szafranek.net on Mac OS X

szafranek.net on Windows

I decided to build the whole design upon a single typeface, Palatino. I used rich typography, including big headers. The results look great on Mac OS X. When the design had been completed and almost all the code had been written, I checked how did it look on Windows XP. It was a terrifying experience. Just look at the screenshots. When compared to the full, smooth shapes on OSX, glyphs on Windows look like an anorectic abomination.

I’m not a Mac fanboy and I really appreciate what Microsoft has done for web typography. The problem is that Microsoft’s most popular operating system doesn’t, by default, use any kind of font smoothing. It makes typographic efforts almost futile as most of the users won’t be able to experience the type as it was designed.

I decided to devote some time to research how different operating systems display type and how it should affect the work of web designers. The main conclusion is that displaying fonts correctly is almost impossible task due to ridiculously low resolution of computer screens. This fundamental limitation is another obstacle that any designer thinking about typography must consider while selecting the typeface and its size. I summarized the research and tips for designers in the article:

Font smoothing explained

I hope you’ll find it useful. Comments are welcomed.

PS. Big thanks to Carolyn Harman, my faithful editor :).

Goals

The biggest problem with the old site was that it mixed navigation and loads of content in Polish with new posts in English. For 2.5 years I had been successfully confusing both Polish and English-speaking visitors with this mess. So my first priority was to handle the bilingual content. Now the whole website uses navigation in English. A lot of content has been rewritten (eg. the entire Works section). The old blog posts and articles in Polish are still here. If you’re using a modern browser (Safari, Chrome, Opera or Firefox 3.1 or newer) you’ll also notice small flags indicating Polish pieces.

If it took me over 4 years to redesign, I don’t expect another overhaul too soon. My second goal was then to create a design which will look acceptable even few years from now. I’m not a professional designer. But I figured out that the best way to achieve my goal was to focus on content and leave fancy graphics to Photoshop wizards. Thus a strict adherence to a conservative grid and insane amount of time spent on polishing the typography.

While working on the redesign, I happen to read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. The book deserves a separate review, but let me just say that if I would have to point a single book every designer should read, that would be it. (Please note that it doesnt’ mean that designers should read only a single book.) The reading was both revealing and depressing. Revealing, because I learned a lot about typography and, according to my friends, became some kind of typomaniac. Depressing, as I realized how rudimentary web typography is when compared to print. So I ended up doing what’s possible now with CSS and dreaming of the better world in which the browsers are capable of hyphenation and other amazing things. Looking at the current status of CSS3 Text Module, it may be only a dream for long time.

Last but not least, I was simply bored with the old design. Thus the new look deliberately uses the color that is an abomination to many and the whole design doesn’t look like anything I created before. I also let myself play a bit, for example when designing the timeline in Works section. Again, only decent browsers will be able to show it fully. Users of IE6 and IE7 are kindly welcome to upgrade.

The geeky parts

I consciously decided that the site won’t look the same in every browser. After consulting my stats, I decided to make the layout look acceptable in IE6 and IE7. In Firefox 2 and 3 and IE8 the site looks almost as it should. Almost, as I rewarded users of CSS3-capable browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox 3.1+, Opera 9.6+) and added few goodies for them. My principle is that users of every major browser should be able to access the content. However, I don’t believe the content must look exactly the same way, especially if the browser is as crippled as IE6.

I wished everybody would use a decent browser. I also wished everybody would use an operating system able to display type nicely. Unfortunately, the world is far from being such a cool place and most users are stuck with Windows XP which doesn’t even antialias fonts by default. As the site relies on typography so much, I was depressed how dreadfully it looks without decent font rendering. I hope to write a separate entry on the topic. Right now I can only kindly ask XP users to enable ClearType or upgrade to Vista, and ask Vista users to upgrade to Mac OS X.

More enjoyable part of development was the work with WordPress. I switched from my very own FlexCMS, considering Ruby on Rails-based Radiant CMS along the way. WordPress is famous for being insecure and terribly written. But it also turned out to be one of the most user- and developer-friendly tools I have ever used. Customizing it was a pleasure, thanks to the good documentation, incredibly rich API and enormous community. I haven’t had to modify anything in WordPress itself: the whole design of this site is basically an ordinary Worpdress theme. Well, maybe not that ordinary, as I spent few dozens of evenings to make it behave exactly as I wanted. But eventually the site looks as designed and there are no compromises on quality as it’s customary to other content management tools. What’s more, the blog posts are imported so nothing was lost during the process.

Brave New World

Each promise to update this blog more often was followed by a shameful hiatus. So this time: no promises. Just see you next time. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the new site.

PS. Thanks and kudos to Helen, Michał, Łukasz, Paweł and Grzegorz for their help, comments and devastating critique :).

Our intended audience are the travelers. We focused on the tourists and day-trippers, though diehard globetrotters should enjoy the website as well. We decided to make the trip experience the central point to the application. The website is supposed to capture that experience and let our users share it with others. The other important goal is to give travel ideas to people who are considering making a journey.

Taking all that into account, we decided to choose the name and the tagline: natrasie.pl – Wrażenia z podróży. In Polish it means something like On the road – Trip impressions.

I had a few roles in the project. I was responsible for interaction design, coordinating the work of the graphic designer and writing the front-end code. It was the first time I worked in a startup-like setup so I’ve learned a few lessons, especially in the area of interaction design.

When I joined the team, the guys already had some idea of what the application should offer. In order to clarify the functionality and ensure a common vision, I created paper prototypes covering each screen of the application. The prototypes were hand drawn and very low-fi. My complete lack of drawing skills certainly helped to avoid unnecessary details. However, even such rough prototypes were a great help. Most of the interaction design decisions were made during the discussions based on these prototypes. Although it’s not possible to find and resolve every problem during this early phase, we achieved a common agreement on the functionality. Thus we had much less to discuss in the later phases of the project.

The paper prototype. That’s what I call “rough”.

At the same time I’ve found Helena Pryłowska (aka Helen), a graphic designer who eventually created a brilliant visual identity and graphic design for our website. Apart from a formal design brief, I provided her with a second set of prototypes. This time the prototypes were much more detailed and polished. I used Omni Graffle as the drawing tool. I quickly fell in love with it. It is amazingly easy to use, has a big set of freely available stencils and allows you to create very different kinds of drawings. I used Graffle to create a site overview (using Jesse James Garrett’s visual vocabulary) and mockups of each page.

Site overview

Prototypes created with Omni Graffle, unlike the paper ones, contained all the elements that made their way to the final design. Before passing the mockups to the designer, we had the final internal discussion about each page. While most crucial decisions were made during the paper prototyping phase, detailed mockups helped to clarify a lot of details related to content and application behavior.

The above screen redone with Omni Graffle

The mockups also made the work of the graphic designer easier, as she could focus on the visuals instead of guessing what should be on the page. It limited the number of iterations we had on graphic design. For most screens the first version from Helen was accepted, and only two or three times there was a need for significant amendments.

It’s clear that the process we followed was quite “heavy”: it involved a lot of prototyping before we dived into the code. Because I had limited time to work on the project (approximately 10 hours each week) and each mockup was discussed with both the team and the graphic designer, it took us 4 months to go from the vague vision to the finished screens ready for the implementation.

The design as it is implemented

However, it paid. First, the mockups helped to ensure effective collaboration with the designer. Secondly, when we eventually started to code, it went very smoothly and without a need to change the design significantly. All important decisions were already discussed and made, so we could spend the next few months translating this into the code. I also believe it helped to achieve a good level of quality from the very beginning, removing a need to rewrite huge parts of the application the very next day after it went live.

Of course no real project comes without blunders. The single most important lesson I learned? Design is all about the communication. Interaction design is no exception. This apparently obvious fact cannot be overstated.

The interaction designer is responsible for achieving a common understanding of the application within the team of developers and graphic designers. The prototypes themselves help a lot, but the way of presenting them to the rest of the team also matters. Initially I made a mistake of not explaining the prototypes sufficiently. During the process I eventually worked out a more effective way of presenting them.

A day before face-to-face discussion on mockups I sent them to the rest of team. In the e-mail I explained:

• the goals of the page
• design challenges it entails
• the rationale behind my design decisions.

It takes time to write such an explanation but it really helped us to have effective discussions the next day. Skipping this part can bring a lot of misunderstandings.

Tip: always write down the results of a discussion. We wrote minutes from every meeting. Later on we often referred to these minutes and avoided unnecessary arguments about established decisions.

Unless your team mates don’t care about the project, they will probably disagree with you once in a while. How to handle this? First, ensure you have common goals for your product and want to reach the same users. A useful technique to achieve this is to use personas. The designer not only needs to create personas, but to make sure that everybody in the team understands them and believes they represent real target users. The lack of buy-in for the personas in the beginning leads to the pointless discussions starting with “Being a user myself, I believe that…”

The other solution to the last problem is the user testing. Unfortunately, it’s also a first victim of the tight timelines. I strongly believe in the value of prototype testing, so the lack of it in natrasie.pl is almost like a personal failure. Because the prototyping phase took so long anyway, I decided to skip it.

It was a direct consequence of our team structure: there were four Java developers and one interaction designer, also responsible for the front-end code. It was no surprise that I quickly became a bottleneck. While the other guys were eager to finally put their hands on the code, I was still struggling with the mockups. The lesson? The interaction designer should start working as soon as possible. Otherwise the developers can become (understandably) frustrated by the lack of work in the early phase.

Fortunately they had managed to cope with me and we finally deployed our first public beta on 12th May 2008. It quickly became apparent that it’s just the beginning of the real work: bug fixing, introducing new features and marketing. Though I had finished my work on the project at the end of June to work on other ventures, Bartek, Michał, Sebastian and Tomek bravely continue their journey to make the best web app ever. Good luck, guys, and thanks for all the fish :).

“Designing Our Way Through Data” by Jeffrey Veen

Two years ago Jeffrey was presenting at @media 2006 as a newly hired Google employee. Now he had just quit Google. Apparently, being an ex-Googler is as hip as being a Googler two years ago.

In his talk, Veen demonstrated some of the challenges faced by designers of modern, data-intense applications. He used a few examples to demonstrate clever solutions to some old problems. The examples included:

• Harry Beck’s Tube map. By hiding geographical relationships, the map puts focus on what’s more important for the travelers: how to get from one station to another.
• Charles Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s march to Moscow. This brilliant illustration shows at least five dimensions of information.
• John Snow’s map of cholera epidemic in Soho. Visualizing the dry data had helped to find and eliminate the source of the disease. It was probably the first time when real, scientific data was the main justification for a political decision. One could argue if it isn’t still a rare case.

Jeff Veen making his point

Being a fan of Edward Tufte myself, I was glad to see that Veen recommended Tufte’s books and used them as a source. He also showed how easy it is to make mistake of oversimplification. Modern presentation tools like Keynote or PowerPoint make it easy to “posterize” the data and obscure it with fancy ornamentation. Veen shared his own experiences with Measure Map design to illustrate these mistakes.

“Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy” by Indi Young

Indi Young is one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the same company Jeffrey Veen had been working for before Google. Recently she had left AP to focus on her book about mental models. What is the mental model? This is another tool in your user experience tool belt, next to personas or wireframes. Below is a sample model, taken from J. Veen’s presentation.

Mental model example

It’s a two folded graph. The top part shows boxes representing user needs. This data could be gathered in many ways: from interviews, call center recordings, usability testing etc. It’s important that it comes from users and shows their language instead of technical jargon. Boxes above the fold create mental groups (or towers – pretty obvious analogy when you look at the graph). Groups create mental spaces. Below the fold are the means to support user needs.

What are the advantages of using mental models? They make clear which user needs are sufficiently supported and which are not. Mental models could be useful when new features are planned, as they help to resolve the eternal argument: “what do users want?”

The presentation ended with the small pitch for Young’s book.

“Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference” by Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin turned out to be a great, witty showman. His presentation was very much a “design for engineers” course – probably that was the reason I enjoyed it so much :). He gave practical tips on how to use hardly visible details to improve the design. It’s hard to pinpoint these details on the finished website, but they certainly add up to the feel of the site.

He mentioned several techniques for different design areas.

Proportion

• Create patterns for margins and paddings. Rubin showed the new cnn.com design where the “rule of 6” is applied and each margin is either 6, 12 or 18 pixels wide. He also used an obvious counter example. However, even the latter site could be improved by applying similar rules and Rubin demonstrated it with a quick compo.

Typography

• Use relative text sizes. You could follow the rule of 5 where text size for any element is a multiple of 5: 5, 10, 15.
• Adjust range kerning (or letter-spacing in CSS syntax) of headings. Usually it makes sense to use 1px negative margin for large fonts.
• Avoid widows. Currently it means inserting additional  . I’d love to have a CSS solution for this.

Texture

• Reality is rarely smooth. Applying light texture to the design could give it a more natural feel.
• A quick way to create a simple texture effect is blending one layer with the second, filled with noise. Similar technique was used on My Mile Marker to give the header a more “asphalt” look.

Tactile effects

• Interesting lighting effect can be created by stretching a 1-pixel edge from a photo and blending the resulting layer with another color layer.
• “Invisible” bevels are another way to create tangible look. Rubin gave an example of Mint and its use of bevels.
• Borders and lines can look more natural when combined with blending, as can be seen on Livtopia. To make color changes easier you can put black and white lines on separate layers and blend them with the rest, instead of applying color directly to the lines.

All examples can be found in Dan’s slides.

“Professional Front-End Engineering” by Nate Koechley

Nate is a senior front-end developer at Yahoo! I’m a big fan of his presentations, filled with juicy technical details. This one was no different.

In the beginning he showed how the importance of the front-end engineering has changed during the last years. His own company is a good example. In 2001 Yahoo! had hired the first fron-end engineer. Now it has 700 of them. With more complicated websites and applications online businesses rely on the front-end as much as on the back-end part. Additionally, as Douglas Crockford put it, browsers are the “most hostile programming environment”. Anybody struggling with IE6 will surely confirm this.

Koechley listed what he believes are the principles of the professional front-end engineering. Each principle was accompanied by techniques.

1. Availability. It doesn’t mean that every browser should display pages exactly the same way. Yahoo! uses graded browsers support instead.
2. Openness, achieved by progressive enhancement.
3. Richness – providing much, but not too much.
4. Stability – prepare for the future.

Nate shared a lot of practical tips for different areas of front-end engineering.

HTML

• Learn it through. There’s a lot of rarely used but useful elements and attributes. Do you know every one? You should.
• Aim for performance when constructing HTML source.

CSS

• Focus on the left side: use precise selectors.
• Always think about maintainability.

JavaScript

• Quality. Use JSlint, profiling, and minimize touch points with vendor code. The last thing not only makes code maintenance easier, but also let browsers evolve faster. Koechley also mentioned unit testing. Apparently, all the major libraries (YUI, dojo, jQuery and Prototype) now have testing modules. For me it’s the sign that JS is really getting mature. However, it’s doesn’t imply that everybody actually writes unit tests. <guilt>I don’t</guilt>.
• Security. This is still the underestimated topic. The general rule is to never trust content from the client side. Koechly recommended watching the progress of AdSafe and Caja projects.

Accessiblity

• Watch ARIA.
• Use decoupled events, so any device can listen to your events.

Internationalization

• Serve all CSS and JS in UTF-8.

Performance

This is Koechly’s hobbyhorse, so it was no surprise that he had a lot to say. However, his advice was taken from Yahoo’s performance best practices, so I just recommend reading them. It’s worth it.

Final words were a bit high-flown, but definitely right: always show stubborn empathy for your users.

“Communicating best practices”

This was a panel led by Paul Boag, including Rachel Andrew, Patrick Lauke, Murray Rowan (former head of European Web Development at Yahoo!).

Introducing web standards and usability-driven design to the management or the clients is a real challenge. I already faced it, so I was eager to hear some tips.

One advice from the panelist is obvious but requires empathy. When talking to your managers focus on business value and avoid tech-talk. Talk money, effort and user needs. Show the consequences of good and bad practices.

One of the panelists claimed that standard-based redesigns will last, as opposed to a mixture of content and presentation. In my opinion this particular point still needs a reality check ;).

Sometimes it’s possible to just follow the right path without asking for permission. I find it to be true in companies when developers are trusted by managers (I’m lucky to be speaking from my own experience). Murray Rowan made a good point saying that you shouldn’t hire people who add up to the problem, eg. are not used to web standards or usability-driven process.

There were a lot of tips on how to position yourself as an expert and thus have more impact:

• Do the homework and know your stuff.
• Don’t be too picky – focus on battles worth fighting.
• If the managers push for timelines, fight for a promise of later quality iteration and enforce it.
• When you work for a customer forcing you to do something you believe is wrong, you can ask for removing your name from the website. It can make the client think.

Hot Topics

Both days of the conference ended with Hot Topics panels. The first one was more focused on design, the second – on front-end engineering. Here are some highlights from both panels.

Work between designers and developers.

Jeff Veen noticed from his Google experience that it’s impossible to have the same amount of control over front-end people as over programmers. It’s even harder with the designers. Forcing them to follow practices common for developers (like daily stand-up meetings or checking .psd files to source code repository) can make them mad.

Andy Clarke (a designer) mentioned how ridiculous it was for him to participate in the morning stand-up meetings. How a designer can refer his daily work? “I was thinking about tabs”?

It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to work with designers in a team. The panelist talked very positively about Campfire as a tool of collaboration. As opposed to source control tools or bug tracking system.

What clients want?

Andy Clarke said it’s a strong warning sign when a potential client wants a “Web 2.0 website”. Well, it’s cool to be able to pick clients.

Front-end

It’s still hard to define the front-end part of web development. However, it was welcomed with a loud applause that front-end nowadays is at least as hard as the back-end (Simon Willison). CSS knowledge seems to be the best common denominator for the professionals in this area.

Switching from corporate job to freelance

Simon Willison and Jonathan Snook, booth freelancers at the moment, shared a few tips. A good idea is to share an office space to avoid anti-social effects of working from home. They agreed that writing a blog is one of the best ways to get clients. The sooner you start it, the better. A 5-year-old blog should be a solid preparation before going to freelance.

Checked.

Since some time I had a vague feeling that the web design has somewhat slowed down. (And I’m talking about general design, marketing and development here, not only graphic design for the web.) Web standards CSS are now obvious. Usability is a must. Accessibility awareness is better than ever before. Ajax for the sake of Ajax or “web 2.0 compatibility” is gone. So what are we left with? What are current trends? Are there any? I was heading for London to find some answers.

There is no single hype that everybody is talking about, as web 2.0 was two years ago. People are now more focused on writing useful applications and exploring web’s potential rather than inventing buzzwords. And I’m happy with that. Yet, there are some trends.

Web applications with personality

If you just thought about former porn actress presenting crippled search results, fear not, I don’t mean that kind of personality. Instead it’s something that makes Flickr or Basecamp so pleasant to use. It’s definitely hard to create an application or a website that has a character. Sometimes not even suitable. Many decent applications lack this property and we still use them. del.icio.us, with its focus on pure functionality was a quoted example.

What makes up a personality? There’s no “one and only” feature that makes us humans, nor there’s such in a case of web apps. Surely, it’s about graphical elements (typography, colors, icons), but also about voice — the way an app speaks to its users. Ryan Singer of 37signals gave examples of how simple shift from artificial “error notification” to a helpful tip of how to fix a mistake could make a difference. Even the visual style of such a note is significant. Big, red text with exclamation is like screaming at your users. It’s hard then to expect them to like such an app or just feel well with it. An application with personality has views and human voice behind it.

In a mini panel with Ryan Singer, George Oates (flickr) and Denise Wilton (moo.com) LinkedIn was brought up as an example of an app that seems professional but not friendly. It has dry language and is more about connecting professionals than people. Ryan pointed that it doesn’t have sign out option and therefore it doesn’t care about its users.

That make me think if all web applications should have a voice at all. I will be still using del.icio.us or LinkedIn even if I don’t care about their voice. But I admit I smile each time I look at the cow from the logo of Remember the Milk. It has no actual value but makes me like the app and… stick to it. So for sure it’s worth considering whether your app should have own personality when you create one.

Cross-media marketing

After morning sessions there were few presentations that had a common message: product sites could bring great results when they’re an integral part of cross-media efforts. Notice the “integral” part. Many times website is just an add-on to a marketing campaign — another way of displaying the same message. But it’s very much like showing black and white movies with no sound in television: it doesn’t explore the full potential of the medium. And one of the biggest strengths of the web is its interactivity.

Few presenters showed how to unleash this potential: Nat Hunter (Airside), Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship) and my favourite: William Rosen (Leo Burnett) and Rei Inamoto (AKQA).

Rosen showed a marketing campaign done by Arc Worldwide (subsidiary of Leo Burnett) for US Department of Health. The purpose of entire campaign was to promote physical activities among American teens. The idea was to distribute 500,000 yellow balls through entire country. Each ball had a unique ID. When you received a ball you could play with it, submit the ID on verbnow.com website and pass it to another kid. The website allowed to track what happened to balls; few changed their owners over 30 times. Some were passed to celebrities, so kids could play the same ball as JUMP5 or Greg Raposo (OK, I have no clue who these guys are, but I’m not an expert when it comes to American teen-pop celebrities). Teens could do something interesting with the ball and then describe it on the website as well.

What caught my interest was a natural integration of the website with entire campaign. verbnow.com was used to elicit kids’ engagement. In this case internet wasn’t drawing kids away from sport. It rather provoked to do something interesting on fresh air and then share it with others. Very simple, very smart.

Rei Inamoto from AKQA had one of the most brilliant presentations I ever saw. It was fueled with inspiring content from AKQA’s portfolio. I’ll give you just one example: marketing campaign for XBox 360 game, Perfect Dark Zero. The main character in a game is a female assassin, Joanna Dark, devoted to kill all the leaders of some corporation, one by one. When you enter the website, you have an appointment with Ms Joanna. She ask you for a name and email of some individual you know. If you enter an address of your friend, he will receive an invitation to the special website. This website will display him a movie from a morgue as seen from a perspective of the dead body. Dead body with his name on a label. When your friend will realize his unexpected decease, you’ll receive a notification from Joanna: mission accomplished. Twisted, immoral, sick. You gotta love it.

What was so innovative here? Again, the idea wasn’t completely new. 3 years ago I blogged about a marketing campaign for Audi that also used personalized movies. Yet, the surprise of realizing that you just asked for an assassination of you friend is… attractively anxious. Combining email, web and immersive, game-like experience with your real world relationships gives astounding effect.

There were more examples of how to employ web interaction together with other communication channels. It can make your marketing message much more effective. You could summarize it with the phrase: People don’t have offline or online lives — they just have lives.

Technology

There were two presentations from conference sponsors: Adobe and Macromedia. I expected these to be marketing pitches and I was pretty right. Yet, it’s good to know what big names plan to offer to the web crowd.

Jon Harris presented Microsoft Expression — a new set of tools for designers and front-end developers, and Silverlight — plugin for delivering rich media content. For me it’s an attempt to get some piece of a market cake from Adobe. Expression Web is positioned as a competitor for Dreamweaver.

It’s interesting that Microsoft recently endorses new products as alternatives to tools from other vendors, rather than better versions of their own products. During a break I talked to the nice lady from Expression Web stand and even she advertised the program as an alternative to Dreamweaver rather than a FrontPage successor. It seems that Microsoft suddenly realized that it has competitors. Or it was forced to realize.

Silverlight is advertised as a cross-platform software. Apparently, Jon Harris was the only presenter who had to connect a Windows machine in order to show his slides (everybody else was on Macs). But let’s not be petty.

On Silverlight’s website there are links to plugins for IE, Firefox and Safari. Well, if Microsoft will release a plugin for Linux browsers (not to mention Opera) I’ll start to think seriously about its cross-platformness.

Adobe doesn’t have to compete in rich media plugin market or web design tools market — the company owns both. While Microsoft is focused on getting back to the web game, Adobe looks for new opportunities. Its new product, Apollo, is a runtime for desktop apps based on web technologies: HTML, JavaScript, CSS plus Flash and PDF. I think it has huge potential. There is a lot of people who know web technologies and would use this knowledge to create standalone applications. If Adobe will push Apollo runtime through Flash Update, it can quickly become the most widely deployed software platform, that will allow to run applications on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Mike Downey who presented Apollo demoed a desktop client for eBay. The app looked nice, but I think it was a bad move to show something that provides no additional value and should in fact run in a browser. But there are plenty of more practical use cases, like applications working on local files (think media players) or requiring offline access.

While Apollo is unlikely to be fast and rich enough to create, let’s say, a Photoshop-like application in the near future, with its Flash capabilities and standard-compliant WebKit rendering engine for HTML it could become an interesting platform for developers with web background. Sadly Mozilla wasn’t fast enough to make this happen with XUL.

Specialization

It wasn’t really o major topic, but it was brought at least twice: during Andy Clarke’s presentation performance and the ending panel: whether we will stay omniscient “web professionals” or end up in small boxes of specialization. The message was clear: it’s not possible anymore for a single person to know enough about graphic design, usability and coding to stay ahead of curve. So called web professionals will inevitably have to choose small areas of expertise.

I agree with this conclusion, but I don’t like it at all. I don’t think of myself as a developer, designer or architect. I just make websites. One of the biggest attractions of the web as medium is its diversity: there are so many different ways of using it. And I’m sure we unleashed only a small fraction of its potential. That’s why I don’t like to think about specializing in a next few years. Actually I’m now focused on some area (front-end development), but I love to learn about server-side frameworks, trends in graphic design or other innovations on the web. So much fun stuff to discover, so little time…

For me the conclusion is: specialize, but don’t close yourself in a small box. It’s nice to be considered an expert in some area (and it really helps to pay your bills), but the web has so much more to offer. It also changes very rapidly, so it’s very likely your current skills will become obsolete in a next 3 years, just like mastering Netscape 4 quirks, essential in 1999, has no value today. But that’s the very reason I love the web: it always has something new up its sleeves.

See you next year?

It was definitely worth to take a flight to London and attend FOWD 2007. The best recommendation is the fact that I still didn’t covered all interesting ideas heard there (like an insightful presentation on managing change by Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path). For those who missed it, there are slides and podcasts on conference’s website.

As for a final word: I was looking for an inspiration and I found it there. Five stars.