I've wanted to attend dConstruct for a few years, and whilst various things have previously stood in my way - dates, other events, me being out of the country, not even knowing the event existed - this year, I finally got my chance to go.

Friends have always described it as one of the conferences to go to and, with a packed Brighton Dome, it was easy to see they weren't alone. dConstruct had lots to live up to.

(Spoiler: I wasn't disappointed.)

The Talks

Jeremy Keith jumped on stage to welcome everyone - the vast majority of whom had travelled, and around two-thirds of whom, like me, were attending their first dConstruct - to the day which, in words which I wholeheartedly agreed with, featured a "fucking awesome lineup of speakers".

As compères go, Jeremy was great: enthusiastic about his speakers, anecdotal about the venue (did you know that ABBA won the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo at the Brighton Dome in 1974?) as well as quite humourous - though I'm not quite sure I wanted to test him on his offer of turning my phone into silent mode in an "anatomically painful way", so I stuck mine into Airplane Mode. Just in case.

This did, sadly, have the unfortunate side-effect of making it very difficult to check how well #SausageBap was trending.

Marty Neumeier

Marty's opening talk, "The Designful Company", was based around the premise that innovation and design are inextricably linked and so that if you want to innovate, you've got to design.

Photo credit: Stefan Nitzsche

He spoke about how brands are not in the owner's control, but rather are the sum of your customers' gut feelings about your product or company and that, in order to succeed in business, innovation is key: "When everyone else zigs, zag". How do you know if you're zagging? If you have a swoosh in your logo, you zigged and, since the globe is the new swoosh, if you've got one of those, you zigged too.

In most cases, innovating means not always asking people what they want - and is usually not always immediately successful. Marty showed a great matrix of good and different, suggesting that "good and different" does poorly in tests and can go to market with difficulty. However, customers soon equate different with good, and the product or service ends up with massive market share and is eventually successful. It needs to be different, but it needs to be good too.

The key point, I feel, was that it's important to make your products and services stand out and that they need to be good, but that you should always make your products for your audience, not your focus groups.

Brendan Dawes

The term 'brendandawesome' was used to introduce Brendan to the stage, and with apparent good reason. From the moment the first slide hit the screen, I knew this would be something fairly special. This wasn't going to be your standard, run-of-the-mill Powerpoint or Keynote slideshow. His slides, which were introduced chirpily with "I've got animations and shit!", were put together in processing and, better still, if you're into that, you can go and download the source files.

Photo credit: happy.apple

Brendan's first major points were that, with better input, we have better output (analogous to the 'shit in, shit out' theory, but with a positive spin I suppose) and that there is inherent joy to be found in the process of making things. The iPhone - which Brendan referred to as a 'digital collection device' - is so magical because it can be transformed into anything, with any user interface, because it has very few hardware limitations.

By that same reasoning, he also declared notebooks - of the paper kind - magical. They too, for example, have no inherent restrictions, but are simply analog collection devices. The mistakes inherent in the things they are used to collect are wonderful, because you can jot and collect quickly. iPhones and notebooks: they're both as magical as each other.

And so he got to the theme of his presentation: Boiling - bringing the stuff together, bringing it up to the boil - and simmering - keep changing context, get opinions, play around with it - before reducing it and taking things away until there is nothing left to take away. Einstein was a big advocate of this: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler". 

Brendan's key takeaway, for me, was that you should always make the process fun. His talk was as entertaining as it was informative, and - as he put it - unless you're designing critical things, no-one will die if you change things during your play/design process. Throw out the rules - in fact, don't even bother learning the rules.

David McCandless

I'd previously seen David give hints towards the subject matter of his talk when he was on television at the beginning of August, but his talk was far more entertaining than his brief stint on BBC Newsnight. During his session, he stressed that it can be hugely difficult for people to visualise any data set. The example given in this respect was the talk of billions being bandied around by various bodies - companies, news organisations, even our governments - in such a way that the layman finds it difficult to make any sense of them.

By giving context to the different amounts, as he did in his Billion-Dollar-o-Gram (a snippet of which is shown above), it makes it easier for anyone to see the scale of each of the amounts. As in the title of his book, he believes that "Information is Beautiful", and that we should make it as easy as possible for users to understand, to relate to and - more importantly - to trust our data.

David - who isn't a formally-trained designer - thinks that data is the new soil - not oil - and that good design can sprout and flower from it. Referring back to Brendan's presentation, he was keen to suggest that you don't need to be trained (throw out the rules) in order to give insight and that, in his opinion, the more exposure we have to various kinds of media and visualisations, the more our latent/nascent design skills and visual literacy will flourish.

His opinion, that combining the languages of the eye - patterns and colours - and the mind - information and data - can only be a recipe for success, seemed to make sense. It's important, however, to make sure that you don't just throw things together in a way that makes the data lose its context. Spaghetti graphs and circular diagrams may look pretty, but they're not very usable. 

To finish up the session, David had some fun interaction, using Google Insights, whereby the audience would guess what a subject was based on him telling us what one line was, and us guessing what the other trend was.

And we all learned that, despite what you may think, twitter is not better than sex.

Samantha Warren

I know of many people who will agonise over the choice of typeface used in logos, publications and in everyday objects, and Samantha's talk on the Power and Beauty of Typography exposed her instantly as one of those people.

She's also either a Wondermark fan, like me, or David Malki's an SEO wizard and Samantha got lucky with Google Image search. Whichever of those two is true, Samantha equates herself with the guy in the comic below:

I must admit, I'm very much a typography nerd, but while I can tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica I'm nowhere near the alpha-nerd status that some of my buddies are. So it's good to know that being trendy does not simply mean choosing a typeface that hasn't been used before - a good point raised during this talk was that kookiness is not equal to being trendy, but rather that versatility is trendy. 

Samantha declared 2010 the year of internet typography, which probably explains why I got the feeling that I'd heard the core points of this talk a good few times already - yes, words say more with the right typeface; no, you should not get in your users' way; yes, you should take care to choose the right typeface for the job; and, no, you should not choose a dozen typefaces for a single design - but, thankfully for Samantha, never before delivered with her amount of enthusiasm.

John (Fucking) Gruber

Speaking in the UK for the first time, John Gruber's talk was built up around his extensive passion for film and a simple, elegant theory: that the quality of any collaborative creative endeavour tends to approach the level of taste of whoever has control.

Photo credit: happy.apple

Comparing different media - books, symphonies, movies, TV shows and general design - John argued that whilst a book or a symphony can be written by a single person, authorship in the case of movies, movie-grade television shows and larger design projects doesn't work in the same way, and tends to be the product of a large team of people.

While this team of people may well be largely comprised of very talented individuals, the quality of the end result lies in the hand of the person at the helm - the director, the showrunner, the auteur. John's enthusiasm for movies - particularly Kubrick's work (explaining his use of the Futura Extra Bold typeface in his presentation) - shone through in his talk with him picking various examples of how Kubrick thought about the same subject.

In terms of the industry I inhabit, a question that can be asked often is this: why are some websites not great, despite the level of the talent of the developers and designers? Case in point: The criticism, response from and almost immediate stupidity and incompetence of American Airlines. Their web team is clearly staffed with people who want to do better, who want to act as a small, agile team, but who are stifled by people with no taste.

As someone in charge of a team of developers (but, sadly, no full-time web designer) I am constantly trying to make sure that the right decisions are made. As Gruber said, if 'great' is on the table along with 'good' and 'okay', then you must always go with 'great'. If you can't tell the difference, that's where the problem lies.

Hannah Donovan

As conference sessions go, Hannah Donovan's was probably the most unique I've ever seen. Starting your session with a piece of live, improvised music was an interesting way to open, and showed that Hannah is an accomplished player of the cello, accompanied by Jeremy Keith and Matthew Ogle on the mandolin and piano respectively. 

Photo credit: Phillip Ingham

Jam session over, Hannah took to the stage to explain what improvisation can teach us about design. Improvisation; spontaneity; something done in the moment that is done in response to your immediate environment. In doing this, in getting feedback, in having our work repurposed by other team members, or even other friends and peers, we're helped to see our work in different lights.

Explaining improvisation in music and how it applies to collaboration was interesting and playback, in the musical sense, was touted as an example - whereby a member of a group of musicians playing will listen to one piece played and play it back, during the improvised performance.

The equivalents to this in our world - Dribble and Twitter in a less realtime sense, and Layer Tennis in the live, under-pressure sense - were cited as examples of where this can take place. Most importantly, Hannah's explanation of having the best ideas in conversation really struck home for me though, as collaboration and the desire to better our work, to respond to others', enhances everyone's.

James Bridle

Unless you were at the conference, there is no way to sum up how good James' introduction to his talk was. In summary, as most of us who had internet connections in the mid-to-late nineties will attest to, the neighbourhood in which we grew up, in which we cut our teeth learning HTML and the fundamentals of today's web, is no longer around.

James, like many of us, grew up in Geocities, and the fact that Yahoo! decided to close the service means that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of information that, despite the best efforts of many individuals and organisations such as the Internet Archive, will inevitably have been lost. 

Photo credit: James Bridle

Using the Iraq War article on Wikipedia as an example, with a funny side note on Wikiracing (starting at a random page and getting to a target page in as few clicks as possible), James explained that Wikipedia is an excellent tool for historiography - the study of how history is written and knowledge of that history is built up - in that a full record of each and every modification is kept, giving us the ability to go back to a point in time and see what was written.

With data storage prices plummeting, it's no longer a case of us not being able to store everything, but rather taking the time to actually do so. Our future selves will better understand the code we write and, in the larger sense, we will ensure that we don't endure the same losses of knowledge we've suffered in the past.

Tom Coates

In what was arguably the most beautiful slide deck I have ever had the privilege to witness first hand, Tom spoke to us about the move to network absolutely everything. Introducing himself as a person who looks at where he thinks the web is going and who tries to get there first - much better than simply calling himself a product developer - he spoke about services, objects and individuals being connected to the network, and the advantages that doing so brings.

Photo credit: Matt Biddulph 

Tom used Darius the Great, and the Persian Royal Road as an example of the earliest network, and the fact that despite the fact that the road network was built over two thousand years ago, it allowed an army miles and miles away from their supreme leader to receive orders within 24 hours. 

As network technologies become cheaper to implement and more ubiquitous - moving in the same direction that LCD clocks did - they'll be built into every device and, as this happens, society will begin to change as the concepts we know begin to change in response. Bruce Sterling coined the idea of a 'spime': an object that can always report its location, because it's always connected and, based on this, the whole idea of ownership changes.

Smart meters are already showing up in our homes, but as more objects become connected to the network, they start changing into 'objects as services' - why buy a washing machine when you can just have a machine in your house and pay for each wash you complete? Each service a network connected object can connect to gives it more context and, potentially, makes it better.

But then what about networked cities? How can they improve our lives? Tom used examples such as the recently launched London Cycle Hire system, whereby you no longer need to own a bike in London to be able to cycle around the city; and San Francisco's SFPark system, where parking availability is broadly available, and parking charges are no longer static, and are instead based on actual usage.

That said, I'm not so sure I want my scales to tweet how heavy I am!

Merlin Mann

I have to admit, I'm a big fan of You Look Nice Today - a journal of emotional hygiene (translation: hilarious podcast) featuring Merlin along with Adam Lisagor and Scott Simpson - so when I discovered that he would be among this year's speakers, it only increased my desire to attend.

Photo credit: designbyfront.com - Used with Permission

Whilst there were no slides, Merlin's talk was among my highlights of the day. He spoke about dedication, innovation and the constant desire to better yourself, not in the way that most 'inspirational speakers' do, but in a way that engaged the audience, made them smile and - for me, personally - made me reflect and think about how it applied to me.

The final session of the day left me smiling and feeling good, for Merlin has faith in us nerds, and with good reason - because we care. But there was no shortage of cautionary tales, the most striking of which was the example of a friend who stuck at the 'image slicing' method of web design when the world was changing around her.

Caring is good, but it's important to keep moving forward, to keep re-discovering what to be nerdy about next, but more importantly, to be around people who do what we do, better. Merlin's point was that it's easy for us nerds to become isolated, but that to get better, we need the advice of our peers, especially so when that advice - the good advice, the hard advice - is tough to take.

I took a piece of advice from Merlin that was easy: I bought him a beer at the afterparty, had a quick chat with him about my newborn son and about being a nerd.

Just like attending dConstruct, I'm thoroughly glad I did.