Speak the web

Last night was Speak the web Manchester the final leg of the four night tour for the north of England organized by Rich Clark and Dan Donald.

Organisation

The night ran pretty smoothly in the end and had a nice close knit feel, probably helped by the Banana bread beer i was drinking and the sofa i was sat on. If all flowed pretty well, the only think that felt slightly out of place was the competitions. Maybe if they were all in the break in the middle or at the very end they might have interrupted the flow less, really though I’m clutching at straws here.

Ben Childs

Ben from Common Agency gave the first talk on designing for mobile devices, which went pretty well. He started off by covering who he was and why we should be listening to him. Weirdly enough it seems that he worked for Orange in the Leeds office while i was in the network team in the Hemel/St Albans office. There was a lot of interesting stuff in his talk, with the take away concept being closely similar to Andy Clarke’s philosophy that site design should be scaled to be scaled for the device that you are currently using.

I think his talk suffered slightly from his early slides trying to fit too much on the screen at one time, his later slides were excellent tho and conveyed exactly what he was trying to say while remaining readable.

Dom Hodgson

Second up was “The Hodge” on the topic of SEO with a pick your own style talk. The plan was that he showed a grid of topics, people would shout out one they were interested in and he would do a mini talk on it. Due to a bit of a technical failure that didn’t really happen and in the end he rushed through almost all of the topics not really covering any in much detail. He covered some interesting things and I got some good info from it but i get the feeling that there was probably much more that i missed.

Remy Sharp

Remy was the first of the big hitters with the second pick your own talk of the evening, one worked slightly better. Remy’s talk covered HTML5 Javascript APIs which is the thing i have looked into the least out of all HTML5 and CSS3. It was a very code heavy talk but for me the most interesting by far. If you aren’t into code then i suspect that it was fairly bewildering and the people i was with ( Designer and Project manager for Pagemakers ) got a little lost. The incoming APIs look like they will take a fair bit of the heavy lifting from Javascript development. The webworkers spec was especially fascinating and have given me an idea for a little side project. Hopefully they will support natively parsed JSON strings so they can be used for some proper heavy lifting.

Andy Clarke

The headline act was Mr Andy Clarke and what an act he was, although Remy’s talk was polished Andy’s was on another level. He talked with a depth of knowledge about his subject, cross browser CSS. His argument was that you should design with the best browsers in mind but present sensible degraded versions for less able browsers, something he termed “Hardboiled web design”. Andy had asked for the audience to heckle and talk back to him which they did, some more constructive then others. He handled it all well and offered to talk to people at the bar afterwards to fully answer the questions.

By far the best speaker of the evening from his beautifully designed slides to his engaging presentation style, Andy would have been worth the ticket price alone.

Overall

I thought that the format worked well, it was pretty informal very friendly and definitely informative. It was like the Northern Digitals talks on steroids, on steroids. I hope that Rich and Dan repeat the event on a regular basis as for £20 its not something that you have to even think twice about going to. I was umming and aaring about going to the Sheffield leg as well, I’m pretty annoyed that i didn’t. If there is a next time I’ll go for a tour pass so that i can see all of the speakers.