Continuing from our Dibi Conference London series we headed into the afternoon talks. If you missed part one, take a read here.
Evaluating the design features of your site
Dan Cork is a developer at Holiday Extras with a passion for UI development and user experience. Dan started his discussion by pointing out the bad parts of his company’s current site at the beginning of his time with them. This was a breath of fresh air for us as designers, we saw what issues others also struggle with and how they resolve them. Dan showed us cssstats.com an online tool which evaluates the design features of your site, it’s a great one for testing a website before it goes live as you can check it is within the brand guidelines you have laid out initially.
Check out his slides here
Zombie Code
Marco Cedaro talked of Zombie code and how to survive it. So what is zombie code? It’s the hundreds of lines of code tightly coupled and hardly understandable. Code should always be easily read by anyone who wants to look at it, but sometimes we get lazy, it may seem harmless at the time but its not and it will eventually eat your brains! ‘Its dumb code that makes you dumb.’ Bad code can be easily resolved by doing simple things: setting style guides for your team, testing your code (is it functional?) making testing part of the process, review your code, involve more people as a team you will resolve more.
If you’d like to know more you can view Marco’s talk here
Data can be creative
Last but by no means least was Stefanie Posavec. Stefanie is a designer who favours data as her chosen medium. She talked us through the beginning of her design journey and showed us her piece called ‘Writing Without Words’ which was the final project in her end of year MA. It was a visual representation of different authors writing styles which explored sentence length, themes, parts-of-speech, sentence rhythm, punctuation and the underlying structure of text were all elements that combined created the beautiful piece, structured in the style of a tree to show the growing of the story. She explained that even something not very exciting like data can be made into a creative visual and can make us think about what we use in everyday life and how we could potentially turn that into something interesting people would want to interact with.
Stefanie’s designs are not only visually pleasing but once you delve a little deeper extremely informative. Another one of our favourites was Stefanie’s project with Facebook which you can check out here.
