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My passion for Side Projects Notes

24th August 2010 Be the first to comment... http://sam.brown.tc/438

I have written about why I think Side Projects are massively important and something everyone should be doing regardless of full-time employment or being freelance before on several occasions in How to stay sane when freelancing from home & Why I love being freelance.

Now I’m planning on speaking about it at SXSW Interactive Conference 2011 in Austin, Texas next March. Infact, I am that passionate about it that I am part of two fantastic panel line ups:

Collaboration Nation: How Side-Projects Can Keep You Relevant

panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6793 →

• Trent Walton
• Yaron Schoen
• Noah Stokes
• Phil Coffman and
• moderated by Joshua Brewer

Pet Personal Projects for Fun and Profit

panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/6893 →

• Elliot Jay Stocks
• Andy McMillan and
• Nik Fletcher

If you plan on attending SXSW and are interested in this topic or either of the panels specifically I would be grateful for your vote. Thanks.

Empowering Users with Two-Sided Incentives Notes

7th May 2010 2 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/428

Drew Houston the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox gave a talk at Startup Lessons Learned in San Francisco on the 23rd of April and he spoke about the Customer Development Case Study for Dropbox. I highly recommend you go and watch the video, it’s interesting and inspiring.

What was particularly fascinating to me was their switch in strategy from using paid-for advertising such as AdWords to a referral system that actually worked. Their referral program rewards not only the person who is sending out the link, but also the person who signed up because of clicking on the link. Both parties receive an extra 250MB of space. It’s proved to be such a success for them that it has permanently increased their signups by 60%!

My Dropbox Referral URL looks like this for example:

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI0MTQ5OTk

So often I see spammy looking referrer URLs just like the one above that people link to and 9 times out of 10 I’ll copy the URL and remove the referrer code. The biggest issue I have is the random unfriendliness of these links, my username or email address instead of the garbled noise at the end would probably work out even better for Dropbox!

I think more companies running referral programs need to start empowering their users and rewarding customers the way Dropbox has. Imagine if for example clicking on an Amazon affiliate link to a product not only earned the referrer a little extra coin, but gave you the customer a slight discount as well. Win win.

DIBI Conference - My experience graph Notes

30th April 2010 7 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/426

The inaugural DIBI Conference kicked off on Wednesday 28th of April 2010, hosted at The Sage Gateshead by Newcastle and was a split conference for both designers and developers. Organised by Codeworks and brought to you in no small part by Gavin Elliott, it was the first big web conference this far north since Edinburgh’s infamous Highland Fling’s of 2007 & 2008.

DIBI: Design It, Build It was an interesting concept bringing both developers and designers together in one location for a two-track conference that you could freely roam between. I was particularly interested in most of the design side of the conference but hear the development side was just as good.

I am not going to go too in-depth on individual speakers talks, you will be happy to know they will be available to watch online in a few weeks time if you couldn’t make the event or the online broadcast. I have yet to find out how successful that particular option was, hopefully we do soon.

Adii talked about how design should be a key focus of any startup, it was an interesting start to the day and is definitely something I am a firm believer in. Adii managed to answer some tough questions on commoditising great design and personal branding, he handled these well.

Sarah spoke honestly about the principles of iPhone UI design the struggles designers can face and managed to cover a good array of tips in a short amount of time.

Tim blasted through his 2020: A Design Odyssey discussion and emphasised the need for designers to continue evolving else you’ll turn into lazy monkeys. Always interesting to hear Tim speak and the extended Q&A session was a refreshing take that I hope we see at more events soon.

Simon spoke in depth about the theory behind design and how we should be bringing these offline thoughts into our online work. There was a wealth of information in Simon’s talk and some great book recommendations to boot.

Dan presented us with a unique and interesting way to handle usability testing that is so simple and effective. In-browser prototyping and fast iteration during testing sessions looks like it might be a thing of the future.

Andy was last to speak and is always a treat to hear, he spoke about working with the most modern and interesting CSS techniques and designing from the top down with best browsers first. Always inspirational and Andy talks about everything I very firmly believe in.

Some Highlights:

• Pre-party Venue and general good times.
• Gowalla vs Foursquare banter with Tim! ;)
• Location – The Sage was a great conference venue.
• Field Notes on Entry, Red Bull’s at the Afternoon Break.
• All of the Design side Speakers.
• Catching up with friends and new faces.

Lowlights:

• Lunch – I can’t imagine cooking for 325 people is easy.
• Sponsored Talks – Always a Catch 22.
• After Party – More on this below.

The After Parties at all web conferences suffer from the same problems, a small and crowded venue, too dark and always with music that is way too loud. It’s been an inherent problem for me across the board, FOWD, dConstruct, Build & now DIBI. I love a party as much as the next person but after a super successful event I want to then be able to talk with people and not have to yell in their ears. Hopefully better locations can be sought after at future events.

To wrap up, DIBI was a super successful and very enjoyable event from start to finish. Gavin and the Codeworks team really nailed their first conference and I can say without any hesitation that this will very likely be a conference worth attending again next year.

Web designers who can't code, need to read this book Notes

3rd March 2010 4 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/419

Upon returning from my month long vacation down-under I arrived home to see that the ‘should designers be able to code’ debate had reared its head once again, there has been plenty said about that already and it is certainly an interesting discussion.

HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions – A Web Standardistas’ Approach →

This book by Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson is the book to read if you are wanting to learn how to write standards-compliant XHTML and CSS the right way. I have been fortunate enough to meet both Chris & Nic on several occasions, have had lengthy discussions with them about how web standards should be taught and also managed to sneak into their workshop at Build Conference. These guys are teaching the right stuff the right way.

Occasionally I am approached by designers looking for someone to write the markup and CSS for their designs and it is always easy to tell who knows how to design for the web and who does not. This is the book I will be recommending from now on, it covers all the fundamentals of web standards today in one neat package that I would thoroughly recommend to anyone looking to learn. Check out the Web Standardistas.

Bulletproof Rounded Corners with Border Radius Notes

22nd December 2009 http://sam.brown.tc/412

I was rather pleased to see that not only does the latest version of Opera (the 10.5 pre-alpha) support border-radius but they made the smart move and didn’t prefix it with a vendor specific property -o- like Gecko (-moz-) and Webkit (-webkit-) do.

If you have not already been writing your border-radius statements with progressive enhancement in mind, now is most definitely the time to do it:

1. .box {
2. -khtml-border-radius: 5px;
3. -moz-border-radius: 5px;
4. -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
5. border-radius: 5px;
6. }
7. Download this code: /code/border-radius.txt

The latest Opera pre-alpha includes a whole host of new properties from the W3C’s CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders spec including background-clip, background-origin, border-radius, Multiple background images, background-attachment, box-shadow & border-image. This version also includes the ability to add CSS3 transitions and 2D transforms for richer user interfaces.

My delighters.css stylesheet now includes the Opera specific transitions and animations. Thumbs up to Opera.

Voice morphing for your iPhone! Notes

19th November 2009 3 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/406

I’ve just had probably the most fun and hysterical 15 minutes of my life talking to my iPhone.

Voices app was created in part by one of my clients Oliver Cameron who hired me to help redesign and launch the new Taptivate site and blog, coinciding with the release of their latest product in conjunction with taptaptap, Voice morphing for your iPhone!

Ever wish you could change your voice to something more fun? Well, now you can with Voices! Just say something silly into your iPhone or capture a friend saying something particularly embarrassing. Then make it sound even more ridiculous with your choice of over a dozen different voices. You’ll sound hilarious as a squeaky chipmunk, a futuristic cyborg, and a super-slow turtle with Voices.

It’s not just the funny voice recordings that I love about this application it’s the interface, it’s a true beauty worked on by the amazingly talented Marcelo Marfil and David Lanham.

Definitely worth checking out and don’t forget to have a look at the new Taptivate site! :)

Build Conference - My experience graph Notes

8th November 2009 11 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/404

November 5th was spent at Build Conference hosted in Belfast at the Waterfront Studio created by a one-man epic event making machine Andy (Good) McMillan. Andy has been organising many events for the web community, but Build was his biggest undertaking and he absolutely over-delivered in every aspect – this was especially evident when he got a standing ovation at the end of the conference day.

Building a better web is absolutely what I took away from the event, each of the six speakers were engaging and informative and the day continued to get better and better, my experience graph represents what I feel I took away from each of the fantastic presentations.

Build was more than just a conference as there were a host of fringe events from an Objectified screening and an evening with Airside to a Flickr meetup and plenty of social outings for dinner and drinks.

Design by Front have written a great Build Conference Recap which describes each of the individual presentations during the day, Build was featured on Wired, BBC and was even given a unique Gowalla badge.

I spoke to so many awesome people in Belfast including: Andy McMillan Tim Van Damme Eric Meyer Andy Budd David Parsons Jason Cale Mark Boulton Chris & Nic – The Standardistas Inayaili de León Jack Osborne Maykel Loomans Si Jobling Trevor Morris Ryan Sims Wilson Miner Eamonn Murphy Sean Delaney Paddy Donnelly Lee Munroe & Nik Fletcher to name but a few.

Other highlights included:

• Guinness. Enough said.
• Sneaking into the Standardistas workshop in the afternoon with Andy McMillan.
• Tim doing a fantastic Steve Ballmer impression to kick off the day.
• Getting called a jackass by Tim during his presentation.
• Getting a fake moustache from David Parsons for Movember. Cheeky bastard.
• Gowalla spot creation racing.
• Brief Trip around the Ulster Museum.
• Getting delayed by 2 hours on the way home. Oh wait, not a highlight.

I thouroughly enjoyed Build Conference though, I took so much away from the day itself and the many discussions I had with some really great people who are so excited about this industry we are in. Andy put on hands-down the best web event I have attended and others such as FOWD and @media will really have to sit up and take notice as there is a big new player in town. I’m looking forward to the 2010 event already, you should be too.

Additional Reading:

• #buildconf – Web Designer Notebook
• Built – Web Standardistas

The New Posh CSS Team Notes

21st October 2009 4 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/403

I created Posh CSS 2 years ago as a link list of sorts for all things CSS related, since then I have posted over 375 links and the site has amassed a good following. That said, of late I have been struggling to manage the site, keeping it up-to-date with new and fresh content was increasingly becoming a challenge.

Last week I put out a request for help and was overwhelmed by the response, I managed to hand pick a great small team to help me move the site forward: @markdotto, @patdryburgh, @kevinholesh, @rosschapman and @levifig, all great guys.

So look out for new and inspiring links from them, or you could submit your own. I really look forward to seeing what happens with the site in the near future and would love to hear how you think it can be improved?

FOWD Tour Glasgow - My experience graph Notes

15th September 2009 12 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/399

September 14th was the third leg of the FOWD Tour in Glasgow Scotland, the tour events are a great way to meet up with other local webbies in your area and include some brilliant speakers alongside some local talent. Another well coordinated event by @loulou200.

The day as a whole was generally very good, the morning tutorial sessions laboured on a bit but @drewm did a fantastic job of simplifying why and how to use Microformats something I’ve been keen to start using properly while the Silverlight and Adobe Air presentations simply didn’t interest me.

The afternoon talks were a real treat though, Patrick Lauke from Opera did a great job of defending keyboard navigation and implored us to consider people who aren’t using a mouse; Drew McLellan’s presentation on Cost Effective Web Development was top notch and followed up by the very inspiring local speaker Colin Hewitt who spoke about Design, Release, Iterate: The Importance of Acting on Feedback – something I took a lot away from. Last up was Bruce Lawson from Opera who albeit tight on time had a good overview of HTML5 where it’s going and how we can use it now.

The only real disappointment of the day was the lack of discussions on proper design related topics – hopefully when the FOWD Tour returns that can be rectified.

As usual I met a bunch of super people including @ricknunn, @rockers_delight, @roanlavery, @rougebert, @sneeu, @colinhewitt, @jackosborne, @fusedreality, @synapticmishap – and like Russell Davies at dConstruct, Matt Gifford realised the true way to a geeks heart audience participation is Kinder Eggs!

dConstruct 2009 - My experience graph Notes

7th September 2009 14 Comments http://sam.brown.tc/397

September 4th saw me attending my second dConstruct conference hosted by the awesome guys and gals of Clearleft, instead of writing and raving about how much I enjoyed the conference I thought this little info graphic would sum up the conference day best:

As always Brighton was full of like-minded web geeks, some of the most inspiring and engaging folks around, I would genuinely recommend the dConstruct experience - both pre and post conference - it is a three day event that is a must do every year.

Just some of the fantastic people I spoke to over the course: @andybudd, @aral & @stephalicious - @roanlavery, @cole007, @relativesanity, & @roryf from Edinburgh - @keirwhitaker & @joleeen from Carsonified - @chriscolhoun, @friedcell, @drbparsons, @deanjanssen, @miekd, & @czillgens - @nikf, @dannygreg & @ac94 from Realmac Software - @marcroberts & @bbodien from Neutron Creations and of course my conference going buddies @elliotjaystocks, @maxvoltar, @sazzy and our newest recruit who barely survived the initiation process (a half hour grilling by a crazed conf goer) @goodonpaper who is running the fantastic Build Conference in Belfast, November 5 - definitely check that out!