As I’ve previously blogged about, I decided to forego the usual trip to London for my yearly conference fix and instead tried to find smaller, more local conferences that would also be better value for money. DIBI was such a conference that took place over the last couple of days, and as is customary I have to follow up with a review of my experience.

So in a rather linear fashion I’ll work through the conference and stick in some extra thoughts at the end…

Fog on the Tyne

As conference cities go Newcastle is counted as local even with the 2 hour train journey to get there. My experience of the city has never been exhaustive and this won’t be changing after the last couple of days but I must admit the location of the conference was excellent.

With all the venues within a stone’s throw of each other and the Tyne (with the Millennium Bridge) in-between it certainly was a picturesque location in which to hold a conference and given the conference is held within The Sage I was surprised that the conference is not priced more highly (though of course I’m very happy with the pricing).

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Through Twitter, Blogs and Conferences we’re constantly told that it’s our job to educate our clients; teach them how best to interact with our community to not only help ourselves but the clients and other webbies they may work with in the future.

Yet it’s not always so easy. The spoken word can be easily forgotten and sometimes external forces work against your best efforts to have both the time and situation to put your client in a hypothetical classroom.

But maybe Mr Boag has come up with the perfect solution to our woes, something that can educate the client in the early stages of a project without taking time away from the designer and minimal time for the client. Paul has created a small factsheet that he and the Headscape team will be using for their prospective clients and have been kind enough to provide it freely for others to use.

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I’ve had enough jobs in my life to count them all on one hand and in that time I’ve had job titles ranging from simple ‘Crew Member’ to mouth achingly long ‘EMEA Interactive Marketing Development and Reporting Co-ordinator’. On initial viewing the second of course look more important, and although you could argue a job at IBM is better than at McDonalds both placed me firmly at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

But now my email signature reads ‘Senior Web Designer & Developer’ but when asked what I do I will simply reply with ‘Web Designer’, why confuse the situation by bringing in the specifics of my being a developer as well or that as the only designer in my company I am graced with the ‘senior’ role. I’ve never been all that concerned with the job title I have, it has no relation to what I am paid or the role I undertake at Bronco, sure I’d have some issues if my title changed to ‘Office Gimp’ but so long as my job title relates to the work I do I don’t want or need to confuse matters.

Yet the industry as a whole seems to be doing just this, no longer do people work on the web it’s all interactive or new media instead. Or job title’s become more specific with people specialising in UI or UX all of a sudden.

So many of the developments in distinct job titles in our industry seem to be solely for the enjoyment of our industry, whereby the world at large has no idea of what UX is. Most are only just coming to terms with the distinction of designer and developer, if not the web at large.

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I’ve gotten into a poor habit recently of skim reading many new posts about the web, and not doing the necessary investigation into some of the new advancements on the web. One of these is responsive design. My understanding of responsive design is to think of designing a website using a liquid layout but with added media queries to alter the layout somewhat at certain resolutions.

This is so that you can create more suitable layouts not only for mobile devices but also utilise the greater space available at larger resolutions. Though I’m not sure if I’ll be looking to use such a method of design in all client work just yet I thought it was worth investigating the concept and attempt to implement a suitable solution.

So with this is mind I thought I would hijack the new Becky Naylor website to try this out. With recent redesigns of Dave’s site late last year and the Bronco site more recently Becky was looking for a refresh to her site. So with some spare time between client work I tested out how to implement the media queries correctly and then began designing the new website, which is now live.

As a personal website the site of course has to suit Becky and I really hope it does, it keeps aspects of the previous site but updates it, cleans it up and utilises some new technologies so it looks simply awesome in any modern browser.

Let’s hope it last’s her another couple of years.