Building links

In just over a week, I’ll be giving the opening talk at the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I’ll be giving a workshop the day before too. There are still tickets available for both.

I have to admit, I’m kind of nervous about this talk. It’s been quite a while since the last New Adventures, but it’s always had quite the cachet. I think I went to most of them. It’s quite strange���and quite an honour���to shift gears from attendee to speaker.

The talk I’ll be giving is called Building. That might be a noun. That might be a verb. You decide:

Every new medium looks to what has come before for guidance. Web design has taken cues from centuries of typography and graphic design. Web development has borrowed metaphors and ideas from the world of architecture. Let’s take a tour of some of the most influential ideas from architecture that have crossed over into the web, from pattern languages to responsive design. Together we’ll uncover how to build resilient, performant, accessible and beautiful structures that work with the grain of the materials of the web.

This talk builds upon the talk I gave at last year’s An Event Apart called The Way Of The Web. It also reflects many of the ideas in Resilient Web Design. When I gave a run-through of the talk at Clearleft last week, Andy called it a “greatest hits.” For a while there, I was feeling guilty about retreading some ground I’ve covered in previous talks and writings. Then I realised it was pretty arrogant of me to think that anyone in the audience would be familiar with any of it.

Besides, I’ve got a whole new avenue of exploration in this talk. It’s about language and metaphor���how we talk about what we do on the web. I’ve just finished giving another run-through at the Clearleft studio and I’m feeling pretty good about it. That’s good, because I find that giving a talk in a small room to a handful of colleagues is way more stressful than giving a talk to hundreds of people at a conference.

Just as I put together links related to last year’s talk, I figured I’d provide some hyperlinks for anyone interested in the topics raised in this new talk…

Books


Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
Creating Killer Websites by David Siegel
Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef M��ller-Brockman
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School by Matthew Frederick
Architectural Intelligence by Molly Wright Steenson
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein with Ingrid King, Shlomo Angel and Max Jacobsen
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand


Articles


A Dao Of Web Design by John Allsopp
Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
Device Agnostic by Trent Walton
The Work I Like by Ethan Marcotte


Audio


Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language on Studio 360
Molly Wright Steenson on Design Notes
Quebec Bridge Collapse on the Brady Heywood Podcast