Design

Inspiring, inspiring, inspiring.

Clearly a success. Inspire conference brought to the table all the latest discussions and big questions of the current status of the digital industry. Four days of creative thinking seeking to break all digital boundaries. Providing unlimited room for exchanging opinions with other professionals, being developers, designers, web-crafters and many other super-fancy job titles that I came across.

It is remarkable to see the first edition of this conference brought to life, with such speakers, in a tremendously inspiring venue and with an amazing crowd. This was only possible thanks to a valuable effort from the founder Rober Eerhart, which was able to gather and unite the best crafters of our industry under the very same roof for this inspiring event.

120 minutes of curving magic

ADC Young Gun, one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design, letterer, illustrator, and crazy cat lady – Jessica Hische  - has been setting the trend when it comes down to digital type illustration. Jessica started her speech by sharing some episodes, experiences and processes of her work. It was very interesting to see how her projects go from sketch to a final artwork and its different phases. With her very own illustration style, Jessica revealed that to master typography and lettering in such advanced way, it requires years of practice, persistence and lots of sketching.

Funny fact, Jessica only uses a trackpad and a mouse as tools of the trade, this might sound awkward for most creatives that use a Wacom.

Find more at http://jessicahische.is/

Excellence in typeface for the web

Tim Brown brought expertise from Typeface. Started by saying “The web is the best place for text. It can be searched, copied, translated”. Tim showed detailed and precious insights about web-typography, mentioning various do’s and d0n’ts when optimizing fonts on the web. Tim brought inspiration in many ways, he explained how it will be possible to set perfect font sizes for multiple devices in order to keep confortable readability by using advanced visual sensors. It was a privilege for all attendes to have such a professional giving insights on how to make digital typography evolve from good to excellent.

Find more at http://nicewebtype.com/

Content vs Interaction vs design

Shelly Bowen brought a very clear message – Make sure your content comes always before design – It was very much about what role content plays on digital projects and how important it is to have it before starting to build the first interactions. Shelly also talked about prioritizing content, showing examples of good and bad hierarchy among various e-commerce websites. Another interesting topic was about the semi-fake content, which can be seen as a little bit of a the next generation for lorem lipsum.

Find more at http://www.pybop.com/

Inspiration from Brooklyn

Chris Shiflett, the mentor of the the Brooklyn beta conference, had a very motivational speech. One of Chris’s quotes was “ Craftsman is someone who gives a shit”, which regards to important values like proactivity and preservence in the digital industry.

Find more at http://shiflett.org/

Bullshit no more, genuine insights

Brad Frost, as the title says, came to cut the bullshit. Started by analyzing  various cases of information overload, misconceptions of hierarchy on the web and other horrible practices that are capable of making all of us annoyed. There were some facts brought by Brad that got us stunned, for example that 10% of all content on the web has been published in 2012 alone, and that 10% of all books ever made have been published in 2012. With this in mind, he explained why this is a revolutionary time on the web, this is the content era, and we (designers/developers) are proudly in charge of shaping it.

Overall it was a very fact-based speech, built upon yes and no, good and bad. Nothing wrong about that, it for sure inspired everyone to keep fighting for balanced online experiences, with less bullshit and more valuable content.

Find more at http://bradfrostweb.com/

One of a kind speech

Jeffrey Zeldman closed the session putting a cherry on top of this inspirational cake. The speech started with a funny interior design critique about how the space between his bed and the chair on his hotel room’s desk was so tight, making it impossible to get in or out. After setting the mood for what would become the most delightful 60 minutes of the day, Jeffrey continued with inspiring insights about pragmatic solutions for now-a-days web, essentially pushing for a better online experience in the upcoming future.

Zeldman said “If you are designing a layout without knowing what or why you are doing it, then you are doing shitty art… not design” – this can be handy when facing certain challenges, it’s all about reverting back to why you are doing it and what is the final goal of your design. At the refreshed zeldman.com, Jeffrey is using what he called “the zeldman grid”, which represents a totally new idea on how to work with responsive behavior from a different perspective, by keeping a fixed width and adapting font sizes according to the display.

There is much more to absorb from the speech than the two paragraphs above, Jeffrey is an inspiring and experienced man from New York city, devoted to make the web a better place.

Find more at http://www.zeldman.com/

Acknowledgement

Inspire conference 2012 has many important moments to be absorbed. It was a friendly, close and emotional meeting of creatives working towards a bright future for web. Conferences like Inspire are really important for our industry, it recycles the digital spirit within every attendee and generates inspiration alongside with new ideas.

You may ask what the future holds for Inspire conference. Very soon there will be an event in Chicago and  then Sao Paulo. Later in 2013 (as confirmed by Rober Eerhart) the event will be back in Leiden.

Not all speakers have been mentioned in this recap, the ones missing were likewise inspiring!

Find more at http://2012.inspireconf.com/