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.

Whilst I'm no conference speaker, I've had the privilege of being invited to stand up in front of a group of my peers and talk about what I do on a few occasions. You won't need to view all 25 minutes of my session at The Multipack Presents to realise that, when it comes to delivering a talk, I'm firmly placed within the amateur group:

However, whilst I'm more of an attendee than a speaker, I'm also a relative newbie when it comes to conference attendance. My first, in October 2007, was in London at the Future of Web Apps Expo. Even as a lone delegate, I managed to become acquainted with a few other delegates who made the three days a little more interesting.

Choosing a conference

As a newbie, and even as a seasoned conference attendee, my thoughts are that the decision to attend a conference will be based on a few things:

• How much?
• What is the conference's primary theme or subject?
• Is it a multi-track conference?
• Who is speaking, and what are their talks about?

If the conference demonstrates value, I'll often approach my boss, but even before I'll think about doing that, I'll be asking myself whether I think the conference is affordable and offers good value for money, or whether it's just paying for a few people to come a long way.

Secondly, and most importantly, it's subject and theme. More and more conferences are moving away from the typical designer/developer divide and focusing on a theme or a subject. Instead of being developer-focused, for instance, a conference may lean towards development, but include a few talks on design that would be of benefit to the developers attending - and vice-versa, of course.

As for multiple track conferences, I'm not sure I'll visit another. FOWA London 2007 and 2008 were good, but the complexity of having a one-for-all type conference diluted the effectiveness. There were talks I wanted to see that overlapped which meant I missed some. Perhaps I'm lazy and don't want to move around too much, but a focussed event, with a single track, catering to a theme instead of splitting the audience needlessly, seems like a more successful idea to me.

Finally, which speakers will be there, and what are the subjects of their talks.

Who are you and what are you talking about?

I'm going to be really clear here. I cannot fucking stand it when I am sat in the audience, looking forward to a topic - based on the title, and what little blurb we're given - only to be let down by the speaker, who is only on stage to sell their product, doesn't really give a shit about the topic, and is talking to the wrong audience. On more than one occasion at the Future of Web Apps conferences, I simply got up and walked out of the hall, disgusted at this tactic.

Instead of entitling your talk "Special Announcement" when it's a sales message, or "Cloud Computing in the Enterprise" when it has nothing to do with cloud computing, but is more about using your SAAS offering instead of Microsoft Outlook, do the honourable thing - tell us it's a sales presentation.

Conference organisers should be ashamed of this too. Knowing, full well, that your sponsor is going to try to pull this tactic and doing nothing about it smacks of a lack of integrity. The right thing to do would be to approach your sponsor and suggest a different title of the topic. If it's a sponsorship message, let your audience know.

Lastly, the most important thing to do is to make me, as an audience member, interested. I go to conferences for two reasons - knowledge and networking. If you're up on stage and you're not being clearly labelled as a sponsor who is giving a sponsorship message, I'd really like it if I came away from your session having learned something new, or shown a new way of looking at something. 

Giving to your audience without asking in return

Of the three big conferences I've been to, the person who stands out the most for me in terms of giving knowledge to the audience without asking for anything in return, was Matt Biddulph. As CTO of Dopplr - before he became software designer and creative technologist for Nokia after they bought Dopplr in 2009 - I was witness to two fine talks in two consecutive years.

On both occasions, Matt's talks were completely different. In 2007, he spoke about getting the best out of third-party widgets on your site, and helping other sites when you offer widgets. In 2008, his talk was about messaging, about modern successful applications being a collection of small parts, loosely coupled, and about using n-tier mentality when designing apps, even when you're using a single server.

In both talks, he showed insight, delivered tips on good development practices, but most importantly he gave. Sure, he mentioned he was from Dopplr, and he explained what Dopplr was, but at no point during any of his talks did he try and sell you anything. More importantly, his 2008 talk was completely different to the one he'd given in 2007.

The problem of being a conference regular

To someone attending their first conference, everything is new - the experience, the speakers and the talks themselves. 

If you go to a lot of conferences, particularly in the same area and in the same few months, there's a good chance you'll see some familiar faces on stage. There's good reason for that - the ones that appear at multiple conferences are there because they have something to give: knowledge, a good message and passion about their topic.

The more conferences you go to, and the more thinly-veiled sales presentations you're coerced into sitting through, the more cynical you become. I took a year out of attending conferences last year. My reasons were mostly due to having constrained budgets, a trip to Australia and New Zealand, a wedding and a honeymoon, but for the conferences I could have attended, there was no reason for me to go back. In the majority of cases, I saw a worrying trend of similar subjects, similar talk titles, and a lot of the same people.

Let me be clear, however: I would happily sit in an audience and listen to Relly Annett-Baker talk about copywriting; Matt Biddulph about anything related to application architecture; Stuart Langridge, Remy Sharp or John Resig about anything related to JavaScript; Bruce Lawson about emerging web standards; and - in fact - anyone talk passionately about a subject that excites and intrigues them.

After all, isn't that one of the reasons you go to conferences?

Less of the same, please

In 2008 at FOWA, I saw Francisco Tolmasky demonstrate the Cappuccino framework and his company's 280 Slides application, built the aforementioned framework and "Objective-J". 280 Slides is, at it's core, a clone of Apple Keynote that works within a browser that will support it. I also recall Ryan Carson coming onto the stage shortly afterwards, proclaiming that 280 Slides was really the future of web apps. 

I remember how Microsoft tried to get the Visual Basic community building web apps using ASP.NET in the early days - drag and drop components, absolutely positioned onto an HTML document - and Objective-J and Cappuccino seem, to me, to be very similar to that approach. Tolmasky spoke with passion and knowledge about his product, but I didn't take much away from his presentations at FOWA because Atlas, Cappuccino and Objective-J strike me as technologies that just aren't relevant to me as a web developer.

His talk at FOWA 2009, which I didn't attend, was based around Atlas, his company's web-based development environment for Cappuccino apps. This year, he's back at FOWA, with another talk on how to write 'stunning' apps with less code. Sound familiar?

Please don't misunderstand me here - I'm fully aware that, as an invited speaker or expert in a particular topic, you're going to talk about the same subject. As I said above, I'll happily listen to a person talk about a subject that ignites them for hours on end, again and again, but delivering the same talk - or a talk which is only slightly different to your last one - at different conferences is, as far as I'm concerned, lazy. Sure, you may be talking to a different audience this year than last, but you've got to plan for some overlap between new and old attendees.

As someone paying to attend a conference, I expect - with reason, I hope you'll agree - that the talks I'm listening to will be informative, entertaining and, above all, original.

Honing your craft

The one exception to this rule, in my opinion, is where talks are given at grassroots and free conferences. If the speaker isn't being paid to attend, or is giving their time up for free, or if the event itself is organised by a grassroots organisation such as The Multipack, then a degree of repetition can be acceptable, giving the speaker a a chance to test out a new talk with a smaller, willing bunch of enthusiasts, some of who may be able to give constructive feedback.

Photo Credit: Andy Higgs

I'm grateful to have had the chance to hear Drew McLellan, Jon Hicks, Stuart Langridge, Bruce Lawson, Remy Sharp and Simon Collison (pictured above) talk about their subjects, all for free, thanks to the Multipack Presents and Geek in the Park events that I've been involved in, and I think more events like this will help up-and-coming speakers talk about what matters to them.

Giving people the opportunity to talk is what will make for greater conferences in the future, with fresh ideas from fresh people. I'd love to see an event whereby groups of established speakers team up with relative newbies - one pair per subject - to present a talk and chair a relaxed, discussion, very similar to some of the Multipack Presents events that have been held in the past, but with an opportunity to promote more speaking.

Don't judge a conference by it's speakers

But importantly, the quality of a conference can't be calculated solely on the speakers that are attending. I did some research on people who have spoken at some of the more established conferences since 2006 - dConstruct, Future of Web Apps, @media. When I looked at the line-ups for the upcoming conferences that I have the option of attending in the next six months, I checked to see who I've seen before or who I've no interest in seeing again.

When I used this method against FOWA London 2010, dConstruct 2010 and New Adventures in Web Design 2011, the results were as follows (where SB/NI means Seen Before or Not Interested):

The raw speaker data is available as a Google Spreadsheet, which you're more than welcome to append to as time goes by. I simply looked at the speakers that I've seen before and the talks that I would not be interested in and tallied them together.

Of course, if I used this method alone, I'd be suggesting that seeing Matt Biddulph a second time would be a bad idea, but speakers such as Biddulph show that a good speaker will tailor new talks to his audience. God knows that there are conferences out there who bring out the 'big' names, like Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck and Mike Arrington, but I'm not sure I'm bothered about hearing from that kind of internet celebrity anymore.

I've never attended a barcamp or an unconference, despite the fact that I'd very much like to be involved in one. I feel that the interaction between speaker and audience is one of the most important parts of learning, and a smaller number of speakers, with short, sharp presentations would allow for more interaction, and a better chance of taking something valuable away.

Simon Collison, who spoke at Geek in the Park last year, has created something a little different - the New Adventures conference, starting with New Adventures in Web Design in January 2011, and it looks like it could be exactly what I'm hankering for:

New Adventures... will be carefully curated; chock-full of integrity, opinion, and fresh content, with an emphasis on shaking things up and challenging convention. This event has inspiration, thinking, and intelligence at its core. It will encourage debate, enthuse, excite, ask questions, and look for real outcomes.

Simon Collison — New Adventures in Web Design

I'm sure that Colly will pull it off. His intention of working closely with the speakers and ensure that they're sticking to the principles of the conference will pay dividends, and given the price and location, I expect it will be a very popular event.

The proof of the pudding

I'm sincerely looking forward to both dConstruct and New Adventures in Web Design for different reasons. dConstruct has always attracted me but, until this year, I've never been able to attend. The type of talks and the fact that the talks are very much cross-discipline means I'm hoping to come away inspired in many different areas of my craft.

New Adventures excites me because it could turn the idea of the conference on its head - the format and the whole idea that the event will be curated makes me think it will address the problems with many of the conferences that I've outlined above. I really do wish Simon well with the event and look forward to being in Nottingham in January.

However, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, my attendance of multi-track super-conferences - like FOWA, @media and the like - has come to an end. Smaller events, focussed on a single theme, as opposed to being all-encompassing developer- or designer-only events, are where I'll be spending my time in the future.

Along with grassroots events, I expect they're also where I'll be finding the most value.