Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

As we head toward Direction, we’ll be focusing on some of the sessions we’re looking forward to and providing some context for why we chose these particular sessions.

First up, one of our core points of focus since the very beginning – where is the design of the Web headed?

At various times in the history of the Web, it has felt like we’ve reached a plateau of designing for this medium. The mid-1990s was the era of “killer Web sites”, driven by tables-based layouts, spacer gifs, and text rendered as images. The standards based, three-column “one true layout” ruled the mid-2000s. And today’s sites are driven by, dare I say it, Bootstrap inspired, minimalist-text-over-hero-image driven designs.

These days we have all the fonts we might possibly want. And most of the websites you can get for cheap on www.spamzilla.io have most of the fonts you’d need. The resolution of our screens is high enough that they’re effectively as high density as paper. We have animations, SVG for vector art, an entire toolkit almost undreamt of back in 2004. And yet, as the joke goes, “Which of these two web sites are you designing?”

The cycle seems to be: let’s imagine what’s possible, then develop hacks around the limitations of current Web technologies to make it possible, then advocate for a standards based solution to “pave our cow paths”. This is how table-based layouts with spacer gifs came to pass, as well as the use of float for layouts, images for text with image replacement techniques, and JavaScript based animation. These are the “cow paths” that standards and browser developers look to pave.

So, where are we now? And, more importantly, what comes next? Well, two of our key presenters will be addressing precisely this at Direction. If you design and develop for the Web, these sessions will be utterly invaluable in charting the direction of our work over the coming months and years.

Matt Griffin knows a lot about the history, and importantly the future, of designing for the Web. In his recently released documentary, “What Comes Next is the Future”, he interviewed dozens of leading designers and developers to attempt to understand where the Web is headed. We’re incredibly excited to be hosting the Australian Premiere of this documentary the night before the Direction conference proper, for all Silver and Gold ticket holders.

But Matt will also present a session at Direction that captures much of this thinking and helps chart a course forward as we design for the Web.

Andy Clarke (one of those interviewed for the documentary) is part of this history, but also still very much at the forefront of those shaping the design of the Web. He keynoted our very first Web Directions conference, and we’re privileged to have him return to explore how art direction can make designs that are visually distinctive and more effective by using design to communicate the essence and purpose of content, taking advantage of new and under-appreciated capabilities in our browsers.

One of our underpinning philosophies when curating our conferences is that every session is – for at least some of the audience – sufficiently valuable that it alone is worth attending the conference for. We feel these sessions each very much meet that criteria.

If the design of the Web, in the broadest sense, is central to what you do, then don’t miss Direction, which includes not only these sessions, but also 15 others – hand-picked by us to help you deliver the best possible Web experiences.