FOWD

Went to the Future of Web Design conference here in NYC last week. Highlights for me were Ryan Singer (37 Signals) on usability, Jonathan Snook (Snook.ca) on Ajax, Jina Bolton (Jinabolton.com) on CSS3 and Jeffrey Kalmikoff (skinnyCorp) talking about community centered design. Its great to hear people I really hold out as my web heros talking about what they do best. Jina's enthusiasm was infectious and I am so absolutely jazzed about CSS3! Ryan gave a great presentation on form design, something so simple ... that so easily gets bogged down in confusion."Emphasize what's important and de-emphasize what's not" ... simple really right?! Snook's was interesting just cause Ajax and web apps are interesting to me. Again Ryan Singer's words were echoing: "If you have to explain it its not obvious" (I hope that was Ryan!). Jeff Kalmikoff did a really energetic presentation on his story with Threadless, which I think has to be fascinating to so many people, as community centered design becomes the web experience. I loved his story about his mother sending him emails to "jkalmikoff@hotmale.com" I remembered when I got my first hotmail account back when they were the ONLY one providing free email addresses and long before they were Microsoft, I always felt embarrassed saying that address over the phone, so much so that I would be very quick to spell it out just so there could be NO room for confusion. So if Jeff had been English he probably never would have had that problem!
So now its time to go to Threadless and buy a t-shirt.