Derek Bender — design, art direction and illustration

Front-End Design Conference

This past Friday the first Front-End Design Conference was held in St. Petersburg, FL. Ryan and I made the early morning drive to St. Petersburg for the festivities.

For awhile there hasn't been a conference or event that has focused on front-end design. Okay, there has been but nothing even remotely close to Orlando. I was surprised to hear about the Front-End Design Conference and quickly made plans to attend (thanks to NFi for covering the cost for the tickets). And it was an even bigger reason to attend when I found out the speaker lineup who included folks and companies I've actually heard of and follow.

Speakers included Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Jonathon Longnecker of Forty Seven Media, Grant Friedman of Colorburned and Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks who had a great talk on jQuery.

Andrew Maier offered a great presentation on affordances in web design:

How do your users decide what actions lie behind a given interface element? For example: what makes a button a button? In this talk, we'll focus on the logical underpinnings of design; drawing on research in the fields of product design and ergonomics. We'll examine the foundations of usability and what it means to interaction design.

The talk also covered overdesigning and a good share of the theory behind interaction design. Andrew presented really forward-thinking ideas on why objects and interfaces look and work the way they do and how that relates to design. In the future I will definitely be thinking about these ideas and theories in my work.

Another great talk was by John Ashenden of Grooveshark about how to work creatively to customize your user interfaces. Fabio Sasso also had a great presentation about gathering design inspiration and how he first started the mega popular site Abduzeedo.com.

The great thing about FEDC was the format. Instead of the traditional breakaway format where you'd have to pick between two or more talks to watch, only one talk/session went on at a time.

Thanks to Dan Denney for putting on a great conference. I meet some great folks and had a lot of fun. The speakers were great, the locale was fantastic and everything just seemed to come together to make this event stand out. Even though it was the first year it's been held, I can see this conference becoming a must attend in the future. Great stuff going on in Tampa/St. Pete.