So, FOWD. My first conference! FOWD stands for Future of Web Design. If you are a cool British person like the organizers of this event, you can pull off simply saying “foe’d.” (In Americanese this would be more like “fowl’d,” which is aurally less appealing.)

I think I’m going to write 2 separate blog posts. One now for general impressions/thoughts, one later for specific things that I want to retain. This one’s for general impressions. Here goes:

How to describe the day? It was a dazzling mélange of technological wizardry, smart people, and dorky jokes, with a few controversial manifestoes thrown in there. Contests were held, Twitter was leveraged, and WIFI capacity was systemically overwhelmed. The talks were all very fun to watch. Quite a few of them felt like watching my tech/design RSS feeds come to life in high-definition 4D. Which is exciting. (Later on, I got to meet Jason Santa Maria, whose blog I follow. The resolution of Jason Santa Maria’s face is tech-defyingly high in real life. Actually I think I may have freaked him out a bit by poking his arm to verify that he was real.)

Totally unrelated aside: pretty much all of the talks were funny. Yes, like humor-funny (not “this tastes funny” funny, silly). Especially Joshua Davis — that guy is a comic genius. I repeat my recently Twitted hope that someone caught a video of him dancing. I want that video, and I want that man on my wedding reception dancefloor.

One thing that stuck out to me about today was that this crowd really did not think of web design and graphic design as having all that much in common. Which, now that I am learning more about it, definitely makes a lot of sense. It is easy to conflate these 2 flavors of design because they both are 2-D media involving graphics and text. But below the surface, they really are 2 different forms of media, like radio and TV.

This comes as a revelation to me because my background has always emphasized the similarities between disciplines. In learning the basics of visual design, I was taught that things like hierarchy, balance, composition, line, etc. applied to the page, the screen, and beyond. Heavy emphasis on the “and beyond” part, as SMFA’s boundary-pushing philosophy and Tufts’ emphasis on cross-disciplinary thinking would have me extrapolate these principles to cover everything from fashion design to painting an abstract painting. To some extent, thinking like this has its benefits. In theory, it frees one to think outside the boundaries of a particular discipline. (It even sometimes frees one to take the position of objectively critical 3rd party observer.) But it also tends to gloss over the unique requirements of the individual disciplines.

Only in the past year have I really begun to delve into the current issues surrounding specifically web design, and this conference was my first real exposure to a group of people who lived, breathed, shared, and debated these issues. So certain things came as a bit of a surprise, like the belief that not everything has to look the same in all browsers, and other things seemed obvious but had a whole talk devoted to it. The sentiments about creativity that were expressed in Mike Kus’ “3-D Thinking for Web Designers” are old hat in the graphic design (and even “fine art”) worlds.

So do I like spending a whole day with people whom, just 2 years ago, I would have considered overly circumscribed inside their professions? Actually, yes, I enjoyed it very much. These are clearly passionate people who do good work, and I have always been predisposed to admiring technology and its seemingly magical powers. Most of all, I can’t stay a wandering freebird college graduate forever, existing on the boundaries of professional practice as a cynical half-participant, half-outsider-and-doubter. I like web design, and I think I’m ready to take it on 100%.

(This doesn’t mean I’ll cease my artistic endeavors though. Or stop making fun of CSS “Best Of” galleries. Bcause even Elliot Jay Stocks did so in his presentation, and I think I’ve seen his work in some of them. =D)