Links from Future of Web Design posted 25th April 2007
The Future of Web Design conference last wednesday was an enjoyable affair. It was slickly organised as usual and of course it was great to meet up with friends (and clients) old and new. To be brutally honest, I didn’t get a huge amount out of the conference itself – there were definitely some really good presentations (some of the best had woefully short slots); a few agency pitches, which were great in parts but often switched tack just as they started to get interesting; and the obligatory stints from Adobe & Microsoft which I’m pretty sure weren’t in the schedule at the time I stumped up my cash (I’m happy to be corrected on that).
Anyhow, like I said there was some good stuff and here’s a few links I culled along the way:
Diesel bag. A campaign created by Brendan Dawes of Magnetic North for a ridiculously expensive bag, which you could win if you immersed yourself in the site experience. Instead of making things easy by simply plonking a web form on a page, they created a fab journey through clouds and customer content.
Pet Shop Boys. Nicely sparse, grid-based site with immaculate attention to colour and typography – athough it really didn’t need to open in a new window and be built exclusively in Flash. Notice in particular that Neil and Chris actually moblog regularly to the site – I’d like to these directly but… Flash. The moblogging reminded me of Jamie Oliver’s excellent site (although I preferred the old design).
Top Shop. Terrific grid-based design, with regularly updated content. I’m not exactly the target audience, but this still good stuff.
Run London Routefinder. Loved the utility of this. Draw your running route on the map and works out the distance. Also during the Run London race itself you could be filmed crossing the line and the your time and video sent to your phone or email.
Kayak. Flight comparison service. With graphs of prices over time, sliders for departure time slots, and all sorts of other cool utilities.
Designing Interactions. Fascinating looking book by Bill Moggridge. Looks like a good one for the office.
I was on the Top Shop site yesterday funnily enough (I promise I wasn’t shopping…) and I found lots of bugs with it.
It’s a very pretty design and yeah the content is cool and current, but the execution of some parts is awful (e.g. try the store locator search – if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can’t go back because it’ll keep executing the search!), and I kept coming across stuff that wasn’t styled right (naked blue links are always the give-away).
I really love Kayak. It has been very useful to me during the crunch time. But if I am looking ahead of time, I like using http://www.farecast.com.. It can predict when rates might be going up or down (with a fairly high degree of accuracy).
Hi Richard, I don’t know if during the conference you watched the Diesel Bag’s Flash installed on local machine (I hope), on the internet it takes 2 minutes before starting (I’ve a cable connection). 2 minutes on the internet are like 2 minutes of silence on the radio.
After that, the movie was moving very slowly, always transfering datas and the user experience was not (for me and for my internet connection) not very interesting, and at the end I have found only a bag :-)
The design idea is very interesting, but it becomes secondary (is this still english?) beacause of the tech. difficulties.
Mauro – I think the Diesel Bag thing may have been served from a local server, but I’ve seen it since on my broadband connection at work and it seemed OK to me – definitely quicker than2 minutes to get going.
Frances Berriman wrote:
I was on the Top Shop site yesterday funnily enough (I promise I wasn’t shopping…) and I found lots of bugs with it.
It’s a very pretty design and yeah the content is cool and current, but the execution of some parts is awful (e.g. try the store locator search – if you make a mistake or change your mind, you can’t go back because it’ll keep executing the search!), and I kept coming across stuff that wasn’t styled right (naked blue links are always the give-away).
It’s a bit of a shame, is all.
J David wrote:
I really love Kayak. It has been very useful to me during the crunch time. But if I am looking ahead of time, I like using http://www.farecast.com.. It can predict when rates might be going up or down (with a fairly high degree of accuracy).
simon r jones wrote:
Skyscanner is really good for flights. Has an excellent comparison of prices across time which helps to find the best days to travel on.
Mauro wrote:
Hi Richard, I don’t know if during the conference you watched the Diesel Bag’s Flash installed on local machine (I hope), on the internet it takes 2 minutes before starting (I’ve a cable connection). 2 minutes on the internet are like 2 minutes of silence on the radio.
After that, the movie was moving very slowly, always transfering datas and the user experience was not (for me and for my internet connection) not very interesting, and at the end I have found only a bag :-)
The design idea is very interesting, but it becomes secondary (is this still english?) beacause of the tech. difficulties.
But thanks to Brendan for the inspiration !
Rich wrote:
Mauro – I think the Diesel Bag thing may have been served from a local server, but I’ve seen it since on my broadband connection at work and it seemed OK to me – definitely quicker than2 minutes to get going.