Let me try and set the mood for you… 300+ designers and developers, 1 pretty swish venue in central London, a bunch of awesome speakers talking about hot subjects like HTML5 and CSS3, iPhones everywhere (as well as the odd iPad) and me… sporting a rather old Nokia which takes at least 10 minutes to connect to the internet to post a tweet, by which time I’ve forgotten what I was actually going to tweet about. Still, at least I had my trusty MacBook with me.

I’ve been wanting to attend a Carsonified event for quite some time, so sitting there waiting for it to begin, I actually felt quite excited – like I was sitting at one of Apple’s keynotes.

Brendan Dawes (Magnetic North) kicked things off with a rather inspirational talk about his creative ethos behind a lot of his work, which reminded me of myself in a way – just by stating that all he’s ever wanted to do was create things. Listening to him speak reminded me of my time at University where we were encouraged to do, pretty much, whatever we wanted.

CSS3 is a subject that many developers are talking about right now, and it’s also something we’ve been trying out here at vzaar. Dan Cederholm, founder of SimpleBits, spoke confidently about progressive enhancement by designing for what is now and letting the rest catch up in time. So what if IE doesn’t support the whole “rounded corners”, we all know that Firefox will display my 10px radius just fine.

We’ve got some pretty exciting news coming out of vzaar towers soon, regarding an app for your iPhone – that’s all I’m going to say! Attending Sarah Parmenter’s talk about tips for iPhone interface design was very useful – a lot of which, we came across ourselves during our own development work. Sarah, or Sazzy as some of you may know her, pointed out how Apple like you to design, how your app can be rejected, pricing… and so on. Generally an interesting and well structured talk.

Hands up who’s guilty of jumping straight onto photoshop before sketching out design ideas? Raises Hand … oh come on, I bet there’s more of you! Brad Haynes of ParamoreRedd flew all the way from Nashville to give a rather interesting talk on wireframing. Brad Highlighted the importance of wireframing within individual projects and explained how this an essential method to help simplify the page design, which eventually, will give your users a better all round experience.

We’re all aware of HTML5 and the impact it’s going to have on the way we design websites in the next few years, so when Opera’s Bruce Lawson took to the stage with a nothing but a blank file in a code editor, us newbies to HTML5 were in for a treat. Bruce takes us through what’s new, what you don’t need to do and what what we should be looking to do, which, in a nutshell, was begin to code with HTML5 now, as 18 months down the line it’s going to be a requirement for all things web, and, with IE9 on the way and in support of all things 5, why not make the switch now.

So, two full days, hours of talking and mouth watering subjects (to me anyway), The Future of Web Design, hosted by the one and only Carsonified, was a great success. Did I mention that they used our vzaar video player throughout the event? No? Well, they did!

Thanks for reading,

Aaron J Rodgers