Web Directions North - Retrospective
I had the honor of being able to attend this year's Web Directions North - a gathering of designers, css/xhtml evangelists, UI specialists, accessability gurus, and other radical web futurists up in Vancouver BC at the fabulous Renaissance Harborside. It was a three-day event, with workshops and seminars (lectures) about the past, present and future of the web. There were some very interesting speakers and subjects, and as a whole I found the conference incredibly useful, if not slightly light on content.
For those of you who don't know, my day job is a designer and producer for a small company in Seattle which does internet marketing, SEO, design and more. We do a little bit of everything. Some new pages that I have designed include ColdHeat and Bella Sara (I am not responsible from any eye-burning that results from you clicking that previous link. Wait, yes I am.) I am a big accessability and semantics evangelist, I truly believe that there is a right and wrong way to code up the internets, and I try to learn more about how to better my skills in that field every day. I am enthusiastic about it; aside from gaming and podcasting, coding CSS and designing web pages is my idea of fun. Yeah, I'm a nerd. Deal.
I was already familiar with some of the names at the conference. I'd been looking to Cameron Moll's work for inspiration for a little while now, and Dave Shea created the milestone in CSS advocacy that is the CSS Zen Garden. It was super exciting to get to hear these guys talk, and anyone that is associated with them has to be entertaining as well. It's true!
The only issue I had with the conference was that it was filled with enthusiasts, yet the speakers seemed to feel the need to focus heavily on history and simple descriptions of new (or current) concepts. The actual information was light, sometimes the lectures felt like advertisements for whatever subject they were discussing. Which was great for lectures like Tantek's talk on microformats (so slick!), but maybe not so great for Dave Shea and Veerle's talk on the design process. I really felt like I wanted more meat to that one, they spent a lot of time on stuff like finding inspiration through office decoration. Which, to me, felt like really really basic design stuff.
Everyone there was attending because we are already really into things like the semantic web, thinking objectively about UI design, and basically improving the user experience on the Internet today. We could have handled bigger words!
I walked away with a ton of information to pass on to my co-workers, mostly in the form of validation of theories and techniques I have already been advocating in my designs. That was nice. I can actually go to my boss and say: "See, OTHER designers don't feel that giving clients more than one mockup is a good idea, either! I'm not doing it anymore, nyeh nyeh." The networking opportunities were spectacular, the parties were well-catered and fun and I got a chance to hand out my new moo cards, which people loved.
There's lots of room for improvement. First of all, more comfortable chairs. Sweet jesus my back hurt so bad after sitting in one spot for what amounted to 6 hours total each day. Also, we were told we'd have Wifi in the common areas, and not only were there difficulties with that, we could barely even connect to the premium network in the hotel. While this wasn't the organizer's fault - it was very important to me and would have been nice if they got a bit more involved.
I met some great people and got to listen to some real important leaders in the field that I am lucky enough to get to be paid to be in. Am I going to try and attend next year's? Yes, but I'm bringing a comfy chair.
What say you?!