Last night I came across a new post on stuff and nonsense entitled Could you be a dick? in which Andy Clarke challenges the world to come up with a spoof business card for a private investigator.
I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.
Last Friday I got up early and headed south on the train. My destination was the Duke of York Picturehouse in sunny (couldn’t be farther from the truth) Brighton. The reason for this outing was the first ever Full Frontal JavaScript conference, organised and curated by Remy Sharp (@rem).
On arrival in Brighton I was faced with a 10 minute uphill trudge in the rain. This was not an ideal start to the day but, before too long I had successfully navigated to my destination, which as had been pointed out to me a couple of days earlier “cannot be missed” due to a massive pair of stocking-clad legs sticking out of the roof. After a well needed cup of tea and two (yeah that’s right, two!) pain au chocolat I settled down into what must have been the most comfortable conference seat ever and prepared myself for the day’s talks.
Full Frontal 2009 Itinerary
A day of firsts…
Full frontal was a day of firsts… It was the first time I had been to a purely javascript conference, it was the first time I had properly understood closures (thanks to @robertnyman) and most importantly, it was the first time I had ever been to a conference where I had enjoyed every single talk. This was a brilliant suprise because in the past at conferences I have always found myself clock-watching in at least one presentation and wishing it would finish so I could go and get another free tea and danish.
The highlight of the day for me was Robert Nyman’s talk, which was a fantastic (albeit heavily Ben Affleck orientated) summary of everything you needed to know in order to be a JavaScript wizard. I also really enjoyed Jake Archibald’s talk on performing your own JavaScript performance research and how best to incorporate JavaScript libraries. The humour and enthusiasm he put into this potentially very boring topic was excellent.
Original presentation methods
Another thing that really impressed was the quality and originality of the presentation materials used, with three out of the seven talks not using powerpoint or keynote. Jake Archibald’s presentation was done entirely in flash, which despite being a little controversial for a JavaScript conference was incredibly well designed and animated. Stuart Langridge had made his own Javascript/CSS3 web-based presentation software, which he later told me would be available to download once he could sort out all the “fucking trigonometry”. Last but not least was Simon Willison’s presentation, which consisted of an original and brave navigation around 16 Mac OSX spaces arranged in a 4 x 4 grid, it was pretty hectic but it worked.
All in all the conference was a wonderful success and I really hope it happens again in 2010. The night ended with what was possibly the best burger I have ever tasted and a few beers at the OHSO Social on Brighton beach. Higher resolution versions of my photos are available on flickr along with many others in the Full Frontal Conference pool.
Last night whilst catching up with twitter I saw the following tweet from Remy Sharp…
Snap Bird is essentially an enhanced twitter search application that Remy has built to find archived tweets which are more than seven days old. I liked the idea and also liked the name ‘Snap Bird’ and I then began to wonder what a snap bird might look like if it where real creature. Before I knew it, this day dreaming had spawned an impromptu design session and moments later I’d cracked out Fireworks and had begun creating an illustration of a snap bird.
From this simple character I continued to develop a logo/brand and before too long I had created an entire layout for the Snap Bird home page.
I was quite pleased with how this design had turned out and decided to email Remy a link to the design to see if he was interested in using it to replace the largely unstyled version that he currently has up. As yet I have had no reply, although judging by further tweets from Remy today, it seems that he has already begun work on his own design.
I look forward to seeing what he produces.
EDIT: Find out what happened in this follow up blog post
At 6:15am on Wednesday 2nd September I left Reading to travel to Brighton. On arrival, after a swift Sausage McMuffin breakfast, I headed to the Clearleft office to attend a workshop entitled HTML5 and CSS3 Wizardry.
HTML5
The workshop which was part of dConstruct 2009 was split into two halves. In the morning Jeremy Keith (@adactio) explained the evolution of HTML. This interesting journey covered the complete history of HTML and introduced the various individuals and associations responsible for its development over the years. The focus then shifted to the future of HTML and new HTML5 specification. Jeremy introduced the new doctypes, tags and attributes available to web authors and gave examples of their usage. Much like Remy Sharp’s HTML5 presentation at geek in the park a few weeks earlier Jeremy explained how these new tags can be incorporated into existing websites and how best to approach support in older browsers.
Jeremy was also very keen to highlight areas of the spec which he believed could be improved. In particular the disambiguation of the usage of section/article tags and similarly the figure/aside tags. He also raised concerns about the strict and counter-intuitive usage defined for the new footer tag*. Jeremy encouraged others to get involved with the WHATWG mailing list and raise any concerns before the working draft deadline in October.
CSS3
The afternoon session run by Richard Rutter (@clagnut) and Natalie Downe (@Natbat) focused on CSS3. The talk covered, in detail, a large number of the new CSS3 modules and discussed how best to implement these new technologies without compromising backwards compatibility. Of particular interest to me was the advanced use of border-radius and understanding the full list of options available for box-shadow.
Towards the end of the session they demonstrated some of the more bizarre elements of CSS3. The weirdest of these by far was the css3 template module, a quirky new way to define a web page layout by drawing an ASCII art blue print (complete with dimensions) within your CSS file… very strange indeed.
The venue and hospitality at the workshop were great, the presentations were well researched and hugely informative. Unfortunately, due to the experimental nature of the content covered I felt that there was very little that I could implement at work due of the huge proportion of our users still using legacy browsers. With such a small audience and no immediate impact on revenue I think it will be a long time before large corporate websites will invest any significant resources into CSS3 related projects. On a brighter note the examples demonstrated contained some inspiring eye-candy which I will definitely consider for personal projects outside of the corporate environment.
After an enjoyable early evening drink in The Fountain Head and some fish and chips on Brighton pier I returned to Reading.
