I did my OSCMS talk Designer eye for the geek guy today. My main plan for this talk was to blast as much basic graphical design concepts into people's heads as possible and sort of teach some of the principles, vocabulary and methods that a lot of designers take for granted.
The response was great as far as I could tell. I also got the inevitable "How do we deal with Internet Explorer?" spin-off discussion in the questions round at the end ;).
Steven Peck recorded my session on video.
You can download the slides as PDF (36.5 MB), though because of all the graphics it's quite large. I think some sections will not be clear at all without the spoken explanation to go along with it though.
nice one!
I really enjoyed this presentation. Despite covering a wide variety of topics, you went into enough depth for each to make it meaningful. I think the part about typography was especially interesting and it's definitely a shame that for the most part, we are stuck with probably less than a dozen or so supported web fonts to choose from.
-Farsheed
All the theory, just need 4 years of practice
In 2 hours you basically gave everyone the useful theory parts of 4 years of theory classes they'd get majoring in graphic design at you average state university. Now all they need is 4 years of doing fake projects and peer critiques and they'd be on par with recent graduates. I'm not sure you can get that from a 2 hour OSCMS presentation.
Do you mind of mash-up a few of your slides in my Developer Eye for the Designer Guy/Gal presentation today?
Kevin: Practice
Of course I don't expect that a room full of designers would walk out. That's why I explicitly dealt with some tools, the importance of practice and examples.
The same goes for coding... you could teach people all the important principles of good code, yet until they write their own programs, they'll never be programmers.
A Usefull tool
I meant to mention this during your talk yesterday, but I couldn't remember the link and my laptop's battery was dead (sods law!)
There is a REALLY useful colour (yes, thats how you spell colour ;-) hehe) picker here:
http://www.colorjack.com/sphere/
I know what you said about colour pickers and how there isn't really a "formula" to it - however I personally have found that at least this one gives you a really nice place to start.
Plus - they have a OSX Widget :-)
As a designer - could you share your opinion on my site design (either via email or these comment). I'd really appreciate your thoughts as I've always been impressed by your design and - at heart - i'm a geek not a designer :-) My site is www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk
nicely done
Even without your verbal presentation, the slides are quite useful. A great beginner's guide to the world of design. There's so much to consider its hard to know where to start. I definitely picked up some new stuff as well. Although with Web Typography, I'm still curious as to why we're holding on to some of the rules with print typography - mainly that consistent line height business. Have you had a chance to glance over the Web Typography Sucks presentation from this year's SXSWi? Touches on that same principles.
Great presentation - jquery
Really awesome presentaton at OSCMS 2007.
Will check back for snippets and other goodies.
Nice design on blog page too.
The deck is almost 500
The deck is almost 500 slides, with all the transitions ! Is there a chance to get a shrunken version with or without the effects ???
Stepless version
I generated a version without all the different steps, but it was a) not significantly smaller (33 vs 36 MB) and b) contained several very useless slides that weren't clear because some elements were missing.
The original presentation still had about 150 original slides in Keynote anyway though.
If you really, really want the other version, send me a ping in e-mail. The Internet connection at my current location is way too slow for uploading at the moment.
Thanks
Thanks for the presentation Steven, I'm looking forward to seeing more well designed Drupal sites in the community.
Chris
Inspiring Without Being Intimidating
Steven, the slides were really great. The transitions were useful, so that I could ponder on a bullet point before moving to the next one. Lots of threads in the presentation for me to follow up on. I definitely don't have an eye for design, much less know how to design something, but the slides at the end, especially the one that says "Make many bad designs first", were inspiring without being intimidating.
Looking forward to the video!
Will the video/audio of the presentation be available?
I really liked the presentation but guessing at what you said as these slides went along is frustrating. The main points are clear but I'm sure most of the nuance and specificity is missing. Any chance of getting the audio or video recording up soon? While video would be great, even just audio would be a real advantage.
Thanks,
Susan
Google Video
Steven Peck's (not really edited) video was put on Google Video for now:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4892104132825691414&hl=en
Ignore the 'errs', 'umms' and generally distracted air. I was going on a couple hours of sleep :P. There's also a short part missing around the break half-way.
I haven't found the time to get into video editing myself yet to turn it into a real screencast, but this should be helpful at least.
Thanks for video - and post to tell me where to find it
Thanks for the video and the post that told me where to find it. I am NOT a geek but thought I'd submit my request anyway and basically didn't expect an answer. So thanks for answering me in a way that I would find it when I returned to the site. I'm impressed.
great presentation
I just watched the video on Google Video along with the slides in pdf format and found the presentation very interesting.
I really like your presentation style with clear explanation and a bit of humor :)
I'm not really a designer but as a web developer i am ofcourse faced with it a lot, and this presentation really enlightened me on a few topics and ways of thinking.
Thanks a lot!
Sven
Sharing the slides
Steven, hope you consider sharing your slides using http://slideshare.net. It'll make reading easier than PDF. Thanks for some amazing content!