Carsonified

If you attended the Future of Web Design earlier this year you may have pinned your uber-cool business card to the Micorosft “biz card wall”. If you did now’s your chance to find it and check out other attendees cards too.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are delighted to announce that Gabi Moore has won the Future of Web Design Holding Slide competition. Over 500 people took the time to vote and Gabi won out with just over 25% of total votes cast.

Here’s the winning slide that will be used during the conference this Thursday.

In second place was Kassy

and Derek Rossman claimed the last step on the podium with his entry

Thanks again to everyone who participated. If you entered and are coming to FOWD be sure to check into the auditorium before the first session as we will be showing every entry during registration.

Firstly a huge thanks to everyone who entered our holding slide competition. We have all really enjoyed looking at your entries. In case you haven’t had the opportunity to view all the entries be sure to check out the Flickr group.

It’s been tough but we have picked our top ten and would now like you to choose the winner. Simply select your favourite and vote for the slide you would like to win. The poll will close at midnight next Wednesday (22nd April).

Thanks again to everyone who entered.

We managed to start quite a debate about our slide competition last week. If you haven’t read my original post check it out. For additional opinion I recommend watching Paul Boag’s video response as well as Mark Boulton’s post on the matter.

If you haven’t already entered you still have time, the closing date for submissions is Wednesday 15th April 4pm (full details here)

At the time of writing we have had 34 entries, here they are. Head on over to Flickr to view them in all their glory and leave your comments.

UPDATE: The winner now gets a free pass to FOWD (or if they are already attending a free conference pass to another Carsonified event in 2009)

The 2009 Future of Web Design (FOWD) is now only a few weeks away and we would like to give you the opportunity to get in on the act. At everyone of our conferences we design what we call a “holding slide”. It’s the static graphic we display between sessions whilst the MC is introducing the next speaker and we are swapping out laptops. Here’s the one Mike designed for our recent FOWA event in Dublin.

This year we would like to give you the opportunity to design the holding slide for the show. The winning slide will be used throughout the day and will be seen by over 800 attendees and featured in our videos. Here’s what it will look like and the number of bums on seats who will get to see it:

Here are the rules:

* The image must be provided as a .jpg or .png and be 1024 x 768
* It must include the “Future of Web Design” logo (available here as .png and the Carsonified logo (available here as .png)

Other than that it’s really up to you. You can go as mad as you like. Once you have completed your design please add it to our new Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/fowdholdingslidecomp/. The closing date for submissions is Wednesday 15th April 4pm.

NB: If you don’t have a Flickr account feel free to email your submission to keir at carsonified dot com and I will post it to the group.

We will then sit round and pick out our favourites and put them up for you, the community, to vote on. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Incidentally if anyone knows of a tool to enable voting on images please let me know in the comments.

A few years ago I came across a link to an article about a report a New York based graphic designer called Nick Felton had published outlining in his year in numbers. Inspired by the design I dropped him a quick email asking if it was possible to get a copy as a PDF. To my delight a few hours later a copy dropped in my inbox. I have been following the reports ever since.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are only two weeks away from Future of Web Design New York which takes place on the 3rd-4th November. The whole Carsonified team are working hard to bring you another great show this year.

Our workshops have proven to be more popular than ever this year and have virtually sold out. However, there are still some conference tickets available with lots on offer throughout the day, including sessions from Ryan Singer (37Signals), Daniel Burka and Joe Stump (digg.com) and a series of inspirational talks from artist Hillman Curtis and Nick La (webdesignerwall).

Our very own super-talented Carsonified designer Mike Kus will be holding a Photoshop workshop at FOWD, along with doing a short presentation on ‘Whatever happened to the Art in Design?’ So in the lead up to the conference i asked Mike if he had two tips for making your design look handmade. Here are his thoughts.

1: Always carry a small digital camera with you wherever you go and keep an eye out for nice textures. You might find them on and old wall, a skip or a bit of rusty metal. These are great for importing into Photoshop and using a background textures or to overlay on an object in your design to give it that handmade/old look.

2: Try and sketch elements of your design i.e. the navigation or the header or whatever you want really. Scan them in and use your hand drawn sketches as part of your design.

Dan Mall (Happycog) will also be joining us at FOWD to discuss ‘The Experience Layer: Using Flash, JavaScript and other technologies to engage users’.

Dan spilled the beans on his talk, here’s what he said.In cognitive psychologist Don Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, he tells a story where a friend of his was trapped between two sets of glass doors at a post office because he didn’t know how to operate them. Doors are such an essential part of our everyday lives that they should be intuitive to use. Norman even elaborates on how simple they should be:

“…some doors have signs on them: pull, push, slide, lift, right bell, insert card, type password, smile, rotate, bow, dance, or, perhaps, just ask. Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed” (87).

It sounds like common sense, but we do the same thing when designing for the web. Haven’t we all skipped over a button because it didn’t look like one? Or maybe just the opposite: everything on the page fights for attention, and you’re overwheled as to what to do? How often do we see a button with the text “Click here”?

That’s exactly what my talk, “The Experience Layer”, and my workshop, “Magnetic Interactivity”, will focus on: creating interfaces that people know how to use based on their expectations, instead of learn how to use through blind stabs. I’ll also be showing how to make that usable design a beautiful one by focusing on very basic design techniques like typography, motion, and depth. Hope to see you there!

Join us in NYC - register over at the Future of Web Design site.