GregKirk.com

Just got my latest project up and running. Doris & Alice sells contemporary greeting cards and stationery. There are 2 versions of the site one for retail customers and a members only version for trade customers. I think the designs are great and really different from the standard you get in all the chain stores like the one at my local shopping centre which is supposedly the biggest card shop in Europe and yet walking through it is a bit like you’re in Scooby Doo and the background keeps repeating, “cute dog, cute cat, watering can, cute dog, cute cat, watering can, cute dog… etc. 

Posted by Greg at 01:27 PM

So last week I went to the FOWD (Future of Web Design) Conference at Kensington Town Hall in London. This was my second outing to FOWD having previously been to the 2007 event and although I don’t think this year’s packed as much punch as 2007 there will still many interesting points raised. Most of which were not directly related to “the future” of web design but interesting none the less.

The event kicked off with an intro from the host, the ever hatted Ryan Carson who still has all the passion and excitement from 2 years ago. Then we had a brief talk from Danny Somekh on the digital design process which led nicely on to the keynote address from Jim Coudal whose game of pairing a book with a band has taken our office by storm (Alice Cooper in Wonderland, The Lionel, The Ritchie and The Wardrbobe etc). The game was meant to represent some sort of metaphor for the creative process but I was too busy thinking up book-bands by that point. Meagan Fisher then hit the stage to talk about designing for mobile interfaces which is something that I have never really gotten into. I just don’t know that many people who use their phone to browse the web and if they do, they usually have an iPhone which has full CSS support anyway losing the need to have a cut down mobile site. This point was raised from a member of the audience during the Q and A and there wasn’t really a response.

After a short break and a free drink, Mark Boulton gave a great talk on typography for the web which included a fantastic rant on the use of Comic Sans. Next up was Mike Kus who works for Carsonified (the organisers of the event) and to me this felt a bit like they said “We can’t get anyone else so lets use the guy in the office.”. He had some very pretty slides but not much to say, although the free poster was much appreciated.

Other highlights of the day included Robin Christopherson demonstrating how he uses the web with JAWS and Sabrina Dent’s Stalinist web design model aka say “you can say no to clients”.

One of the more bizarre talks was by Microsoft who chose to retell the Watchmen story via their Surface technology. I for one didn’t really get it and it seemed to be a rather abstract way of showing off the undoubtably impressive Surface.

It was once again a very slick and professionally run event from Carsonified but this was let down by the lack of “wow factors” during the talks, and I came away slightly disappointed at the lack of inspiring work that was so apparent at the 2007 event. 

Posted by Greg at 11:29 AM