Presentations about visual design
Podcasts, slides, videos and more
Mark Boulton — Designing grid systems
Grid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that?
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Daniel Burka — Changing successfully: Adapting your interface over time
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 1.40pm.
User interface design is an iterative process — the design of Digg and Pownce have been a study in evolution and adaptation. This talk will inspect the why and how of these iterations by looking at specific case studies from the two projects as well as previous client work Daniel has tackled.
The case studies will examine specific user interface challenges that have arisen and will chop them up into their various bits. How do I identify a challenge? What is the best approach for getting started? How do I solve the problem conceptually and technically? How will I know if I solved the challenge successfully? Case studies have been selected that are especially pertinent outside of their specific contexts to help you in your everyday UI design.
The presentation will focus on design inspiration, decision-making processes, technical solutions, and learning from missteps as part of a designer’s iterative process.
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Jeffrey Veen — Designing our way through data
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 9.10am.
The hype around Web 2.0 continues to increase to the point of absurdity. We hear all about a rich web of data, but what can we learn from these trends to actually apply to our designs? You’ll take a tour through the past, present, and future of the web to answer these questions and more:
- What can we learn from the rich history of data visualization to inform our designs today?
- How can we do amazing work while battle the constant constraints we find ourselves up against?
- How do we really incorporate users into our practice of user experience?
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Jeff Croft — Elegant web typography
Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 2.40pm.
Even in our day of web videos and podcasts, text is still the king of content on the web. Great typographic sensitivity is one of the hallmarks of sites that exude a professional confidence. From type sizing and coloring to leading, kerning, and measures to proper usage of quotes, dashes, and bullets, to choosing appropriate typefaces, this session will demonstrate using CSS and other modern web technologies to display type on screen with elegance and impact.
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Mathew Patterson — Delivering user experience to the inbox: designing for email
A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.
So you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design.
No problem right? Just need to test in Outlook 07, and 06. Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course. Oh, and Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL…Of course, the design may not work that well for an email anyway, and isn’t there some kind of anti-spam laws?
Like it or not, HTML email is here to stay and the responsibility for doing it right belongs to web designers. Learn how to plan, design and build an email newsletter that will provide a great user experience to the recipients, and great value to your clients.
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Kimberly Elam — Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography
A presentation given at Web Directions North, Vancouver Canada, January 30 2008.
Have you ever seen a web site so clear, logical, and exquisitely composed it made you stop in your tracks? Have you wondered how the designer achieved such a stunning and cohesive design?
In this presentation, Kimberly Elam, designer and author of the best-selling “Geometry of Design” and “Typographic Systems” will reveal the mysterious relationships between proportion, visual systems, composition and aesthetics.
Too often excellent conceptual ideas suffer during the process of realization, in large part because the designer did not understand the essential visual principles. This presentation explores these elements and how they work by examining how the use of visual principles informs, even creates, beauty in typographic design, but, more importantly, how you can use these techniques to create cohesiveness in your own design. The wide range of visual examples are both informative and insightful, and any designer can benefit from learning or revisiting the rules governing the basics of typographic design.
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Andy Clarke — Think like a mountain
A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.
Once seen as unsophisticated, childish and of low artistic value, comic-book art and culture has inspired artists and designers for generations and are now are often untapped resource for web design inspiration. In this session, designer and author of Transcending CSS, Andy Clarke will examine comic book layout, conventions and colour in the context of making inspirational designs for today’s web.