SXSW 2009, Day 1
- Categories:
- SXSW
- Tags:
- clearleft, design, nicepaul, sxsw, web
- Published:
- 8:05pm on Sunday 15th March, 2009
Based on my experience of previous years, I was expecting the Friday of SXSW to be largely a waste of time—but this year actually featured some great sessions.
Everything you know about web design is wrong
Dan Willis of Sapient drew parallels between the dawn of modern cinema (cf. Birth of a Nation, probably the only time you’re going to see the Ku Klux Klan at a web conference) and our industry’s slow discovery of the grammar of modern web design.
It was largely interesting, and Willis did point to some emerging trends as possible candidates for how things could or should change—random voyeurism, self-aware content, user-created content, ambient awareness and experiential content—but ultimately had no answers. And who couldn’t have told us that the web is different from print?
Unnatural experiments in web design
In the same ballroom, Paul Annett from Clearleft explored some of the cool hidden treasures people are putting into their designs. Starting from FedEx’s hidden arrow and the bear in the Toblerone logo, he ran through a laundry list of interesting techniques in use on the web; Silverback‘s parallax scrolling backgrounds, We Bleed Design‘s endless scrolling paint stripes, and Skittles’ recent social media experimental homepage, among others.
His point, ultimately, was that adding hidden treasures to your design can surprise and delight users, and the natural feeling of wanting to share your discovery naturally translates into high visibility and pseudo-viral marketing for your site or product.
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b,i,em,del,ins,strong,pre,code,blockquote,abbr. URLs or email addresses will be automatically converted into links.X3 at 10:33pm on 19th March, 2009 #