The Future Of Web Design 2013 - from Vickys Perspective

Added on 10/07/2013

Myself and Adam were very lucky in being able to attend the 7th annual Future of Web Design conference in London. The day was packed and we had such an amazing time.

Held at The Brewery, the conference featured design and development talks from leading professionals from around the world. In all, I saw 8 talks which covered a whole range of topics, but had one grounded theme - the Future of Web design.

Surprisingly, the talks I enjoyed the most were not about design, but the development of websites, and it was great to learn something completely new. The developers I saw explained how web language is changing and how this is affecting website design - rather than the other way around.

Designers who code

The clear message coming across from all the speakers was that in order for web design to continue to grow in the creative way it has been doing, designers really need to start learning code.

Which is a pretty horrible thought!

I have always battled against the idea, for no other reason that web language is ugly and looks scary. But after the conference I have realised the importance in developing ideas using the web tools that coding offers, and this will only continue to grow once we really know what we are doing!

Thankfully, the developers who spoke were not expecting designers to start writing Java Script or CSS3, just to develop more of an understanding of how things work, and why they work in certain ways.

Geniuses at work

All in, I had a brilliant day and two of my favourite speakers were Peter Gasston, who explained the lay-outs for the Multi-Screen world (responsive design was a very hot topic understandably), and Addy Osmani, who works at Google. Addys’ talk was about frame rate, and he spent the first 20 minutes tearing apart the development of Pinterest, with some live coding, and he spoke about things I will never understand, and for that reason I decided he was a genius (because he is.)

I definitely benefited from attending the conference as a designer, and I have already put into practice the things I have learned on the day. It’s pushing me further as a professional and this shows in the web designs I’m now creating.

Thank you to FMG for letting me and Adam attend!