FOWD review

This Thursday I went to my first ever conference, Future of Web Design (FOWD) in London. I’m notoriously hard to please and I can get very annoyed when I’m told things I already know. Anyway, here’s what I thought of it… I liked it. Actually, I think I really liked it.

After 2 days, I think I’ve realised that I really did like it, a lot – certainly my girlfriend is sick of me talking about it. I had expected to take away a lot of information about design techniques and tips/tricks for design or Photoshop/Fireworks but it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, it was lectures (yes, I considered them lectures) around the general topic of web design.

There were about 8 different presentations and out of them I found about 5-6 incredibly useful. In particular, my favourite presentations were by Andy Budd from Clearleft who talked about taking usability inspiration from our own experiences in different places e.g. shops and hotels. My other favourite was by Paul Farnell of Litmus, who talked about unconventional promotion techniques for website promotion.

Elsewhere, there were some great lectures, discussions about build process, branding, user experience, design sign-off and much more. I was very impressed by the professionalism of all the talkers – I had half expected these people to be a little bit more inept socially but that, simply, was not the case.

I can’t talk much about the social side of FOWD, as I skipped both the pre and post parties in order to see some of my friends and relatives in London instead. I’ve never seen so many web designers/developers before so if I had had more time, I can imagine having made some quite good contacts.

Would I go again next year, depending on the topics… yes probably and I’m seriosuly considering making dconstruct in September too.