Ten things a web designer would never tell you

Following the barcamp (BathCamp) that we ran last year, I was looking for a way of maintaining some momentum around the local tech scene, and decided to put together a monthly evening meetup. The first of these was on Wednesday 4th Feb.

Talking at the event were two pretty well known people from the web industry: Paul Boag (Boagworld and Headscape) and Ryan Carson (Carsonified).

Paul did an exceptional talk entitled “10 things a web designer would never tell you” – a tongue in cheek (but scarily accurate) parody of the approaches taken in many web projects. I particularly liked “4. Form a committee to provide feedback…(before you know it you will have a design everybody can tolerate)…” and “6. Enforce corporate style guides to the letter”. Actually, the entire list is pretty easy to check off if you’ve been involved in this kind of stuff before. Comment if this all seems horribly familiar!

Interestingly, Paul followed the talk up with a blog post taking the same tongue-in-cheek tone and got so many comments from people who thought it was actually straight advice that he first of all had to move the “THIS IS TONGUE IN CHEEK” message from the bottom of the post to the top and I see just now has even had to add a new post: “For those of you hard of humour“. Funny stuff.

Anyway. Here’s a video of the talk that I took on a friend’s Flip. Quality is slightly poor (not the Flips’ fault but my failure to get a bigger file up to Vimeo..)

[vimeo 3104512]

Ryan did a talk on the excellent Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. I’ll be posting the video of his talk just as soon as I can squeeze it through my limited home bandwidth.

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