I really enjoyed the Future of Web Design conference today, most of the talks were really interesting. I particularly enjoyed Andy Budd (Clearleft) talking about the ‘user experience design curve’, Paul Farnell (Litmus) talking about unconventional ways of promoting sites, Daniel Burka (Digg) on iterative and adaptive design and a great presentation from Steve Pearce from Poke (pictured below) all about user experience vs brand experience.

Another thing that struck me about the day was virtually everyone there was a pasty, skinny, white guy with thick glasses! … Concerning!

Picture by jkleske

Interesting to hear that Flickr are now moving into video sharing territory, everything seems to work in that minimal Flickr-like way - though I found it interesting that they’re limiting video’s to being only 90-seconds long to promote the idea of the “long-photo”:

“Video on Flickr grew out of the idea of “long photos” and as such, we’ve implemented what might seem like an arbitrary limit of playing back the first 90 seconds of a video. 90 seconds?We’re not trying to limit your artistic freedom, we’re trying something new.

Everyone has endured that wedding video, where even the bride will fast-forward to the “good bit.” In fact, even Tara at FlickrHQ hasn’t made it past the first 90 seconds of her own wedding video”

View examples on the Flickr ‘Video! Video! Video!‘ group

This is a great little blog by a guy called Todd Hart who basically buys up old cassette tapes from the Oxfam shop in Dalston then digitizes them and shares them on his site. Having a quick flick through I’ve found some pretty cool tracks by Gill Scott-Heron, Groove Train and a nice James Brown mix by Matt Black (right-click and select “Save Target As” on the links). www.dalstonoxfamshop.blogspot.com

Thanks for the link Chris

Quick Response Codes – what what what? Well they act in a similar way to a barcode except when you take a picture of them with an internet-enabled camera phone, your phone will bring up information or take you to a link of a particular website.

It’s something we’ve trialed a bit at the BBC (we ran an experiment in London zoo a couple of years back with these images next to the animal cages so visitors could get more information), also I noticed when I was in Japan last year that they got used quite a lot on billboards and advertising to provide a link back to the product.

Anyway I thought this was quite an interesting use of the technology by Munich-based clothing label Emma Cott, basically you can generate a link to your own website, social networking site etc, they’ll then print it out on to a t-shirt. Here’s the code to my facebook profile (I’m sure there could be some interesting uses for this?):

There’s something I really love about this Muxtape site, it basically allows you to upload mp3’s and create online playlists or mixtapes. However I think it’s the interface which is almost over-the-top simple, but there’s something really beautiful and art-like about it?

Web design, good CSS practice and search engine optimisation - all to a pretty fly beat! Watch here

“design done, congratulations but it’s time to start construction
follow these instructions when you move into production

your photoshop functions then slice that design
do your layout with divs make sure that it’s aligned

please don’t use tables even though they work fine
when it come to indexing they give searches a hard time”

Found this on Tonteau’s Threadless Blog which I thought was pretty funny, a classic British tabloid headline?

In other news related … news, check out the redesigned bbc news site, which is finally starting to drop those Real/WMV pop-up players and replacing them with the new embedded flash video player I was working on before Christmas.

Interesting to see the new ITV Catch Up site, there’s a couple of things that I like about it (though there are a LOT of bugs when using it on a mac) - My main gripe is that rather than using flash video (which everyone has) it uses Microsoft Silverlight (which no-one has?!)

Wow, this is amazing - like good ‘ol Quicktime VR but with video instead of still images … check out the demo here (be sure to move your mouse around over the video)

Found on the Protein blog

It’s been quite a busy few weeks getting some designs signed off for the next release of iPlayer. In the meantime there’s been some pretty cool developments - firstly it’s now become one of the few video sites (the only other one I know of is youTube) which will work on the iPhone and iPod touch, this is because it can stream in H.264 as well as flash - more info on the BBC internet blog and in the Guardian.

The other thing which has been quite interesting has been a couple of iPlayer clone websites which essentially use the same content and flash player but reorganised into a different site. My favourite version of this is iPlayerList which has the strapline “Making the unmissable, browsable” a little dig at the fact that on the current site, which is very picture heavy, it can be difficult to browse through content quickly and easily (this is something which we’re remedying for the next release).

Anyway it’s actually a really great site, with RSS feeds of programmes, related blog posts, it also pulls in related video from other video sharing sites. I think the main point seems to be though, that if you can easily find and play content it really doesn’t matter what the site looks like?!

Am currently watching Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews live on Radio 5 … the quality of the stream is pretty good and it’s actually quite interesting viewing - another example of the blurring between TV and radio?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive

Wow, that was pretty amazing - reminds me of that first time of going to see Jurassic Park in the cinema! Anyway didn’t really want to blog too much about the film (apart from that you should see it … now), but what I thought was really interesting is just how much “seeding” went on to promote it, i.e planting little clues in various places other than an official website to generate excitement.

I think ‘Lost’ did a similar thing when it was first released, but if you don’t want to spend hours wading though the characters myspace pages, weird japanese soft drink sites and translated manga comics - then this article seems to cover most stuff which has been going on behind the scenes!

So it seems BBC Three have gone for a bit of a rebrand, along with a new multiplatform vision which will include becoming the first channel to be broadcast live across the internet as well as on tv (though if you missed your weekly hit of “Can Fat Teens Hunt” on either platforms then don’t worry as you can always catch up with it on iPlayer too!)

I quite like the new logo, though it does seem mighty similar to the Heart FM one?

The BBC are currently running a ‘Festival of Technology’ today and all of tomorrow. It’s completely free, and will showcase latest developments within web, interactive television, digital tv, audio production etc. It’s in Television Centre on Wood Lane and is open to everyone (though if you’re not BBC staff you have to register here). I’m gonna try and pop down tomorrow morning …

Although I missed it last year I’m gonna try and get work to pay for me to go on this, it’s in London on April the 17th and 18th. Looks like there’s gonna be some good speakers, also alot about usability/user centered design - rather than just how to make shiny buttons!:

http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/