London, 20 February
Reasons to be Creative events always bring together a broad range of experts spanning from visual artist all the way to coders and hard-core developers. This one-day event taking place in a beautiful venue, LSO St Luke’s, just around the corner from the ‘Silicon Roundabout’, hosted 6 speakers who covered many aspects of digital design, print and coding for web. Great atmosphere and tons of information!
Harry Roberts kicked off with an in-depth talk about theming and user-customisation of websites. As an award-winning front-end architect and consultant on UI, he certainly had a lot to say on the topic. The developers in the room got a detailed explanation of four (and a half) different techniques of using CSS to create themes on their website, and when to use which. For the rest of the world, Harry shared all his slides online too.
Those of us who found it hard to follow the first, very technical, talk were happy to see Stefanie Posavec next. She creates beautiful data visualisations and info-graphics, treating data-sets as raw material. She does not code much herself, but it was nice to see that the good old pen and paper is sometimes still more efficient when collecting data. The output does not need to be digital either. Stefanie turned air-pollution data into a necklace, Facebook relationships into dance steps and open data into a hopscotch playground.
The talk that many visitors probably still can’t get out of their heads was about internet security, delivered by James Hall. It was a kind of a crash course in hacking for developers. For starters, James showed us some easy tricks to steal passwords and other personal data of everyone connected to the WiFi. When people started uncomfortably shifting in their seats and turning of their smart phones, he tried to calm everyone down by explaining how developers can prevent this. And his advice to us, common users, was to use sentences rather than a word and a number for password.
Of course, a conference such as this one had to have a talk dedicated to UX. Anna Dahlstrom criticised how design often tends to be driven by technology, rather than user needs. Nowadays, when it is common for people start reading the news from their tablet in the morning and continue on their smartphone when they commute to work where they finish on a desktop, it is important to create seamless experience. To achieve that, products need to be designed and tested with a specific audience. “Design for everyone and you design for no one.”
After such an avalanche of information from all the speakers, some visitors might be loosing focus. Art director and web designer Andrew Clark revived everybody’s attention by showing up wearing a mask from Planet of the Apes. He said that the web is loosing its soul because we spend too much time worrying about functionality and not enough time on creativity. Giving many examples from advertising, he pointed out that no focus group, no personas nor any amount of research could come up with such original and successful campaigns such as chimps drinking PG Tips.
Before we all went to a nearby pub, Elliot Jay Stocks spoke about his love for beer, web and print design. Elliot is a creative director of Adobe Typekit, but he spoke mostly about his side projects such as his lifestyle magazine Lagom celebrating innovation and creativity he recently started with his wife. After he proudly announced that he has recently been ordering craft beers for himself as a part of his job, many creatives in the room probably added this to the list of their career goals too.
John Davey, the man who runs the show, appeared on the stage on last time to thank the speaker and organiser and then it really was time to hit the pub. This was a great opportunity to have an informal chat, squeeze more information out of the speakers and exchange business cards. Is there a better way for young professionals to spend their Friday?
For more information and future Reasons to be Creative events go to http://reasons.to/ and follow @reasonsto. See you next time!
