Shali's Tumbling Thoughts

Recently I attended two web design conferences: Carsonified’s Future of Web Design 2009 and An Event Apart in San Francisco. It was interesting to see all of these opinions on where the web is going and what we, as web developers and designers, should be learning next, or focusing on in terms of providing our clients and producing in the future of our work.

Here was my general takeaway on both conferences:

• Understanding graceful degradation, progressive enhancement and progressive enrichment with the best practice method to use techniques in a subtle matter to enrich a design
• A website experience does not need to be the same in every browser as long as it doesn’t take away from the branding experience (http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/)
• Don’t be afraid to take advantage of CSS3, HTML5, and Attribute selectors to enrich a website via: form elements, utilizing RGBA, drop shadows, scaling images on hover, rotation, fade and transition effects
• Future proof your code as browsers will catch up
• Get better at accessibility when building websites (i.e. adding keyboard controls or buttons that grow if you miss them so many times)
• Get smarter with web form design because certain layouts can mean losing form fills or cause for faster conversion rates just depending on how you place your labels (See: Luke W’s Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks)
• Take negative feedback as a form of passion and don’t make quick decisions based on user complaints
• Don’t worry too much about validation
• Stop following trends (because that get’s boring!) and get influenced by design outside of the web, look at print for design inspiration
• Understand all options for Typography on the web (Typekit, Cufon, SiFR, @font-face, etc)
• Read Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web because it’s a quick read and a great way to understand accurate, consistent, and smarter content on your client’s website
• HTML5/Canvas is the future
• Javascript is going to be the single most important language to know

Any interesting thing to note is that after attending these conferences, I went browsing around on the web at examples of work by some of these web leaders and I’m not really sure if some of these methodologies is a good way to look at things. There was pretty much a general consensus that all of these web designers and developers have a preference for using a Mac and browsing in Safari. I would agree that this is the superior way to experience the web. It’s how I roll, too. However, I was doing this browsing on IE8 in my VMware and found that a majority of these sites just did not look good at all. Drop caps not showing up, RGBA completely misused in major noticeable areas, buttons looking disastrous, etc… At both conferences, there was a lot of bashing on Internet Explorer which was an odd position considering that they sponsored both conferences.

The reason I bring this up is I think to a point there should still be full consideration of other popular browsers (Internet Explorer especially) and whatever methodologies we use in our code, we really should bulletproof across at least modern versions of IE. It’s a bit unfortunate to know that the rest of the world who aren’t designers and developers (and my dad who’s a PC user 4 life!) is going to be affected by these teachings where web makers are starting to pretty much disregard internet explorer while trying to utilize cool methods of CSS3. At the end of the day, the content of both events has been great. I think we should learn the future of web design and use these methods in those subtle ways that we were taught, while still bulletproofing cross-browser compatibility for areas that would be completely noticeable.