FoWD 2007 NYC

I spent yesterday at the Javits Center for Carson's Future of Web Design conference. The space was packed with all flavors of web-people: designers, developers, managers, marketers... The color-coded conference passes were a nice touch (green for developer) - it was cool to get a feel for the practical distribution of attendees.

The conference was held in the glass-enclosed, cavernous West-side wing of Javits, a poor choice of venue. The PA system was awful, the room was incredibly noisy (what is this, a boxing match?), and sunlight coming in from the ceiling washed out the projector through-out most of the day.

But environmental complaints aside, the con was great. Josh Davis opened up with an irreverent talk about his path and process, showing some of his more recent work with algorithmic design. Ryan Singer (of 37 Signals) gave a great presentation on web application usability. One of his past FoWD presentations (on web app form design) is available here. Ryan gave a deserved shout-out to E. Tufte, which got me super excited.

UPDATE: Seems that Carson puts conference materials (audio and pdf of presentation) up under the past events section... sweet!