@Media Day Two – thoughts

I never did get round to finishing this, did I? Doh!

• Jon Hicks : How to be a creative sponge“
• Jeremy Keith : Bulletproof Ajax“
• Shawn Lawton Henry : Advancing Web Accessibility“
• Andy Clark: “Royale with Cheese“

For the thoughts (such as they are) clicky on the ‘more’ link…

• Jon Hicks’ session was another one that was interesting to me for a number of reasons, but primarily again based around design. In some ways it was a bit of an answer to the old chestnut question about ‘where do you get your inspirations from?’. The answer? Pretty much everywhere.
    Hicks’ basic principle was to keep your eyes open all the time, take notes, sketches, photos, and be open to possibilities. Again, not really rocket science, but it was interesting all the same, and gave me some ideas – although in fact I do most of them already. Well, maybe not the ones about ‘found’ typography (taking photos of signs, letters etc., and using them in future ideas) because I think that’d make even Herself despair of me. But well, I do do most of them. Then again, one of my favourite “found in nature” colourschemes is poppies in a green field. And just think how well that would work on the web…
• ‘Bulletproof’ Ajax really turns out to mean ‘make sure that if the Ajax fails, the site still works’. As always, not a difficult concept really – although it’s certainly one that seems to be missed by a large number of companies.
    Personally, I don’t much like Ajax for a lot of things, and I tend to agree with Sevitz in his post about javascript and Ajax, that while it’s OK in small doses, entire ‘web operating systems’ or whatever are inherently hacky, and not the best thing to do (I’m paraphrasing). And in that perspective, Jeremy Keith seems to be more in tune with me than with most Ajax ‘developers’. His basic idea was to put Ajax in last – build a site that works in the ‘old-fashioned’ way, then use Ajax (or, as he termed it, Hijax) to ‘upgrade’ the site if Javascript is running etc. (and on the latest figures from Technorati, some 15% of web-users still have Javascript turned off) – that way, the site works, regardless of whether it’s “Web 2.0” or “Web 1.0”.
• Ah, the accessibility session. I’m sorry, Pix, but for me this session was the biggest let-down of the entire conference. ‘Advancing’ accessibility? No. If someone were at all interested in Accessibility on websites, there was little-to-nothing in this session that advanced their knowledge one iota. OK, if someone were coming to Accessibility stuff for the first time, then it had some use – but then didn’t cover the essentials either. Talking about WCAG2 happened at the last @Media, and while there might have been some new revisions, the impression I got was that there wasn’t really much ‘new’ happening. Other people I’ve spoken to felt the same. So, well, this one was just the let-down of the conference for me, which is a shame. But there we go.
• Finally (I didn’t bother with the ‘hot topics’ panel) “Royale with Cheese”. If you’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’, you’ll know the section where the ‘Royale with Cheese’ is discussed. And the basic theme of the session was about whether websites (and particularly the design of websites) reflect anything of the country where they were created. Is there an ‘English’ design trend? A ‘Russian’ one? A ‘Japanese’ style?
    It made for some interesting thoughts about designs based on one’s cultural background, and a lot of the research Andy Clark had done was useful – talking to designers from around the world – but ultimately it’s probably not something I’m going to be doing any time soon. Then again, it has made me look at various websites, and think more about the design and – again – the inspiration for design.

All told, a damn good conference, and one that let me take away a lot of material for thinking about (and using) in the work I do. To me, that makes it definitely worth the money.