Ace Things: Lost Worlds' Fair

To celebrate – if that’s the right word, hopefully it will be – the beta release of IE9…

One of my favourite web designers, Brooklyn’s Jason Santa Maria put together a pretty little thing called Lost Worlds’ Fairs, celebrating the latest web-design technologies and giving us all a whiff of WOFF.

Jason Santa Maria worked with other super-talented folk such as Frank Chimero, Naz Hamid, Trent Walton and Dave Rupert in bringing together 3 designs based around typography, as well as the latest in CSS3, JavaScript and HTML5.

In his own words:

We decided to make designs around a grand series of events, the World’s Fairs. We initially started playing with ideas for the cities we all lived in, but ended up going with locales and fairs that never were. We wanted to feel unrestricted by the design and history that already existed from specific fairs and instead find ways to key in on design aspects of a particular time period.

Despite the design and development clearly being orientated for Mac viewers (not their fault, type rendering on Macs is usually 100% better than on PC browsers) the results are some of the most impressive non-Flash, non-Javascript heavy few pages I’ve ever seen on the web. Super ace stuff.

Check it out here:

http://lostworldsfairs.com/

AlbinoMosquito were looking for a website that would display the quality and beauty of their visual solutions, i.e. music videos / live visuals.

The website most the most of the WordPress Custom Fields to allow for video linkage as well as meta information such as gallery images.

Techniques such as jQuery and CSS3 were used heavily to give the website a more ‘cutting edge’ feel.

Speak The Web

Hello campers. I went to the Speak The Web conference in Manchester’s Noho (that’s in Northern Quarter, yeah?) this week, to hear internet luminaries wax lyrical about their prospective fields and the future of net-land.

The event included talks from Ben Childs (mobile web development chap), Dom Hodgson (SEO and all-around coding geekery), Remy Sharp (HTML 5 know-it-all) and the self-styled rockstar of CSS Andy Clarke (or ‘Clarky’ as he kept referring to himself).

It was an emotional affair, particularly with Remy Sharp’s explanation of HTML 5’s current limitations – he was showing examples of flash-less video content using only html, as well as showing how HTML5 will be able to communicate directly with MySQL without the dependence of PHP – if I’ve got that correct. Either way, it blew my tiny mind somewhat.

Even more rousing was Andy Clarke’s ‘Hardboiled’ or ‘no-compromise’ proponent of CSS3 usage, where he advocated graceful degradation of the more advanced CSS3 techniques – basically, he wants us all to build websites using all the latest CSS3 techniques available to us, and then work backwards to try and fix up horribly old and massively annoying browsers such as IE6. This was controversial in that most web designers have been under the mantra that ‘thou shalt make websites that work across all browsers and look and function the same’ – Andy Clarke simply stated that this was rubbish and if we don’t take advantage of the latest CSS3 offerings as well as the facilitations of the latest browsers, there may never be need for people stuck with IE6 to upgrade. Other than the frequent security risks that have been in the news a lot of late.

His talk drew the most criticism, but was thusly the most entertaining. There was also quite a bit of facial hair in the room. And much coding-knowledge-pugilism.

If you get chance, you should go along to another Speak The Web event as they’re focusing on the web-talent of North England, rather than doing what most of the other conferences do and just focus on London and Brighton, which makes a nice change.

View the website here: http://speaktheweb.org