Presentations about visual design

Pod­casts, slides, videos and more

Daniel Burka — Changing successfully: Adapting your interface over time

• In: Resources
• By: jessie
• June 19, 2008
• 2 Comments

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

• In: Resources, trends
• By: jessie
• June 19, 2008
• 5 Comments

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

• In: Resources
• By: jessie
• June 19, 2008
• 7 Comments

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

• In: Resources
• By: Maxine
• March 10, 2008
• 1 Comment

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

• In: Resources
• By: jessie
• February 12, 2008
• 1 Comment

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

• In: Resources
• By: Maxine
• September 29, 2007
• No Comments

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.

See the slides and hear the podcast »