The Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco officially kicked off yesterday, with some workshops. The first impression I got when I walked into the conference venue was how large the event is – a perception confirmed when I bumped into Anil Dash later that day, who remarked that it was the biggest Web conference he’d been to since the late nineties. The event is being held in the spacious Moscone West Center and there is no shortage of attendees to fill up the spaces.
This morning I moderated a panel called The New Hybrid Designer, with Kelly Goto, Chris Messina and Jeremy Keith (unfortunately Emily Chang was sick and couldn’t make it).
From left to right: Jeremy, me, Kelly, Chris (who took the photo)
The panel went well and gave me a chance to re-visit an article Joshua Porter and I co-wrote in May 2005 for Digital Web Magazine. The article was called Web 2.0 for Designers and it summarized the trends that Josh and I saw happening at that time – just before the web 2.0 hype got going… well put it this way, we wrote it before Techcrunch even existed! ;-). Here were the 6 main themes of the article:
- Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
- Providing Web services (moving away from place)
- Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
- Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
- Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
- Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)
Since that time, the world of ‘hybrid design’ has evolved further. It was summarized nicely by this image Chris put together:
The talk was more aimed at designers and developers, so my role was mainly to make observations about high level trends and the panelists would drill down into more practical details. I hope it was an enjoyable session for the audience, about half of whom were designers and the other half developers (with a healthy mix of ‘hybrids’ of course!).
Well, I am off to roam the hallways, check out some more sessions, and also venture into the land of the booths (where startups are showing their wares).
