Mark Wyner‘s presentation on Experience Design As the Sum of Its Parts was fantastic, and we liked his tattoos, too. It’s nice to be in an industry where tattoos are just part of the everyday and not something to be hidden, furtively, like a pvc fetish or a penchant for furries. At our last “day” job, we found ourselves deeply resentful of the fact that we had to keep the tattoos on our ankles covered. Now that we work for ourselves, our intricate Tengwar runes (that’s Elvish, for the less dorky among us) are free to see the light of day, assuming said day is not drenched in rain. And isn’t that what web design is really all about?

Mark Wyner’s presentation had very little to do with tattooing (or being a big dork, although he did compare the internet to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) and more to do with the way design and development can learn to work together to create a more useful and comprehensive whole. Basically it comes down to Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interface Markup and Functionality holding hands and playing nicely together to create sites that are not only pretty, but also functional, easy to maintain and accessible to a wide variety of consumers.

We’ve been devouring information about accessibility and semantic markup lately, so this session was particularly topical. We’ll link to the slides once we upload the pictures from the “good” camera and can decipher the URL on his closing slide. Seriously, you’d think that all those notes would have included that one vital bit of info, but you’d be wrong.

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design, mark wyner, experience design

WebVisions, here we come! We’re ridiculously excited to be spending the next couple of days hanging out with the best of the web. If you’re in the Portland, OR area, head on over!

Technorati Tags:
webvisions, portland, web design

Well, Webvisions 2006 has come and gone.

For CouldBe it was an eye opening experience. Our creative juices are now overflowing with ideas sparked by the seminars.

You can see some of our pics from the event here.

So Far today:

Bulletproof web design: Dan Cederholm
Freakin’ Sweet. I felt completely excited and full of ideas of stuff to try and how this all fits in with the work that CouldBe is doing and want to be doing more of.
Improving Front-End Architecture: Garrett Dimon
A lot of interesting, if not exciting information.
Unleashing CSS (How I learned to stop worrying and love IE7): Christopher Schmitt
Some useful information, although unfortunately the speaker was somewhat difficult to understand.
Beyond Just Content (Websites as interactive applications): William Rogers
Unfortunately, this seemed to be 1 part advertisement for the speaker’s company and 1 part long, somewhat boring history of the internet. Literally starting with electromagnets and telegraphs before painstakingly meandering his way up to day.

Scaling For Your First 100K Users: Matt Mullenweg
Just about to start…it entertains me that I’m about the hear the founder of WordPress speak while blogging about it on a WordPress install.

Well, I got here bright and early, picked up my badge and away we go.

Should be a full day.

My intended Schedule for today:
9:30 – CSS Bootcamp – David McFarland
2:00 – Rapid DOM/AJAX Development – Jonathan Snook
3:15 – Design Patterns For the Web – Bill Scott and James Reffell
4:30 – The AJAX Experience – Dave Johnson

If you have never been to the Oregon Convention Center, you should really find an excuse. It’s one of the most architecturally interesting spaces you are likely to find in Portand.
p.s. Thank you webvisions for providing the free wireless.

CouldBe Studios will be attending webvisions! Well, half of us, anyway. We’re ridiculously excited about getting our geek on with some of the biggest names on the internet: Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, Intel. Plus, we’ll get to fanperson the superstars like Flock and WordPress, as well as rubbing elbows with local businesses. Good stuff.