Headway — The Drag & Drop Theme For WordPress

Developer/Designer Workflow Conference 2010

jcheray | Jun 24, 2010 | 0 comments

This past weekend I got to attend one day of the Developer/Designer Work Flow conference and I have some great bites of information that I took away from that day.

The way it worked was there were three conference rooms that were for developer talks, designer talks and hybrid talks. A hybrid from what I understand is the melding of the two disciplines, web site development and design. The day started out with everyone attending the keynote presented by Doug Winnie of Adobe. There will be another blog post on the information he presented as I tweeted most of what I heard and will have to print my tweets out with regard to that. Then, I sat in on a demonstration of Adobe’s Work Flow Lab brought to conference attendees from James Polanco, Doug Winnie, and Aaron Pederson. Work Flow Lab allows developers and designers to collaborate together to meet clients needs.

Then, I sat in on Pariah Burke’s Print to Web, Changing Your Thinking presentation. I have about seven small notebook pages of notes that I took away from that. I will also be posting another blog post just on what I learned at that session. Next we broke for lunch where I was invited to eat with Diane Low Training Specialist for the state of Missouri Office of State Courts Admin Division of Judicial Department Education. She was a nice woman and friendly.

After lunch I sat in on John Farrar’s talk on The Perfect Prototype where he talked about how sloppy coding can make your design look sloppy. He gave real world examples of how cluttered code strings made design layouts look bad, then showed how neater and cleaner lines of code made them look tidy. He mentioned the use of jquery UI Themes to test how an initial layout will look before you implement the code for a site layout. He also talked about coop2.0 an open source code library that does the same thing regular html code does but makes the code look cleaner.

Lisa Heselton presented during the 2:30 to 3:20 session. She talked about how to use Twitter and Facebook to market your creative services. Ok again a whole other post as I couldn’t shut up during this one lol.

Last but certainly not least is Tom Green. His presentation was awesome. He was Shakin’ the Toolbox for an hour showing how using the various tools within the creative suite. He demonstrated how to build an interactive magazine spread using InDesign, Illustrator, Flash Pro, Fireworks, Soundbooth, and Adobe Media Encoder. He uses Fireworks to batch process image resizing. He shared how to create video from flash using Illustrator, Flash Pro, After Effects, and Adobe Media Encoder. His last demonstration was the one that blew me away. He showed us how to make weather using Soundbooth, Fireworks, After Effects and Flash Pro. Using these four programs together he was able to create a thunderstorm rolling in from the distance. with lightening and thunder effects.

The day wrapped up with panels/workshops and I decided to go to the marketing/business panel. That one was chock full of good information and gave me added incentive to really utilize the skills I already have with respect to blogging, social media/social networking. Everything you do for a client with regard to social media and setting up and maintaining their business blog is billable.It is up to you to determine how much and how often. I got to thinking that if someone wants me to maintain their social media presence then I will need a retainer at best.

Each speaker presented information that was timely and useful. And as I said there will be more posts related to what I learned.