In fact on the day of the conference itself I was struggling to breathe properly and ended up leaving early, missing the final two speakers entirely. This wasn’t a massive issue for me at the time as I’d seen Andy Clarke speak plenty of times before and had seen Brendan Dawes at last year’s Future of Web Design in London. Plenty of other attendees cite Andy and Brendan as the highlights of the day but I came away with my own highlights from a stack of great speakers.

For me, Greg Wood’s talk on Art Direction and Editorial Design on the web was the one that fascinated me the most. Greg had undertaken a small research study to discover how people engaged with his content in the standard blog template format versus an art directed version with graphics and textual treatments.

His presentation was all about his findings and his inspiration. I wish I could link to the slides from his talk but I’ve yet to locate them. If you visit his website you’ll get the general idea though as he art directs all the articles too. I remember Jason Santa-Maria introducing the approach at @media a few years back. If you’ve got the talent and time to put this kind of effort into your articles then it certainly seems to pay off. I’d not seen Greg speak before, I’m not sure he’s done much of it, but he was entertaining and told a good story.

All the other presentations were of a very high standard. I think I took away at least one useful point from each of them. Colly put on great event that felt intimate, friendly and somehow quite unique and set apart from the the more established industry gigs. It has a little of the vibe of the first, single track @media from 2005. The attention to detail was second to none. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to organise an event of such scale and produce a well considered accompanying newspaper to take away.

Travelling up to Nottingham made a nice change from London. I managed to meet a few new people and catch up with some old faces. I just wish I was in better health at the time so I could make the best out of the day. I got the impression that this wasn’t going to be the first and last such event though. Maybe I’ll see you there next year?

All three demonstrate the kind of song writing craftsmanship that few other bands can achieve this far into their career. In the case of Iron Maiden, fourteen studio albums in, the band members all now in their 50s, there is no sign of them reaching for their pipe and slippers. I’ve been a fan of Maiden since I was just a boy. People told me I’d grow out of them but it’s yet to happen! I guess I’ve grown with them. Their musical style has evolved over the years into less metal, more prog-rock epics. Still, the likes of The alchemist demonstrate that they can still knock out short, galloping numbers they used to. For me, the highlights of their latest album are Isle of Avalon, Coming home and The talisman.

Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy), who always seemed a little old for his years, is now writing some of his most melodic and diverse material. It’s been a long time since he last had a hit single. Not that this seems to bother him. In fact, being out of the spotlight is probably far more suitable. He now entertains crowds in intimate settings via his one-man show allowing for plenty of room for spontaneous renditions from his back catalogue accompanied by his trademark self-depreciating wit. Hearing the new tracks live was a real treat. It’s hard to pick out any stand out tracks as they are all really strong but if I had to choose I’d probably say that When a man cries and Down in the street below were a cut above the rest.

Belle and Sebastian take much longer gaps between delivering fresh material these days. Yet when it finally appears you really get the impression that they have slaved over every last nuance and detail. I’m quite happy for their latest long player to loop over and over as there’s always some little flourish that i’ll have missed on previous hearings. The melodies are so catchy and the sequencing of the entire album from track to track is perfect. Stand out tracks are I want the world to stop with its northern soul feel, Calculating bimbo which has a really nice warming sound to it; and the title track itself which could have been on last year’s side project, God help the girl.

In 2011 I’m anticipating the latest long player from Elbow and hoping that we’ll see some new material from the Super Furry Animals.

Mark illustrates each of his points with a case study from his own vast portfolio and other examples from the web and print. Be it the enormous task of redesigning the Drupal community or the De Standard newspaper websites to the time he spent designing endless tables of printed data in his early career. The book has bags of personality and really does fill a void in my bookcase that has been begging to be filled for some years.

Mark self-published his book and the attention to detail cross the entire process shines through. The enclosed postcards show us that this is the first in a series of five simple steps books and the handwritten compliment slip really added to the whole experience. Even the box it was delivered in showed that ever ounce of the design had been poured over for unending hours. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Buy Five Simple Steps, A practical guide to designing for the web direct from Mark Boulton Design LTD for £29 or get the PDF for £12.

Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life with things like Flash Action Scripting or, in this case, Javascript.

Secondly, I’m a fairly practical kind of bloke who would rather just get something done as a proof of concept and work out how to improve it later. I don’t want to learn a language like PHP or Javascript from the ground-up before I can do something like tab interfaces, resizable boxes and drag and drop widgets. So I never have.

The jQuery User Interface (UI) Library is preceisely the kind of thing that I need in order to rapidly prototype web interfaces. It’s a set of well tested widgets, compatible with all modern browsers (and some old ones).

This book explains in great detail, with full code examples, how to quickly get cracking with every part of the library. This includes tabs, accordions, pop-ups, sliders, date pickers, auto-complete, drag and drop, resizing, selecting, sorting and various animations.

What I most enjoyed about this book was the rapid pace that Wellman moved me through each of the widgets. First he explains the purpose of the widget followed by the default implementation, how to style of ‘skin’ the widget to your own requirements and then onto the more intricate details of chaning how it behaves. This kind of approach is very accessible to me.

As a designer I’m quite interested in making the widgets fit the look and feel of my design. It’s rare that I ever want to use the default style and if it’s not easy to change the chances are I’ll look elsewhere. Each and every jQuery UI widget can be styled to exacting requirments and Wellman is keen to highlight this fact.

I get the feeling I’ll be frequently referring to the chapters on tabs, dialogues, resizing, selecting and sorting the in my day to day work. This is the kind of book you can confidently dip into when you have a specific problem to solve and one that will be a valuable addition to and web design bookshelf.

jQuery UI 1.6 by Dan Wellman is published by Packt Publishing and is £27.99

Read a sample chapter or buy the book direct from Packt Publishing.

Yet javascript opens up a world of exciting behavioural options to us. It enables us to bring our pages to life with all the wizzy and cool stuff that clients love. Things swishing in and out of view, dropping down, sliding, expanding and contracting. Javascript brings our flat designs to life. But it’s difficult. That’s one reason why jQuery was invented — to make life easier for web designers. If you’ve already mastered HTML and CSS then you’ll find jQuery a logical next step. It uses a similar code style to CSS rather than the all out alien language of raw javascript. Learning jQuery 1.3 from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) is the only book you’ll need to get started with the library if like me you’re a web design who wants to add a little extra umph to your designs.

You’ll realise that this is definitive tome when you see that it contains a glowing foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. He praises the authors, who he knows personally and gives Karl Sedberg a particular thumbs-up for his excellent knack for the English language. Indeed the themes in this book are relayed to the reader in accessible chunks of to-the-point tutorial that will immediately have you eager to boot up your PC and get cracking with showing and hiding, fading, bringing content into the page by the power of AJAX, sorting tables and all manner of glittering delights that were hitherto beyond your mortal reach.

I was in the process of building a new website using the usual solid webstandards that have kept me in work with my current employer for the last seven years when this book landed in my in-tray. One chapter in and I was hooked. My original pretty and functional site was soon awash with plenty of little jQuery effects and goodies. Probably overkill for what was actually needed but once you start playing it becomes pretty difficult to leave alone. Remember when you discovered all those photoshop layer effects? Remember how you used them in earnest way back when? You’re going to do the same again here. But as time goes on you learn to use where appropriate and go throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a design. JQuery is another set of tools to add to your ever expanding web design toolbox and this is the manual.

Learning jQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg is published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) and has a recommended retail price of £24.99.

Read a sample chapter or buy it direct from Packt Publishing.

The book is aimed at web developers and designers who want to customise the look and feel of a standard MediaWiki installation. Carter recognises that most people will find the default theme, monobook, rather dull. Whilst it is used fairly effectively on the Wikipedia site, it soon becomes tiresome after the third or fourth MediaWiki powered site you visit. Carter ably demonstrates that following a few simple steps will put you well on your way to stamping your own identity on your wiki. My personal aim was to make our MediaWiki wikis use Open University branding and web styles and standards. The steps in this book made it a breeze.

The content of the book perhaps goes over and beyond the call of duty. Whilst it covers all the things you’d expect: layout, headers, navigational systems and other user interface elements, I wasn’t expecting to find an entire chapter on integrating the software with social networking sites. Still, it was a nice surprise and actually incredibly useful. There’s also a nice appendix on troubleshooting browser issues which includes fixes for the ancient Internet Explorer 5. Some might consider this sort of stuff outside the scope of the book. Indeed there are plenty of dedicated CSS and HTML web design books to thumb through at your local Waterstones but it’s a nice touch that serves to indicate that the author really does live and breathe MediaWiki and web design.

The entire process of creating a MediaWiki skin is covered in relation to the book’s case study, a fictional theme called JazzMeet. From planning (purpose and audience) through design (html, css, javascript) to development (php). Key subjects such as usability, information architecture and the various page states are well documented.

One personal irritation. A default install of MediaWiki calls the homepage Main Page and it’s not obvious how you change it to something more useful. As hard as I searched within this book I still couldn’t find the answer. Maybe this is out of scope of a book on Skinning MediaWiki as opposed to administrating MediaWiki but as a designer it’s a task I find myself performing with each and every new install. I want the homepage to announce itself as something more meaningful than Main Page. This is a minor annoyance though as a little searching on the web will find the answer.

MediaWiki Skins Design offers a nice structured approach to creating a usable, customised template for your wiki. You can happily skip the chapter on decorative touches if you’re a designer by trade and try your hand at some of the more complicated stuff. For anything you need to know that isn’t in the book there’s the official MediaWiki documentation. If you just want a practical step by step guide book to creating MediaWiki skins then this is the book for you.

Read a sample chapter from MediaWiki Skins Design (PDF, 1.26mb).

The album kicks off with part one of two acts of the apostle. A strange choice for the opener which plods a bit but manages to evolve by the chorus. Track two, another sunny day, is typical jangly Belle and Sebastian. Very melodic, catchy, uplifting and one of the best on this release. A potential single but would need to be censored for bad language (the referee gives us fuck all). White collar boy is a Marc Bolan clone track – even the singing style but enjoyable nevertheless. Dress up in you is another highlight with a laid back feel to it whilst Sukie in the graveyard has a funky beat and an American football organ vibe to it.

We are the sleepyheads is a great track with a flower-power swinging london type female vocal. funny little frog and to be myself completely are the two northern soul style tracks that were first explored on Dirty Dream no.2 on the boy with the arab strap. It took me a while to get into to be myself completely as it always does with the songs sung by guitarist Stevie. However, also typical, it’s now one of my favourites. Funny little frog wont help the band get away from their twee image but it is a strong track and a joy to hear appear so far into the album. The last two tracks, for the price of a cup of tea and mornington crescent are a bit of a let down and not especially interesting. This has been the pattern on most B&S albums save for the last three amazing tracks on fold your hands.. and story telling. I have the feeling that mornington crescent could have benefited from a wider 70s style production with some more bass and echo. In fact most of the album’s production in a little too compressed for me. More breathing room would have been nice. One thing about their early productions, whilst perhaps a little underpolished, they did capture a real vibe. That said, the life pursuit is a very good album and well worth the cash. You can even get a version with a free 30 minute dvd of their recent performance on BBC Scotland for a couple of extra quid.

It’s a lot of fun but slightly pricey at £31 for two hours plus £5 to rent any gear plus £1 non-refundable locker fee. Incidentally, we didn’t realise it was non-refundable. Inevitably we needed to put some more stuff in the locker after we’d locked it and lost a quid in the event. If you want a photo of yourself skiing it’s gonna cost £4.50. The same price for a magnet (for what purpose?) or keyring. The staff dishing out the skis were not dissimilar to the crusty types currently making a scene in the channel 4 rock school. You know the type – moody teenage metallers who seemed really put out that we needed them to pass us some skis.

Don’t be put off by the slick wallet draining though – get onto the slope and enjoy the feeling of snow under your skis for a couple of hours. There’s plenty of scope for jumps and it wasn’t as busy as we’d expected, usually only queuing for, at the most, two minutes for a button lift. There were plenty of snowboarders on the slope. Most were pretty good and were enjoyable to watch. You’d get the occasional one falling over right in front of you and have to take quick evasive action but that all adds to the fun, right?

I’d recommend it. Go for two hours as it’s only £6 more than the one hour. Beware that if you’ve not skied in some time you might, as I did, discover your knees are shot to pieces afterwards and have to spend a few hours in the nearby weatherspoons recuperating.

Afterwards we had a walk round Bray and saw a few other rather expensive eateries. As well as the aforementioned Fat Duck, we also paid a visit to the Waterside and the Monkey Island Hotel. The weather wasn’t fantastic but it was a decent day out nevertheless.

As well as being treated to a couple of new numbers, the band did an on-the-fly cover of Elvis Costello’s Oliver’s Army. They played their second album If you’re feeling siniter almost in entirety. Not my favourite album but it sounded much better live than on record and I can understand why they’d want to play so much of it as it proves how bad the production on that album actually is.

Leader Stuart Murdoch was highly entertaining, jumping into the crowd to check the acoustics of the new concert hall and engaging in amusing banter between songs. The band really involve the crowd – even inviting people onto the stage to dance to the final number.

With such a huge back catalog it was inevitable that a few favourites were omitted but that doesn’t matter because the band bear repeated viewings live. I’ll certainly make more effort to see them again soon.

Read the review from The Herald: Belle and Sebastian, Perth Concert Hall – The Herald.