This past Friday I attended Front-End Design Conference in St. Pete, Florida with some fellow sharks [that is, Grooveshark employees]. Front-End was actually my first industry conference, and it was great to meet fellow front-end web developers and designers from Florida, to put a face to this community.
Dan Denney—who created the conference a year ago in order to learn more about design—did a great job of gathering 7 talented speakers. I felt that I took away something from each of the people who presented (collectively, 6 pages of notes), but for the sake of brevity,
- “Design is in the big picture.” —Niki Brown
- Do color research based on your audience. Different groups of people will have different reactions to color based on context and experience. —Niki Brown
- [On process in picking web design colors]: pick base color, then color scheme; Add muted colors, select a text color, and then experiment with how transparency can bring depth to your web design. —Niki Brown
- The way you write your copy and the way you speak should be the same. Matched messaging builds credibility, but out-of-sync personality (web vs. personal) can feel as though you are lying. —Lea Alcantara
- Use inspiration boards to create a visual context for the “feel” you want to go for (e.g., if you want to evoke the Victorian period, gather Victorian references) —Meagan Fisher
- “If you want something, ask for it”>—Lea Alcantara
- [On CSS Workflow]: Be psychic; have foresight for changes in content. This way, you won’t have to go back into your code later and make major adjustments. — Jina Bolton
- A brand is what you do and who you are
Like I said, Friday was so chock-full of goodness that I can’t possibly post it all here and expect anyone to read that giant wall of text. So because I can’t give everyone their due, visit Front-End for the full list.
Slide Downloads:
“CSS Workflow” by Jina Bolton
“Design is in The Big Picture” by Niki Brown
More downloads to come when they’re linked on the Front-End website.
2 Comments
Thanks for sharing your notes from FEDC this past week Melanie! It was my first Florida event as well and loved it
Hopefully there will be more coming to this area.
No problem, Alex! Plenty more notes where they came from if there was something you missed. I’m glad you enjoyed the conference; seems like Dan Denney is really pumped about how it’s gone these past 2 years. I’m sure there will be another next year.
In the meantime, you should come out to Gainesville this February. Vox Graphis, the design club at UF, puts on a symposium (called Ligature) each year. We’ve had some really great names come out (last Feb. we had Debbie Millman) and it’s always a really inspiring weekend. I’ll have to remember to fill you in when we get closer to the event.