Before continuing, know this… I am no great wordsmith, there will be typos, mistakes & things that just dont make sense… But hey, I’ve gotta start somewhere…
On 29th October, I travelled over to Cardiff for two days at theweb.is conference. The whole conference was put together to celebrate the 25th anniversay of the web, with all the talks being based around “what the web is” to each speaker. Based on this concept there was always going to be a broard range of topics, however I was surprised at just how broad.
The talks ranged from accessibility and performance, to mental health and branding.
I can’t do any of the speakers justice on here, so rather than trying to get everything down, I’ve chosen a select few to focus in on.
The whole conference was filmed, so I’ll post the link to it once that’s up, however in the mean time here’s a list of round-ups from a few other attendees.
For my offering I decided to focus on:
Chris Murphy is a writer, designer and educator, described as, “a William Morris for the digital age”.
His talk centred around the role of the educator and opened his talk with the “O captain, my captain” scene from “Dead Poets Society”. The contrast between how the students interact with Mr. Nolan and Mr. Keating is fairly stark. Mr. Nolan teaches in the classic read and learn style, whereas Mr. Keating doesn’t just tell them what poetry is, he shares his knowledge and discusses it with them, but he also teaches them other life lessons along the way. He doesn’t just stick blindly to the agreed (and out of date) syllabus and this is why the students risk punishment to show their support for him.
Chris described this as a new old way of teaching, going back to the days of the master and apprentice, where the master craftsmen would take on a single apprentice and teach them everything they know until the apprentice is on the same level. The apprentice would then go out as a journeyman and learn from a different master and keep progressing way above the original master. Currently, it seems that most education is based around getting the end qualification, with no support around it. This leaves students with the knowledge of a subject, but not the skills to use it and more importantly without the belief to reach their full potential.
The thing that is missing from this is what Chris called “the human touch” the ability to call some one out who’s being rude, to educate people on manners, to give an extra bit of help to someone who’s struggling, comfort a student who’s having a difficult time and to reassure them and build up their self belief.
those who can, do; those who care, teach
This whole thing made me think of the plethora of online learning sites that keep cropping up. I don’t believe them to be a bad thing really, but they don’t offer that extra education around the subject, that extra human touch. A recent experience with a friend who’s learning html and CSS really hammered this home for me. The online school they were using wasn’t teaching them, it was just getting them to recite code (markup for those who take offence).
His closing remark was this “those who can, do; those who care, teach”.
We missed the first half this talk (due to getting stuck in the carpark), which was a pain in the arse as I was really looking forward to it. However, what I did see of the talk really resonated with me (I’ve only realised this now, as I’m writing up my notes).
David Hieatt is “an entrepreneur, marketeer and brand builder”. He created Howies (the eco-friendly clothing brand), founded the Do Lectures and has recently created Hiut Denim.
The main gist of David’s talk was to play to your strengths. If you’re a small company you should embrace it. Small companies may not be able to win on price or on breadth of product, but they can make decisions quickly, focus in on making one thing amazingly well and above all, out innovate the bigger companies. Speaking of Hiut Denim, he said “We can move faster, we don’t have to wait for decisions to be made”.
On innovation, he quoted everyones’ favourite product designer, Richard Seymour - “the more you operate in the future, the less competition you will have”. I took this to mean you should be working on the things now that the competition will be trying next.
The other theme in his talk was “be authentic”. Although I don’t think he actually said “be authentic”, authenticity is at the heart of every action and intitiative that comes from one of David’s ventures. He said if you’re going to start a venture - make sure it’s something you love, because it will get tough and test you and if you love something, that will fuel your innovation.
One idea that came from this love of the product was the history tag. Every pair of jeans Hiut make comes with an individual “history tag” printed inside them, which links to historytag.com. The basic idea is to document the history of “a thing”, to see where that thing has been and what it’s done. So if they end up in a second hand shop, whoever buys them can see their story. The whole concept came from David looking at a 100 year old pair of jeans and pondering on what they had seen and been through. This idea might not immediately seem like any sort of money maker, but as a brand it shows that they care about their products and that they expect them to last hundreds of years.
One of the problems that Hiut Denim had was that their customers wanted “pre-worn” jeans. However, they didn’t have the facilities to “pre-wear” the jeans in house. So they set up a club, called the “Denim Breaker Club”. This “Denim Breaker Club” was basically a lean test. People signed up for it, paid a deposit on a pair of jeans and then all they had to do was wear them for 6 months and never wash them. At the end of the 6 months they send the jeans back, Hiut wash the jeans (this is apparently where all the 6months of wear suddenly shows itself in all the creases of the wearer) and then they auction them off giving a % to the guy/girl who spent 6 months of their life wearing a single pair of jeans - to effectively they are paying people to wear jeans. Once again, this may not seem on the face of it a fantastic way to build up a money mountain, but as a way to build a brand it once again shows their authenticity.
the best project you can have is your current one
They also have a few other clubs, such as the “no wash club” designed to reduce the carbon footprint of jeans (80% of the carbon footprint comes purely from washing them) by not washing them for 6 months.
He closed his talk with “the best project you can have is your current one, not that ideal project that you’ll get round to in the future or the one that went really well a few years ago. It’s what you’re working on now and that should have 100% focus”.
If you’re small, use it and keep nimble. Be authentic and your customers will see that you care. If you’re working on something - focus on that and not the next thing.
Keir is a UK based Shopify Designer Advocate and co-host of The Back to Front Show weekly podcast.
This talk started to set the mood of the conference for me. In our industry it’s not uncommon to hear people say “I live and breath the web” or something similar. That’s fooking awful. We’ve got to this point because everyone is “super passionate”, “the web is always progressing” and it’s now interwoven with our everyday lives. We check twitter, check e-mail, check facebook and check instagram. Then once we are done checking our instagram, we check to see if there’s anything new on twitter.
We consume too much, which leaves us little time to produce anything meaningful.
We do this in an effort to keep up to date, to stay at the head of the curve and to make sure we are up to date with all the new technologies and techniques.
This is exhasting and it makes us constantly question our tools and ourselves, if we fall behind the curve we feel like we are failing, like we’re an impostor within our job.
It's ok to be behind the curve
If we are always chasing the next big thing, we don’t spend any time perfecting the current thing. It’s ok to be behind the curve, most people are (and they aren’t all hipsters).
Keirs talk summed up - it’s ok to slow down and disconnect, it will pay off in the long run and you’ll save your sanity.
I’d never heard of Phil before this conference, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect from his talk. I was pleasantly surprised. As a speaker he was up there with the best of them, funny and fast paced, but not so quick he left the audience behind.
If nothing else, I will never look at http:// the same way, all I see now is http double meh ://.
His talk focused around the fundamental building block of the web, the link. We can link to absolutely anything (that’s not behind a paywall), joining two things together and creating something more than the sum of the two parts.
the URL is the share button of the web
After a brief bit of wonder at how amazing the humble link really is, he moved on to discussing how we are destroying the link. He expanded on his definition of the link (for this talk) to include the URL (URI) and how we have gone down a path where we are making our URL’s too convoluted and we’re forgetting that these URL’s are supposed to be human readable… Infact… That’s pretty much their sole purpose, to be read by humans.
We’ve ruined these URL’s to the point where browsers are starting to hide them, which is insane, as Phil quoted Jake Archibald - “the URL is the share button of the web”. Ever heard someone say “send me the link”?
Phil then moved his talk onto progressive enhancement, pulling out one of my favourite web quotes, “This is for everyone (with javascript enabled)” - Dan Williams. At it’s most basic the web is a bunch of html pages linked to other html pages, so at their most basic, this should be how our sites are made. We all hear everyone say “But everyone has js enabled now”. Phil’s response to that is that more than 60% of the population of India (a shit ton of people) are offline. When they come online, the devices they will be using will be basic, very basic and probably wont have js, so should we just ignore them?
This was an interesting one… It wasn’t actually a talk… Andy runs a podcast called unfinished business about “the business end, the sharp end of web, design and creative industries” and his “talk” was actually a live recording of his podcast. The topic discussed was mental health in the web industry. The conference coincided with “Geek Mental Help Week”, which is an initiative set up to get our industry talking about mental health. Andy was joined by four guests, Chris Murphy, Cole Henley, Relly Annett-Baker and Dr. Clare Symons.
Cole Henley and Relly Annett-Baker talked us through their previous mental issues, whilst Dr. Clare Symons gave an outside professional perspective on mental health in our industry.
I can’t really do their stories justice on here, so have a listen to the podcast - it’s one of those topics people rarely like to talk about, but it’s something we really should be more open to.