Future of Web Design (FOWD), Glasgow – Part one.

Three of the 360 development team were excited to get the opportunity to head off to the FOWD event held yesterday at The Glasgow Film Theatre. The schedule featured an array of highly regarded Web Evangelists and Developers from the names such as Opera, Microsoft and other well know independent web agencies from around the UK.

The morning sessions were delivered by edgeofmyseat.com developer Drew Mclellan, Microsoft developer Mike Tautly and Fuzzy Orange developer Matt Gifford.

Drew Mclellan on – “Making Your Content Discoverable with Microformats”

Drew’s presentation was based around the practical uses and benefits of Microformats, which are perhaps most easily described as a ‘simple set of data formats that help share common meaning and data that goes beyond standard HTML’ – for example: an address or event information.

The presentation was really well structured and provided an interesting, practical insight into the value of how and why microformats should be used in the process of marking up web pages.

You can read more about microformats from microformats.org or visit Drew Mclellan’s blog for musings on a wide range of things Web.

Mike Tautly on – “Silverlight and Expression Blend”

Mike’s presentation was again interesting and one which gave us some background and usage examples with the Microsoft alternative for delivering RIA for the Web. Platform and Browser independent Silverlight is a plugin which builds on the Microsoft .NET framework.

As a designer often looking at how to improve workflow from initial sketches, through prototyping to production artwork; Mike’s outline of Expression Blend provided interesting options to effectively demonstrate ideas to a client using something called a SketchFlow prototype.

It seems Expression Blend is also pretty useful when needing to show interactive page flow and behaviours in prototype format – this can then be built upon to the point of detailed production graphics using Photoshop layered files, with reusable components.

All in all – perhaps one to take a further look at.

For more information on Mike Tautly check out his personal blog

Matt Gifford on – “Getting Started with Adobe Air”

Matt Gifford it seems was drafted in to step in to the breach after a colleague couldn’t make the conference – he did a great job! And along with free Kinder Eggs and T-Shirts Matt gave all us Adobe Air novices an hour long insight in to the possibilities with Air for building and deploying RIA’s.

Some of the most interesting elements of the presentation for me included the integration with web content, applications and data stores (such as mySQL DB’s) in real client situations.

For more information on Matt Gifford check out his blog.