The day was set up to cover as much aspects of webdesign as possible. Patrick McNeill kicked off with the 'inspirational' part, using design examples from his site Design Meltdown. We especially liked the "one design a day" concept; force yourself to design something else every day, but don't spend more than half an hour on it. Sounds easy, but I really think structured practice is important, even when it's a stupid exercise. Besides that, knowing his gathering site that well, he was able to show current trends and aspects we will see more in the near future (like widescreen layouts, softer colors, more use of video, etc). He also came up with some unconventional ways to approach a brand/subject, resulting in some challenging design examples.

The presentation of Steve Pearce (Poke) was a brilliant demonstration of the experience iceberg concept (brilliant slides), which is a great way to help clients realize that visual design is only the "tip" of the iceberg (a very important tip that is, of course, let's not encourage the software developers more than necessary). I'm afraid Andy Clarke's part of this presentation didn't really made an impression, since I can't seem to remember the points he made... It was funny though.

Andy Budd's presentation was all about user experience. First impressions, making users feel special (personalisation, attendive services), attention to detail and and a lot more points he made, make sure that users return, or at least talk about 'that great site' they visited. A nice talk, covering how the world deals with user experience ("Starbucks doesn't sell coffee, they sell an experience") and examples on how to adapt this in the webindustry.

Then, a short commercial Microsoft talk, showing us a case study of Aston Martin, meant to promote Silverlight. The Adobe talk later on showed us similar cool sites made in Flex. Both great tools - for developers and designers - we should look more into at Ibuildings, or at least one of them . Larissa Meek's presentation came down to 12 basic rules to get your design approved. No news for us here; Just some tips most designers will pick up along the line when you work with clients long enough. After lunch and a disappointing Photoshop battle, it was Elliot Jay Stocks' turn, who's blog I've been reading for about a year now. So I already knew he likes books, business cards and other artwork, that he used in his presentation to explain how webdesign should learn from print design.

And then, Jon Hicks (Hicksdesign). Many know him as the guy that created the Firefox and Thunderbird logos. Jon had one of the best and funniest presentations of the day. He took the audience through the process of redesigning a website - starting with the problems with the original - all the way through the redesign. The funny thing is, here at Ibuildings, I already started to collect and describe best practices involved in setting up a new website (the path of design -> knowing your content - > markup -> styling -> compatibility isues etc.). So, hearing Jon talk about it, was motivating. He didn't cover issues like dealing with Content Management Systems, fluid vs. fixed or ems vs pixels, since he only had 50 minutes available for his presentation. And although he didn't really come up with many new things (which is good, in a way, because that means I'm on track with my document), he showed the perfect way to carry it out.

Paul Farnell pointed out ways to indirectly promote your site by adding value and driving useful and relevant traffic. His concept of 'satellite sites' seemed usefull (launching small and free sites to promote the main site). But although he was a smooth speaker and his slides worked very well, the topic somehow didn't really appeal to me. I guess that's why we leave this part to marketeers (and why they leave the creative part to us). The last presentation: Daniel Burka (chief creative director at Digg) described some of the processes and ideas behind the evolution of sites like Pownce and Digg. The use of common design themes in the various elements of each site, and adapting to user demands were two of the points that he made. A worthy presentation to close FOWD 08.

See Slideshare for some slides and Flickr for pictures of the event...