Some ideas, advice, information and the occasional rant
This Saturday rather than enjoying the rest the weekend had to offer I jumped in the back of a car and headed to Leeds for Think Visibility (or ThinkVis for short).
ThinkVis follows pretty much the normal conference mould in that it gets experts to speak in front of an audience about stuff that earns them money, in the case of ThinkVis this centres primarily on the world of search marketing.
Like most people I live my life through my job, seeing or hearing certain things will automatically have me thinking as a web designer. So when at Leeds Festival this weekend I could help but have the following image bug me a bit.
I’m not going to say whats wrong with the image I’ll leave you to guess that in the comments but I’d hate to be the person that designed it because if it was me and I saw this round Leeds Festival all weekend I’d be royally annoyed with myself that I missed such an imperfection.
I also have an issue with the choice of fonts on the wristbands, but this comes down to personal preference rather than a mistake. Lets just say the font they did choose was only just a step up from comic sans in my opinion.
In all however it was a great weekend spent with some great guys (and lady).
What normally happens with the websites I produce is I will design the site and then build it myself, crossing between designing in the browser and designing in Photoshop depending on the requirements of individual pages. Unfortunately what usually happens is that once the site goes live I can quickly alter my opinions on certain elements of the design and wish I’d spent more time crafting something more visually appealing. The element originally designed is always usable it’s just I’m always pushing myself in order to refine the quality of all the work I produce.
This is no more true than when it comes to my personal stuff. Although my new site design has only been knocking about for a little over a month I’d been wanting to look at refining certain areas based on both my own personal desires and also feedback gained from others.
Following in the footsteps of Gowalla and Foursquare it was Facebook’s turn to jump on the geolocation bandwagon today with Facebook Places. It describes the service as somewhere to share where you are and connect with friends nearby.
Personally I think this is Facebook trying to have a presence in yet another arm of social networking. But while they expand into yet another market are they able to compete with those who operate solely in the geolocation game?