Paul Annett

Every summer the Clearleft office buzzes with the excitement in the lead-up to dConstruct, the web design conference we organise here in Brighton. Preparations are well under way for this year’s event, which is on 5th September, with two days of exclusive workshops leading up to it.

For the last few weeks I’ve been designing the new website, which was then lovingly built by Natalie. Being intimately familiar with the brand, I really enjoy designing the dConstruct site each year, but as an in-house project we never have as much time to devote to it as we’d like. The site is normally an evolution of previous years’ designs rather than anything completely new, but this year I took the move to highlight the excellent list of speakers in huge type right there on the homepage. It’s they who ’sell’ the conference, so they really should take pride of place, and the treatment used is quite striking and bold.

For any typophiles reading this, the font for the main speakers list is Alte Haas Grotesk bold, a kind of distressed, slightly weathered-looking Helvetica Neue bold.

One thing I’m particularly fond of with this year’s site, is that we’re encouraging people to mash-up their own photos with the dConstruct buttons. I’ve made this really easy to do, and you don’t even need to open Photoshop! Just insert the web address of one of your own photos into one of the code snippets provided towards the bottom of the buttons page, replacing http://url.to/photo.jpg. Your photo will then slot itself neatly behind the conference info. You can see this in action at the top right of this page, where I’ve used a photo of Toby at the play park.

The theme of the conference this year is ‘Designing the Social Web’, so rather than go the predictable route of giving the site a ’social networking’ feel (think Facebook, Flickr, Edenbee, Last.fm), my idea was to extend the website beyond its boundaries into the social space elsewhere on the web. Our buttons are more socially inclusive, in that people could personalise them with photos of their friends or family, which they perhaps already share on social networking or photo sharing sites. The buttons can then be completely customised fit the design of any site. I can’t wait to see a wide variety of visuals used on dConstruct buttons across the web!

If you do use our code to create your own button design, please add a screenshot of it to the My dConstruct Button group on Flickr!

The conference itself looks like a real treat as usual, and I’m looking forward to it hugely. 600 tickets sold out in 6 hours last year, so if you’re planning on coming make sure you hit the site for your ticket as soon as they go on sale!

Clearleft is creating a desktop application for web designers. We put the holding page live at Silverbackapp.com last week.

There was no fanfare - I just told a few friends to check it out, but the word spread like wildfire and within a day it had received 25,000 visitors!

The response was overwhelming and unexpected - not just from web designers excited to find out more about our application, but also from those eager to find out how the clever pseudo-3D background effect works (this effect is only visible as you resize the browser window).

In response to their requests, Vitamin have now published my tutorial How to recreate Silverback’s Parallax. Go read it! But if you don’t, feel free to join the other people who haven’t read the article either, but are still leaving comments at the end of it.

I’ve never met anybody who sings the praises of O2, the phone network Apple have disappointingly chosen to exclusively offer the iPhone in the UK. Once upon a time I was an O2 customer, but the experience was so bad that not even the iPhone will tempt me back. I was an ‘online’ customer, which meant suffering their awful, error-riddled website, because no in-store representative could even talk to me about my account, and I refused to call their premium-rate customer support number to talk to an incompetent call centre buffoon.

It doesn’t fill me with confidence that even after the iPhone launch has been announced, O2 have such disregard for Apple’s customers that the left-hand navigation on their website is missing when viewed in Apple’s Safari web browser (the browser built-in to the iPhone). If you do get an iPhone in the UK, don’t expect to use it to check your bill online*.

Even more annoyingly, when I filled in their contact form to report this issue, I received the following email:

Thanks for getting in touch.
We’re really excited about the iPhone - for the most up to date information we recommend you visit www.o2.co.uk/iphone or www.apple.com/ukstore
If your query doesn’t relate to the iPhone, please reply to this email and we’ll help you further.

…so, essentially: “Nobody will read your message. If you really want us to read it then try to remember what you typed in our online form, and type it up again in an email.” - thanks O2, how helpful of you.

* I’ve just installed a beta version of Safari 3, and discovered that the problem doesn’t happen. Safari 3 will only be on a very few web developer’s Macs at the moment, so most of the world still sees the broken site - and it wouldn’t even be a hard thing for O2 to fix.