I’d better get this up now before it vanishes from my memory.
I gave a talk on Monday night at the loverly Brewery Tap pub for the loverly Front End Suffolk about loverly colour. A vague subject perhaps, but I wanted to give a bit of grounding to people who may not have known some of the rubbish I’ve picked up over the years that I feel are important to design such as RGB & CMY, how adult & children’s websites treat colour differently and some of the ways that colour is used on the web (eg navigation and branding). The slides are available to download as a pdf along with my notes from the talk but they may be a little hard to follow without me jumping around like a jackalope infront of a screen. Weeeeell I thought I was jumping around, I was probably just slouching.
As I said at the talk, for me colour is something that you need to almost imagine rubbing your face against to feel the texture, I dislike all these clean and stark sites around at the moment so unless the site is there purely for information consumption (such as wikipedia) I want to be engaged visually.
I really enjoyed getting the slides ready for the talk and I think I managed to cover most of my points without flustering too badly. Although I’ve given talks in public and run some workshops before, this was the first time I actually didn’t know how the audience would react, as it was a room full of my peers but thankfully a few people came up to me after to ask questions and discuss some of the points that I had made in the talk so I think it went down ok.
The only thing that stuck in my mind was about halfway through, someone asked me a question about colour in children’s sites being influenced by culture. I think thats what it was anyway, I kind of froze mentally, repeated a few things (can’t remember what) and carried on. Whoever that was (i didn’t see) SORRY! I wish I could actually remember some details but I think I was too much in a state of adrenalin rush at the time.
If anyone at the talk has any questions, please feel free to hit me up here or on twitter where I seemed to pick up a number of people right after the talk. Also the page with the downloads on is my third most popular page at the moment according to my Analytics, right after the main site and (for some strange reason) my Mechanicus page…
Days cycled to work: 90
Days driven all the way to work: 0
Days sailed to work: 1
Days driven half way to drop the car off at the garage to have a service: 1
Days tramped along in snow and ice: 2