Photo by Marc Thiele

On the 19th of May, I gave a talk at Carsonified’s Future of Web Design London on Freelancing. I’ve just been sent the video of my talk if you missed it. – Video no longer available. :(

Although I was really nervous in the days leading up to the conference, I really enjoyed speaking. The audience was great, and made such lovely comments on Twitter. I really hope Carsonified ask me to speak again. (hint hint!)

I’ll be posting a write-up of the talk on either my blog or Scrunchup, so keep an eye on my RSS or Twitter feed.

I’m planning on doing a full write-up for an upcoming issue of Scrunchup.

The reason I did this talk is because I am concerned that young web designers and developers are jumping into freelancing without much thought, and then discovering how much of a minefield it can be. So I decided to cover things like how to set up, what sort of problems young freelancers come across, and what I’ve learned from the mistakes I’ve made. I hope you find it useful.

Big thanks to Perch and Littlesnapper who provided me with prizes to give out to people who stayed awake during the talk.

Here’s an unedited video of the first set of talks. Mine is 01:06:45 in. I’m hoping an edited version will be available soon.

Here are my slides. If you want to read the notes that go with the slides, click through to the slideshare site.

Here are two YouTube videos that were filmed by Meaghan of the talk.

Nick Pellant did a stella talk about Building Your Company. I was worried it would overlap on the things mentioned in mine, but it didn’t at all. He seemed to cover everything that I didn’t have time to mention, and I was quite jealous of the way he presented while walking across the stage, without notes, whereas I stayed pretty much glued to the spot. He also had very few slides, meaning the attention was focused purely on what he was saying. His presentation style seemed to echo that of Ryan Carson (watch out Ryan) which is perhaps expected since Nick works in the same offices as Carsonified. He even gave out lovely free posters at the end which cover all the points he mentioned. These are handouts you don’t want to throw away. All in all, a great speaker and also very talented at his work.

Jamie Rumbelow did a talk about APIs which I was really impressed with. He’s 14 and seemed completely relaxed with talking about something quite complex to a room full of people. He is also very enthusiastic, and was asking me how he could help with Scrunchup. A very sound guy, and one to keep an eye on.

If you could buy stocks in teenagers, I would buy as many as I could in James Proud. This is an 18 year old guy who has his head well and truly screwed on. He gave a pitch about his project, Gig Locator, and blew away the audience and the panel. This guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. He knows his product really well, has good ties in his product’s industry, and keeps his two feet on the ground at all times. He’s business savvy and an engaging speaker, as well as having a really decent product. This guy is gold dust. Conference organisers take note.

Then there was Greg Cooper. Greg has made the decision to work purely in UI design for social networks, which is pretty smart in my opinion. As his specialism is quite niche, it will be really interesting to see what Greg is working on in the next few years. I’m sure he’ll be in hot demand by a lot of companies.
His presentation was really good, he touched on things like the importance of designing for the extremes – specifically designing how it would look if someone had a really long name which is something so many designers don’t think about.
Sadly, most people had left the conference before Greg started his talk, so not many people got to hear it. I guess this is the cost of making a conference free.

I enjoyed Charlie McDonnell’s talk a lot. It wasn’t about Web Design or Development, but about the life of a teenage YouTuber, which brought me back to my Media Studies days. If you haven’t heard of charlieissocoollike, check out his videos, specifically this one which is about tea. One of the interesting things he mentioned was that some of the things he is doing with agencies like the BBC is breaking ground in New Media, and him and these big organisations are on the same level, both trying different things and not quite sure what will happen.

I really enjoyed my time at the conference. It was great to catch up with Jon who came all the way from up North, and it was nice to be in a room full of like minded people of a similar age to me.  As with any conference in its first year, it has room for improvement, but I think it was a massive achievement that Rob and Grant managed to do it at all, and for free. The feedback from other attendees has been very positive, coming away with new contacts and ideas. And if inspiring a bunch of young people was their goal, they certainly achieved it, and I guess that’s all that really matters.

As much as I’d like to, I’m not going to write a minute-by-minute account of the Future Of Web Design conference. I’m suffering from the side-effects of writing 300 pages for my IT coursework and I’m not sure how much more I can type before my swollen fingers drop off. So I’m going to summarise a few of the good and not so good events of the 3 days.

• The roadtrip to Kensington with Ryan, Paul and Dom
• Enduring the boys singing Celine Dion songs
• Re-enacting Half Life in the car park
• Taking an hour to check into the hotel
• Overhearing the hotel receptionist on the phone to the police
• Squeezing into a minature lift and calculating everyone’s weight to see if we’d break it
• Getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere by a dodgy unlicensed taxi driver
• Relying on human-sat-nav PaulPaul to locate bars in London
• Getting a very large Media Temple shirt that I ended up using as a nightgown
• Dom setting fire to the toaster in the morning
• Ryan hitting his croissant against his plate to demonstrate how stale it was
• Getting a cool pass with my name on it
• Being very geeky and sitting at the very front of the hall
• Dom twittering EVERYTHING
• The Silverlight talk by a guy who actually worked for Aston Martin
• Watching a very funny Photoshop battle
• Not understanding all the obscure references from the 1970s
• Being completely captivated by Andy Budd’s and Jon Hick’s talk
• Getting Krispy Kreme doughnuts for the boys
• Watching Dom go up to Jeremy Keith and say “Hi, I’m Dom, who are you?”
• Almost using Paul Boag’s iPhone as a coaster
• Getting a Stuff and Nonsense badge from Andy Clarke
• Asking Daniel Burka very school-girlishly if I could shake his hand
• Being mocked by Ryan for asking people if I could shake their hand
• Watching Dom use a dance mat
• Ryan reading me a bed-time story
• The brilliant Silverlight workshop
• The guys from Microsoft using Macs with Silverlight stickers on top of the apple logo
• Being called a “Bloody Northerner” for ordering mushy peas
• Going on a Mini Mondeo Adventure
• Telling Ryan to turn of the sat-nav because I thought I knew the way back
• Ending up in Hemel Hempstead
• Going round hundreds of roundabouts saying “I think there’s a Waitrose round here…”
• Saying a very sad farewell to the boys :(

I really enjoyed my FOWD experience, and can’t wait for the next event. Here are a few photos that I took.

At first, I wasn’t sure If I should go because I’m not a full-time designer yet, and at over £100 (plus hotel, food and travel costs), it wasn’t cheap.  But I would really recommend it, especially to people like me who don’t have much of a chance to interact with other designers.  It’s very ineffective and boring to try and learn everything from a book, and I came back feeling very motivated and inspired.

I think there were about 12 of us altogether in the choir. I didn’t know most of them because they were in the year below me, but a couple of my friends were going. At 10am we met in the music room and did a little rehearsal. We’d all been asked to dress smartly in black trousers and white shirts. I’d had a massive shoe dilemma before I left (which I always manage to have before going anywhere) and had to borrow a pair of my mum’s shoes and hobble over a mile to school in them, so I was a bit flustered when I arrived.

The journey was… interesting… Our driver seemed to want to go everywhere in gear 1, take the least direct routes round the back-alleys of St Albans, and ramble relentlessly about practically anything, as well as apparently making very dodgy comments. I’d stuffed my headphones in my ears at this point to drown out Abba playing on the radio in the background.

When we finally arrived at the Foreign Office, we were stopped at the gate by two security guards. One of them used a mirror attached to a stick to look under our van, and the other talked on his radio. After a couple of minutes, we were told we couldn’t drive into the building, and would have to get out and leave our coats and bags inside the bus. Unfortunately this meant I couldn’t bring my camera or phone inside to take pictures.

We all hopped out of the bus, and walked into a big courtyard, then to some more security gates where our keyboard and equipment were scanned and we were all handed ‘visitor’ passes.

The interior of the building was stunning. All of the walls were painted intricately, and there was gold leaf everywhere. I’d never been anywhere this expensive looking. We walked up a marble staircase and down a corridoor where we collected badges with each of our names printed on them. We then went into a room where the doors were 3x taller than normal doors (and also about 5x heavier!). There was a table with refreshments for us, and a huge table in the middle of the room. Everyone hovered round the edges, too scared to touch anything! Set out on the table were leaflets about the conference. I got the gist that it was to try and get headteachers to encourage girls to take careers in more male oriented industries. I wish I’d been able to listen to the conference as it sounded very interesting.

A lady came in with tote bags which she gave out to all of us. They each contained a tin of boiled sweets, a pen, a shirt with “breaking the mould, women in leadership” printed on it, a book about teenage finance, and a £15 book voucher!

After a quick drink, we huddled round the keyboard and practiced quietly. We could hear the conference going on next door. After about 45 minutes, we heard clapping, which was our cue. The giant doors opened, and people started walking in.

I was feeling a bit nervous and my legs were shaking, but once we had been singing for a while it was ok. We sang songs like ‘Choucone’, ’sing sing so’, ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’ and a song about snails with very strange words- “I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail…” I’m an Alto which means I sing the low notes, and most of my parts were just singing “Ahhhhhhh”, or “Ooooooooo” which was good because I find it hard enough reading the music without the words.

Our headteacher found us pretty quickly, waved, and whipped out her camera and started taking pictures. She then disappeared, and reappeared with more headteachers. She’d obviously rounded them all up to come and listen to us. Our school careers teacher was there too.

After we’d run out of songs, we started heading towards the buffet table (as we were promised a free lunch) but we were sent back by our head who wanted as to sing the same songs again. Which we did. Then we tried again to get some food (as we were very worried they would run out!) but again we were asked to sing more songs.

We finally got to the buffet table, and it wasn’t long before we’d cleared everything there. Luckily, some people brought in more food, which again, we rapidly demolished. It was mostly finger-food with things like salmon, spring rolls, and things that I had never seen before but tasted very good. As I was on my way to get a 3rd helping (I’m not greedy, the plates were too small!!) I spied little bowls of chocolate mousse. I was about to get one when a lady came up to my group and said that we had to go back and sing again because a man with a webcam was going to film us all, and that we’d all be able to tell our friends we were on TV! (because the TV and the Internet are exactly the same thing apparently). If I find the video of us singing on the Internet, I will post it up here.

We were all very distressed that we couldn’t have our chocolate mousses before we sang, and we didn’t know if there would be any left when we’d finished. We crowded back round the piano and sang some more songs while the cameraman danced around us with his camera, and our headteacher pulled faces in the background.

Finally we’d finished, and were able to have our mousses. 5 minutes later, we were back in the minibus, all feeling suddenly tired. I was annoyed to discover my feet were in shreds after wearing shoes all day that were too small for me. Madonna did a no-show which was a shame, but I wasn’t too fussed about that.

I think the event is a move in the right direction at getting more girls to look at careers in male-oriented industries. I know from experience of being in a girls’ school how few people leave to study university courses such as engineering or IT. Apparently nobody in my school has gone on to do IT. I’m not sure if this is true, but it’s what the careers adviser said when I asked her for information on universities that offer good courses. My friend is going on to do engineering next year, and at the open day we went to, she was the only girl there. I don’t think the fact that there are predominantly men on the course deters girls from taking it, but rather that it is something that few really consider, perhaps because they don’t know anyone they can relate to who does it.

In year 10, we had to do work experience for a week, and were given a list of about 70 different placements that we could apply for. There were none in construction (other than gardening), one in design (architecture), none in IT, and about 10 different hairdresser placements and most of the rest were shop floor placements. Schools must try harder to give girls an insight into less stereotypical careers. And most importantly, women in these industries must do their bit and go to schools to inspire girls to look at other options that they maybe hadn’t considered.