I want to say thank you again to everyone that attended the conference and to all of the speakers who really rocked the day! I have truly appreciated the feedback and I am already looking forward to Front-End Design Conference 2010!
Of course, I would also like to thank all of our generous sponsors: Wufoo, ExpressionEngine, Shopify, Pixelmator, LessAccounting and LessTimeSpent. Also, don't forget to check out Notable and the FUEL Brand Network!
Things are cooking for the 2010 event, details soon...
The beginning of Fabio's presentation talked about his inspiration and he shared some great videos. They were full of colors, shapes and effects that have inspired some amazing tutorials available on Abduzeedo.com.
One of the major takeaways from the presentation was the fact that Brazilian designers have a completely different learning process from American designers. English is not a major language in Brazil and many of the design resources that we cherish have not been translated to Portugese. This results in Brazilian designers needing to intensely study images and their associations in order to figure out ways to create them.
"Don't drink the paint" is advice that you wouldn't normally expect during a walkthrough on how to create a brush for Photoshop or Illustrator, but it was important in this one! Grant walked everyone through using paint and paper to create various effects that you can scan into a computer to reproduce digitally.
The major takeaway from this presentation was seeing it live! It's hard to explain how cool it was to see and hear paint get sucked into a straw, shot out onto paper, touched up digitally and used as an effect.
Check out his post on Colorburned.com to download the files that he used in his presentation.
Jonathan's presentation provided great examples of some awesome sites and design companies that are using ExpressionEngine. He then gave an excellent walkthrough of the features and power of this designer-friendly CMS.
The major takeaway from his presentation is that he and Nate are "not programmers" and that you don't have to be to learn and utilize ExpressionEngine. It is built to work within your code to add functionality and deliver content dynamically.
Download his presentation and watch out for much more content to be available on FortySevenMedia.com
Chris used his wit and some green fire text to help explain how to expand the functionality of your standard html and css with jQuery. He had the room laughing and learning the whole time.
The major takeaway from this presentation was that jQuery is written very similarly to css, but you can add more functionality with less code. You should be using it! (Oh, and that green fire is cool!)
Download the pdf and sample files and view the presentation on Slideshare.
Andrew gave an in-depth explanation of what affordances are by explaining the history of their study and showing plenty of great examples. This presentation was full of "aha!" moments with wonderful samples of good and bad functionality in products and websites.
There were many takeaways from this presentation, but one of the major one was that we should all try to learn from the world around us as our users do.
John presented on how to make your designs better and his presentation covered not only how to make more visualy appealing designs, but how to create better source files to work with. He used some great sample sites and showed work that he has done at Grooveshark for the "pretty stuff" and gave some great tips on how to structure .psds so that you can easily work on them after time or hand them off to a developer.
One of the major takeaways from this presentation were seeing his techniques for using guides, both for easy slicing and coding and for using them to avoid blurry half-pixel errors.
Download John's presentation which has the Keynote file, pdf, .ai and .psds that he used.
Kevin gave a very entertaining and informative presentation about the relationship between app companies and their users. The inside-look into the Wufoo approach to customer service was inspiring and there were some wonderful examples of companies that focus on building a relationship with their customers.
One of the major takeaways was the breakdown of relationship factors. There was an awesome comparison of how the things that make up a personal relationship can be correlated to the app/customer relationship.