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

tldr; we’ve relaunched Scroll Magazine, featuring profiles and interviews, indepth articles, and more. Read on for more details, or get yourself a digital copy of our first edition now.

I came to the Web in its early days somewhat by accident.

I was developing a hypertext system, Palimpsest (yes, ironically, a competitor of the Web, in a sense), and the Web it seemed, for all its shortcomings as hypertext, represented a new way for software publishers to distribute their applications, compared to the traditional model of packaged software sold in stores. So we built a site, with screen shots and feature lists, provided our software for download, and then wondered how on earth we could get people to find it. We hit on an approach which is now known as content marketing, providing great resources to help people find and work with what was excitingly called ‘etext’ back in the early 90s. Of course, to build our site we needed to learn HTML, and later CSS, and along that journey we realised that there weren’t particularly good tools for working with CSS, then still in its earliest days, nor much to help you learn, deal with browser quirks, and otherwise master Web development. And so I built one of the earliest CSS editors, Style Master, and in keeping with our marketing strategy, a whole raft of online courses and resources, which led to my involvement in the early Web Standards Project “CSS Samurai”, and to the original css-discuss mailing list, which we helped start with Eric Meyer, among other initiatives to help people become better web designers.

A few years later, again largely without a lot of long term thinking, we founded what became Web Directions, an event that predates – and provided a blueprint for – almost all the conferences for Web designers and developers around the world. At Web Directions, we’ve often featured speakers right at the beginning of their careers who have gone on to become among our industry’s most highly respected experts, and have seen the launch of incredibly influential ideas like OOCSS (Web Directions North 2009) and “The New Aesthetic” (Web Directions South 2012). I don’t list these in many ways happy accidents to blow our trumpet here at Web Directions but, among other things, to point out there is no master plan; rather, a series of inspirations that, to be honest, we often didn’t realise the value of and on more than one occasion abandoned before the idea had the opportunity to really come to fruition. One of the ideas we abandoned that perhaps we should have stuck with a little longer at is (either literally or figuratively) in your hands right now: Scroll. The thinking behind Scroll was, and is, akin to how we think about everything we do at Web Directions. How can we do what we do differently, better? What are we doing ritualistically, simply because we’ve always done it like this, or because it’s always been done this way? Scroll started by us asking ourselves, “What is the point of a program at an event?” The bios you read are all online (and in an age of ubiquitous mobile much more readily accessible there than on paper).

The session descriptions are, as well. All the relevant information about the event is on the attendee’s lanyard, or just a link away on their phone. So why are we going to the effort and expense of designing something essentially useless? Something that wastes trees? But what if we could create something of real and lasting value? That captured the ideas that are at the heart of our event, and let people learn more about the speakers they’ve seen and their thinking? Something that can be shared with colleagues and peers, and which would also take some of the value of an event out far beyond the audience in the room? That’s our ambition with Scroll. We’ve interviewed some of our amazing speakers and tried to get behind their thinking, to their motivations and inspirations. And we’ve tapped some of the speakers to share some of their ideas and techniques more deeply in print, just for this magazine. As I write this, Ricky Onsman, who has literally been to more of our events than anyone, and who has recently – to our great good fortune – come on board as editor for Scroll and all of the content at Web Directions, is ridiculously hard at work racing to complete this first (or third) edition, and so I’m waiting, excited, though a little anxiously, to see how it turns out. But we’re definitely going to stick the course this time, and there’ll be editions of Scroll associated with all our major upcoming events. I hope you enjoy it. Let us know what you think!