raised his concerns about more fonts becoming available and how that could seriously effect the quality of typography on the web, Jon Hicks also illustrated the importance of quality in designing icons for interaction.
This @media was actually the last from Patrick Griffiths as Web Directions will now be taking over, with the next @media being planned for June 2010. If you’re a web designer or developer, I would certainly recommend checking it out.
Just for reference, I’ve listed the speakers and their sessions and also linked to slides/resources if they’re available. If you know of any more then please let me know and I’ll add them.
Comments
Posted by Emily H on 30.06.09
It was my 3rd time @media too and it was definitely a good one. I really liked that it was only one track, there wasn’t any difficult decision making choosing between two talks you want to see (and possible disappointment when you realised you picked the wrong one!). It also made it a more unified experience in terms of sharing with others - we’d all seen the same talks.
Another theme was content, again *quality* of content, but also the point that we need content as early on in the web design process as possible!
Thanks for coming and saying hello - I’m sorry we didn’t get to have a chat. Maybe next year?
Posted by James on 30.06.09
I thought the one track system was better too, I usually felt like I was missing out before and as you say more unified. Content too was definitely something talked about quite a bit, I realise I’m generalising a lot saying ‘quality’. An important message though I thought, especially in harder times when budgets are cut and people get tempted to cut corners. It would be good to go again next year, so yes hopefully see you there.
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