Blog:

We are only two weeks away from Future of Web Design New York which takes place on the 3rd-4th November. The whole Carsonified team are working hard to bring you another great show this year.

Our workshops have proven to be more popular than ever this year and have virtually sold out. However, there are still some conference tickets available with lots on offer throughout the day, including sessions from Ryan Singer (37Signals), Daniel Burka and Joe Stump (digg.com) and a series of inspirational talks from artist Hillman Curtis and Nick La (webdesignerwall).

Our very own super-talented Carsonified designer Mike Kus will be holding a Photoshop workshop at FOWD, along with doing a short presentation on ‘Whatever happened to the Art in Design?’ So in the lead up to the conference i asked Mike if he had two tips for making your design look handmade. Here are his thoughts.

1: Always carry a small digital camera with you wherever you go and keep an eye out for nice textures. You might find them on and old wall, a skip or a bit of rusty metal. These are great for importing into Photoshop and using a background textures or to overlay on an object in your design to give it that handmade/old look.

2: Try and sketch elements of your design i.e. the navigation or the header or whatever you want really. Scan them in and use your hand drawn sketches as part of your design.

Dan Mall (Happycog) will also be joining us at FOWD to discuss ‘The Experience Layer: Using Flash, JavaScript and other technologies to engage users’.

Dan spilled the beans on his talk, here’s what he said.In cognitive psychologist Don Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things, he tells a story where a friend of his was trapped between two sets of glass doors at a post office because he didn’t know how to operate them. Doors are such an essential part of our everyday lives that they should be intuitive to use. Norman even elaborates on how simple they should be:

“…some doors have signs on them: pull, push, slide, lift, right bell, insert card, type password, smile, rotate, bow, dance, or, perhaps, just ask. Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to come with an instruction manual—even a one-word manual—then it is a failure, poorly designed” (87).

It sounds like common sense, but we do the same thing when designing for the web. Haven’t we all skipped over a button because it didn’t look like one? Or maybe just the opposite: everything on the page fights for attention, and you’re overwheled as to what to do? How often do we see a button with the text “Click here”?

That’s exactly what my talk, “The Experience Layer”, and my workshop, “Magnetic Interactivity”, will focus on: creating interfaces that people know how to use based on their expectations, instead of learn how to use through blind stabs. I’ll also be showing how to make that usable design a beautiful one by focusing on very basic design techniques like typography, motion, and depth. Hope to see you there!

Join us in NYC – register over at the Future of Web Design site.