The British duo of Andy Clarke and Andy Budd step up to the stage with rock music and rock star ultraviolent lighting. This looks to be a good one.
Star Wars theme playing on the speakers.
The slides are amazing. You can now download a pdf file of the slides on Andry Clarke’s site. It’s 13.5mb, but worth every byte.
Here are the questions and answers, none of which are really technical, but all are very entertaining.
Q&A
Question: Every superhero has a vulnerability. What’s yours?
Audience: Sideburns.
Clarke: I’m always quite trusting and take people off face value. I know that I need to be more wary.
Budd: Like most of you, I;m not a graphic designer, I’m self-taught. I don’t have the formal training in design. My personal vulnerability is that I feel I don’t have the necessary vocabulary or training that I’d like.
Clarke: In education, there is emphasis on the ability to use flash or some application. Is there any training for creating user experiences? At this point probably no.
Budd, regarding a web superhero needing perseverance when convincing management to embrace web standards: 2006 is the year in which CSS will take off.
Clarke: There are ea lot of good people promoting web standards within organisations like Ebay, Yahoo!, or BBC. What happens when these people leave? All the good work can be undone in seconds.
Budd: My understanding is that web standards is like a virus. When the individual leaves, they’d have left their mark on the organisation.
Clarke: I’d like to see top management “stung”, if you like, so there’s a top-down approach to web standards.
Question: Regarding supergroups, what is missing from a lot of designers is collaboration. How do supergroups work, and how do they work well?
Budd: What the company I work for does is the front end services the back-end developers. We build the templates and pass them to the back. We have the backend developers build the site in a very bare-bones manner and we pass them the templates and plug in the CSS. They (the backend developers) just want to program, they don’t want to worry about slicing up images.
Clarke: I disagree with you. Back in the day designers need to know everything. You still see job descriptions where web designers need to know PHP, Dreamweaver etc. I believe the jack of all trades approach is coming to an end. There is a move towards specialisation. I believe that writing XHTML and CSS is a designer’s job, bu we can go further than that.
Budd: But I’d only hire a designer who knows his canvas. He may not have to do the actual code writing, but he needs to know how things work.
Clarke: A designer that knows how XHTML works may be in a better position to give a better design than a code author.
Budd: A designer is not just someone that makes pretty pictures. A designer needs to know how to lay out the elements of a page semantically, how to highlight certain elements, how to deliver meaning.