Ireland is a small country. The web industry – in my mind – is a small industry within this small country. Proportionally I think we’ve got quite a lot of gongs going for digital media. Off the top of my head here’s the ones I can think of:

• Irish Web Awards
• IIA Net Visionary Awards
• Irish eGovernment Awards
• ICAD Awards
• Digital Media Awards
• Golden Spiders
• IDI Awards

Aside from the recognition by your peers and the nice warm fuzzy feeling that you get from having your work given the thumbs up I’m curious to know if anyone has experienced other benefits as a result of winning or being nominated for an award?

Does it help you to win clients?

Does it raise your profile?

Does it open up new opportunities?

Do you advertise the fact that you have been nominated for/won awards?

I’d love to know what you’ve experienced.

The common man’s games, Paddy Games founding principle is taking silliness very seriously.

Events include Retro Running (i.e. Backwards running), Irish Dancing Hurdles and Mobile Phone throwing.

Fancy free entry to this year’s Electric Picnic in exchange with raising some cash for Temple Street Children’s Hospital? Check out the ‘Tour de Picnic‘ – essentially it’s a 90km charity cycle from Dublin to EP in Stradbally, Co. Laois. Raise €500 and you’re in. Info is available here.

The text shadow is becoming the glossy button effect of old in the web design world at the moment. More and more designers and developers are dabbling in the visual gems that CSS 3 affords despite the fact that CSS 2.1 spec has yet to be signed off. An article on A List Apart today highlights the dangers of ‘forking’ that this adoption of these proposes and offers the solution of a new JavaScript library called eCSStender.

I don’t know how I feel about this. While I agree that forking isn’t ideal I don’t think that loading pages with yet more JS libraries is the acceptable path to take either. What do you think? Will you be using eCSStender? Are you using CSS 2.1 and 3.0 properties yet?

In Cork this weekend? Check out the Street Performance World Championships. Last year was brilliant craic, even as a volunteer. This year is going to be even bigger taking over both Fitzgerald Park AND the Mardyke Sports Grounds. If you can’t make it we’ll be posting all sorts on the blog over the weekend so check it out at spwc.wordpress.com, Facebook and Twitter.

In Dublin for the weekend? Well why not give the Tweasurehunt a go. The last one was a great laugh and great exercise to boot.

Jason Santa Maria on his favourite typefaces.

Bringing psychology to the web design toolkit. Stephen Anderson‘s note cards are available to pre-order now.

Looking for a freelancer of any description? Check out endor.se

Seth Godin enthusiast? Join the masses for the “first ever unofficial official Seth Godin Linchpin worldwide Meetup” in Buskers, Temple Bar on Monday 14th at 7pm. Check in on FourSquare to receive a free drink on arrival.

And some light relief courtesy or Redmum…

Molly Holzschlag –  Progressive CSS3 Design

Quite a start to day 2 with Molly starting off with a call to action for all designers to have more input in the W3C Working Group. She presented a pretty matter-of-fact state of the web and where we are with CSS spec. The spec for CSS 2.1 isn’t finished and browser vendors and developers are already ploughing ahead with using the far from finished CSS 3 properties. It’s a all getting a bit crazy!

Posing the question of whether we should be going with a ‘progressive enhancement’ or ‘graceful degradation’ approach she recommended a ‘bridge building’ approach that somehow traverses the 2. Each project should be assessed individually for what kind of browser support you have to take into account but while you shouldn’t ignore older browsers and the problems they pose you need to get on top of what’s coming down the line.

Simon Collison – What Will Web Design Look Like in 2 Years?

An interesting musing on where the web and the web from a design perspective is headed. From questioning how the design process might change (should we design for mobile first and then desktop?) to the potential problem of the adoption of web fonts leading to widespread inappropriate use of typography on the web. Do designers understand grid systems properly and should they really be using them? How much web design in the next while is going to be purely experimental given the changes that lie ahead for HTML and CSS? His stunningly gorgeous website has more.

Aral Balkan – The Art of Emotional Design: A Story of Pleasure, Joy and Delight

One of my favourite sessions of the whole conference, partly because he spoke a whole lot of sense and partly because of his clear passion for what he does. He presented the question “why do we pay more for one thing over another?” Answer = UX. There’s a world of MP3 players available in the world yet the iPod still outsells them all despite not being one of the cheapest available. People like using them and are willing to spend a bit more for it.

For the second or third time at FOWD design and user experience is likened to our experiences with food. Essentially, to say that something is usable is like saying something is edible. Edible is fine but we want more than just edible. We go to a restaurant for more than edible food so let’s take that slant and apply it to user experience on the web. This idea I love.

And I loved his talk so much I’m going to have to give it some blog space all of it’s own. Seems I’m not the only one who gave him the thumbs up!

Bruce Lawson of Opera – How to build a HTML 5 Website (live demo)

As it says on the tin, a rapid how to for newbies on how to approach building a web page using HTML 5 markup and what the heck it’s all about and why we should care about it. Good overview and some useful tips on handling fallbacks for video formats in particular. Very much looking forward to getting stuck into the book that himself and Remy Sharp are writing on HTML 5 and its more advanced features.

Brett Welch of Adobe – Rethink Your Job (And Earn More Money)

Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting much from a sponsor slot but hats off to Bretty for making some really interesting and valid points about the business side of the design and development process. Some of the main points from his talk:

• Web designers need to think of themselves as web consultants (and consultant isn’t always a bad word!)
• Don’t expect a website to be a success without a strategy
• Set your goals
• Measure the results
• Don’t launch a website and leave it there – try a more iterative approach, agile development works on the web!

John Hicks – Icon Design

John Hicks of Hicksdesign is a well-known graphic, logo and icon designer who has produced some truly gorgeous work for well-know brands such as MailChimp and Opera. After a brisk step through of the history of icons and the concept of icon design he gave us some pointers and suggestions on how to approach the workflow for icon design including:

• Is an icon appropriate in this scenario?
• Choose the right metaphor
  • Realistic
  • Abstract
  • Aribitary/Symbolic
  • Application
  • A logo is not an icon!
• Is there an existing convention?
• Can you base it on familiar objects?
• Avoid too much detail and decoration
• Design on a grid
• If you’re designing more than one icon design them together to maintain context and coherence

Check out his work and his blog here.

Day 1 –  afternoon

The highlight of the afternoon, and indeed the day for many people was the UX Masterclass with Web Standardistas. Despite their 19 hour trek from Belfast thanks to the infamous ashcloud they kicked ass to a packed room. It’s the second time I’ve seen them give a presentation and I’m completely enthralled by their attitude, work and passion for what they do. Their trademarked UX Recipe (which I will have to go into in a post all by itself) will hopefully raise the game for at least everyone who was there.

Allan Haley gave us the low-down on what Fonts.com are doing with their web fonts service. Now I get that he’s a sponsor and we need them to run these kind of events but it was all just a bit too salesy for me. It was nice to get a demo of what you can do with Fonts.com web fonts but I’d like to have seen a more objective talk on web typography taking a look at all the options side by side.

Paul Boag shook things up with his ’5 new skills every designer needs to know’ presentation. He had asked people via Twitter to guess in advance what these might be and got lots of the typical stuff in response – HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, web fonts etc. His response? If you’re not already using them, well, you’re screwed. Amen to that! His recommended toolbelt additions for designers:

1. Marketing
2. Copywriting
3. Contextual Awareness
4. Strategy
5. Psychology

Check the Boagworld blog here for the full gist of his talk. I recommend the Boagworld podcast if you fancy some regular ramblings on all things web. It can be a bit long and chatty for my liking so consider the ‘bitesize’ version that’s available on iTunes too.

Brendan Dawes, Magnetic North – Play. Destroy. Create.

An interesting take on creativity and where to find inspiration for your work. He loves maths and applying it to create new information structures and interfaces. Check out one of his projects, DoodleBuzz.

Dan Cederholm on CSS3

A great practical look at how and where to use CSS3 in current web projects. Check out his experimental project (both in terms of content and code) at css3exp.com/moon.

Remy Sharp, jQuery for Designers

A quick yet accessible overview of jQuery for people who don’t do hard-core code and want to add some visual gloss to their web projects. Some useful bits and pieces too for those of us who’ve been tinkering with jQuery for a while such as the FireQuery plugin for FireBug.

Robin Christopherson on accessibility

A rapid overview on web accessibility at present particularly in a mobile context. Using CAPTCHA? Consider using TextCaptcha instead for greater accessibility for all.

Carsonified introduce membership.thinkvitamin.com

A subscription service of varying price levels offering web designers and developers video tutorials, online conferences and reduced price tickets to FOWA, FOWD etc. Launches next month, 50% off for FOWD attendees if they sign up during the conference. See membership.thinkvitamin.com for more.

Ballyvaughan beach in February

The destinations map on the Dublin Airport Destination Map annoyed me the other day when trying to look up routes to Germany. A lovely big interactive map squished into matchbox, effectively. So I pulled out the iFrame link and here it is in fullscreen glory.

Generate your CSS3 border-radius goodness with preview of results and with ease using this handy tool.

Weedle beta kicking off this afternoon.

My native Ballyvaughan and surrounding area of North Clare get featured on No Frontiers this Sunday evening. Curious to see how the place comes across during the hibernation season when pretty much EVERYTHING is closed.

Vimeo Plus Stats for Vimeo Plus users. Looks great, looking forward to a play.

It’s been a really pleasant experience thus far. Having only one (reliable) browser to test in and being able to take advantage of some lovely CSS3 properties has been just fabulous.

Better yet there’s loads of documentation out there, mostly supplied by the good folk at Apple.

Below is a list of some of stuff you might find useful for similar projects:

• Safari Reference Library: iPhone Human Interface Guidelines for Web Application Development
• Safari CSS Reference
• CSS3.info – CSS3 preview
• Safari on iPhone User Experience Coding How-To’s
• Safari Reference Library: Creating Compatible Web Content
• Safari Visual Effects Guide (PDF)

Happy coding!

I’m happy to say that any cynicism or dread felt at the idea of the Golden Spiders spawning babies has been quelled. Well, for the moment anyway. Here’s the skinny:

What are the Junior Spiders?

“The eircom Junior Spider Awards were established as a parallel programme for students at primary and post primary school level. The idea was originated by Business & Finance, working closely with main sponsors eircom.” [via]

The important stuff

• It’s free to enter
• The closing date is November 6th 2009
• The shortlist will be announced on 30th November and winners announced on December 18th

Prizes

• Primary students
  • 1st place winner receives a trophy and €200
  • 2nd place winner receives a winners’ certificate
  • 3rd place winner receives a winners’ certificate
  • All entries receive a participants’ certificate including teachers
• Post-primary students
  • 1st place winner receives a trophy and €300
  • 2nd place winner receives a winners’ certificate
  • 3rd place winner receives a winners’ certificate
  • All entries receive a participants’ certificate including teachers

Categories

• Primary & Post-primary schools:

1. Best concept (website/application )
2. Best Online content (including websites, blog, podcasts, Social Networks )
3. Best website design & functionality
4. Best educational website
5. An suíomh no spas ar an idirlíon is fearr as Gaeilge

• Post Primary students only:

1. Best web application
2. Watch your space award

• Overall (both Primary and Post-primary):

1. Best teacher contribution (web/internet)
2. Grand prix

You can find out who the judges are, what the judging criteria are and everything else under the sun about the Junior Web Awards at juniorspiders.ie. They’re also on Twitter as @juniorspiders.

• Virginia Agricultural Show (Cavan) is 68 years old, has over 400 judging classes and €50,000 prize money up for grabs
• Damien has a chocolate allergy but can handle the lower cocoa value stuff
• You can do the local lotto for many GAA clubs in Ireland online at locallotto.ie
• Microsoft will support IE6 until 2014
• Gmail has been putting a lot of genuine emails into the Spam folder lately and it is rather annoying