Last week, I attended the first New Adventures In Web Design, a conference in Nottingham, a “unique and affordable web design conference in the heart of England”.
Many of the reviews & writeups have gone into incredible depth detailing every aspect of the day, Sam Brown has even created what’s become to be known as an Experience Graph. What I’m going to do is summarise how the day was, for me, a young web developer immersed in a town full of his heroes.
The Pre-Party
Misleading title there, there were two parties! One party was a Second Wednesday (but on the third Wednesday), but I didn’t attend that because everyone was bowling instead!
Erskine Design booked the upper floor of a bowling alley, 24 lanes! They made 24 teams, so each team had was mostly made up of well-respected designers & developers. That was the place to be. Inevitably, much alcohol was consumed, we even managed to drink the upstairs bar out of Guinness.
The Conference
Given the name of the conference, I was expecting some ground-breaking talks, and to be fair Simon Collison (@colly) did get each speaker to give a new talk. The downside of that is, it’s the start of the year, everyone has new talks and were testing them on us. It did show, most of the seasoned speakers there seemed to be reading from a script half the time.
Some of the talks, especially from newer speakers did seem to drag on a little though, one even got a little offensive patronising (in a geeky way). They’re were speaking to a room with 650 designers & developers. We all know about Dribbble & FFFFound. Telling us we can get inspiration there is like telling us we can get food from Tesco’s. Myself & half the audience found ourselves checking Twitter, one lady even got her knitting out! (I’m not joking!).
Despite the lack-luster veneer of the talks, each talk seemed to have a clear message everyone could take away & apply to their work. There were countless tweets saying the conference was very inspiring.
The After-Party
After the conference, most people stumbled back to their hotels, trying to get the blood flowing through their legs again after sitting still for best part of 9 hours. A few friends & myself met up in the hotel lobby and decided to follow the crowd & go for a curry. When we got there, we were lucky enough to be sat on a table with Remy Sharp and Chris Mills and many other faces I see on Twitter on a daily basis. What an honour!
After curry & much Cobra, we all briskly walked to the party venue, Escucha, only five minutes away. There, a few friends, myself and Remy chatted about various conferences and work we’ve done before splitting off in our own little groups & discovering the downstairs bar, we everyone quickly drank the bar out of Guinness again. Downstairs, I started chatting to Gowalla‘s newest recruit, Tim Van Damme and his wife about their move to the States in the coming months.
After-thoughts
In retrospect, there wasn’t much happing in terms to the web design & development, even at the conference. I’d say it was more abstract general design theory. Not to say that’s bad, just not what I was expecting. I’d still go again though, learning about general design theory is a great thing, it makes you think about how things should look and work in day-to-day life.
Very valuable.
