Voices That Matter :: QRATOR

07 July 2010

Voices That Matter

Posted by: Jocelyn Edin

Last Monday and Tuesday, Todd, Rie, and I attended Voices That Matter, a web design conference at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. The web is a complicated and ever-changing medium, definitely an area where I feel I have to constantly push myself to stay fully aware of things.

This conference was an excellent way to do that. The content ranged the full scope of web design, from high-level topics on user experience (by the infamous Jesse James Garrett), strategy, and content, to talks about web typography, grids, social networks. And, of course, the biggest topics of the moment, CSS3 and HTML5, included very detailed information (bullet points of code) on the changes being implemented with these new standards.

It didn’t come as a surprise that I found the session led by graphic designer Koi Vinh, to be totally intriguing, even though it was about grids. I was also fascinated by the research data presented by Paul Adams from Google about our personal social networks and the varying degrees of importance those relationships have and how each have potential to be marketed to. Then there was the insider information shared by Tantek Celik about the history of HTML standards and how HTML5 came about. This is something I’ve never known much about, so to hear snippets from the conversation as to why standards were adopted one way or another was very interesting.

And then there was the gorgeous location and wonderful company I kept. Todd and Rie both work remotely from San Francisco, so this was a chance for us to gather in-person, learn and share with each other, and lift our glasses to the beautiful city we were in and the great design studio we work for.