Today was the conference part of FOWD, where many of the speakers from the workshops along with a few others got up to do short presentations on the "future of web design," and giving tips about how to stay on top of the ever-changing web world. Here's our thoughts:
Jon: I found it very interesting how much these speakers discussed CSS3 and the idea of pushing the boundaries and coming up with an experience for the user that may be different based on their browser. They mentioned how it's not a big deal to have an extra little nice feature added by CSS3 to a site that may only be seen by a small percentage of users, because other users won't know what they're missing out on. Another big idea brought up by each of the speakers was to take risks, as Mike Kus noted "Progress and innovation in design requires exploration. In exploration there is risk." I find it's very important to try to keep my designs from getting old and boring and too much the same, and that it takes risks to come up with something new and innovative. I really feel like they were trying to push everyone in that direction to continue to innovate and change the web and how users interact with it.
Andrew: As I mentioned on Twitter, the overarching theme of the presentations today was progressive enhancement. So what does that mean? Basically, we need to reward users whom are using better browsers. This can be accomplished by using CSS3 properties such as box-shadow and border-radius, and Safari-only animations like rotate and zoom. As designers, it's our responsibility to use these things, and push boundaries, so we don't let the web flounder in it's current state. Most of the speakers pushed "moving forward" with these new technologies, and some even went as far as to suggest giving IE6 text-only stylesheets to accomplish this. As Jon mentioned, other speakers that weren't getting into the technical side of things presented general design tips, and pushed taking big risks with your designs "just to see what happens." I came out of the conference feeling empowered and confident in the decision to provide enhancements to better browsers while serving graceful degradation to older (or less powerful) browsers.
Overall, we had a fantastic FOWD experience. Keep your eye on this site for more detailed posts about some of the speaker presentations.