Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

design panels

Saturday was a pretty good day for design-related panels. Three were particularly good:

A Decade of Style — I didn’t necessarily learn anything new in this panel, in which four CSS gurus reminisced about ten years of CSS, but it was fun to hear the ruminations. The panelists almost unanimously cited the launch of CSS Zen Garden as a pivotal moment in the progression / adoption of CSS as a standard.

Doug Bowman offered one bit of advice that I found really useful: Don’t try to design in CSS. Rather, design your site, and then start getting into the code. CSS is a tool, and relying on it to originate your designs can be rather limiting. It’s important advice for me to keep in mind because, especially with tight deadlines or on database-centric projects, it’s much easier sometimes to dive straight into the code and just crank it out. It’s fast but, as he said, a bit limiting.

After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration — I found this session, led by Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert of HappyCog, incredibly inspiring. It’s always exciting and a bit refreshing for me to hear other designers talk — in specifics and with enthusiasm — about the things that creatively nourish and inspire them, and Santa Maria and Weychert did it really well. Their examples of outside-the-office design exploits were especially helpful / inspiring, from letterpress classes (something I’ve actually been considering) to an annual themed birthday costume party (which reminded me of Eric and Caroline’s annual Halloween bash) to “design vigilantism.” I came out of that session feeling really energized and ready to design. I’ll have to revisit my notes to try to recapture that energy later on. (Mani also had some interesting things to say about this session.) Updated: An MP3 of this session is now available, as is a video.

Grids Are Good and How to Design with Them — Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh offered a really useful exercise in grid-based design with a vaguely vigilante redesign of Yahoo (renamed Yeeaahh for this exercise). They explained the concepts well, and I really hope that they post the presentation slides at some point. Updated: The slides are available for download.