- 8th - 12th November 2010
- Waterfront Studio, Belfast
Workshops
Please Note: Each workshop lasts for a full day. On purchasing a workshop pass, you are reserving a place to attend one workshop, which you will be contacted regarding and asked to choose in advance of the event.
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Finding Stories: Hidden Art of the Interview
If you had five minutes with your customer, what would you ask? Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone has an opinion that can inform your work. But if we don’t ask good questions, we’ll never hear the feedback coming directly from the people we’re designing for. Interviewing is both an art and a science, but often, both are overlooked. Taking time to plan for and ask the smart questions can reveal unseen insights about what we design.
This workshop will give you concrete approaches for asking good questions of your customers. Learn how to plan, how to listen, how to read body language, and practice on the spot to get feedback in real time. Walk away with practical experience you can use the next day to inform the products you’re creating.
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Baking in Enthusiasm
Designers spend a lot of time talking about how to improve our designs in the capacity of informing our audiences, persuading, and increasing conversions. But we give enough headspace to the concept of delighting people with our work.
Our audiences are more apt to be passionate about the things they care about, so the new task is not only creating sites and designs and tools and experiences that are useful, but also ones that people can be enthusiastic about. In this workshop, we'll explore different ways to delight users, including surprises, clarity, and storytelling. It's bigger than an easter egg here and there: it needs to be baked in and fully integrated.
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Designing With Real Fonts
In this workshop, you'll learn where to find, how to use, and why to use real fonts on the web. Tim Brown will explain the concepts and intangibles at play, and offer practical tips to help you make the most of our new typographic opportunities as you plan and design websites. You'll spend all day immersed in typography native to web standards; You'll leave with a comprehensive list of resources and a full experience in web typesetting.
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Paper Is Your Friend
Great designers have one thing in common: their design process is centered on ideas; ideas that are more often than not developed on paper. Paper is your friend!
This workshop, delivered in the tried and tested Standardistas' style®, explores the importance of paper prototyping as a critical, though often overlooked, stage in the design process. With a focus on the importance of pen and paper - old fashioned, rapid prototyping tools - the Standardistas explore a number of questions, including: How do you get ideas in the first place? How do you capture these ideas and turn them into real, tangible design prototypes? (and...) How do you create original designs that aren't mere carbon-copies of the most recent (1% Noise) design trends? Using nothing more than pen and paper (supplied) the Standardistas will show you how to revolutionise your design process, saving you time, money and heartache.
