Barcamp review
As Iain mentioned in his previous blog, we visited BarCamp London on Saturday. There were ten rooms, and with two seminars per room each hour (from 11am to 9pm) – that’s a lot of talking! We decided to split up for most of the day to hear as much as we could.
I chose some of the talks to visit depending on whether I would learn something to improve my skill set, or whether they just sound incredibly interesting. Overall an excellent day and I certainly came away with some key thinking points about how we approach web design and development at Base Creative.
There were two talks about CSS (cascading style sheets) by Anna Debenham and another by Mark Stickley that taught me some practical solutions to building a web page. There are many ways to take a flat design and make it interactive and these two talks reinforced a few of the good practices and clever methods to do just that. It’s important to understand all the solutions in order to make the most efficient website. I was very pleased to have boosted my knowledge base here!
My favourite talk was titled “New Fonts for the Web” hosted by Tobs. The discussion centred around the new CSS addition of embedding fonts on web pages. This basically means that we’re no longer limited to which fonts we use when designing a website. It’s a particularly intriguing discussion because unlike some emerging web technologies this one is implemented by most modern web browsers, and will likely be useable in the foreseeable future. There were two significant points that I think were raised well during the discussion:
- The first was on choosing a font that is legible on-screen. The subtleties of many fonts don’t render well on low resolutions (i.e. computer screens) and at small sizes they’ll become illegible.
- The second point was on the importance of Unicode support. Many fonts only support basic Latin characters. Accented letters and other languages like Chinese aren’t going to appear in some fonts. This is especially important for “social” websites that allow anyone to comment, or when using tools like Google page translate.
It’s important to remember that choosing a font is more than just a design choice. Weighing in the accessibility issues is just as important.
They were the main talks that stood out for me but everyone I heard was informative and there were many more I didn’t get chance to visit. A thoroughly enjoyable day and I can’t wait for next year. I’ll definitely be preparing a design-related talk for then.