Awwwards Conference 2016

Published in

Elements blog

11 min readFeb 3, 2016

Author: Edwin Groot

Each year digital architects, pixel visionaries and curators of dreams alike, come together in iconic cities all over the world to share with us their best-kept secrets. Previously it was Paris and Barcelona, next up is New York but this time it was Amsterdam who was chosen to host the Awwwards conference.

The three day conference, including a day of workshops, was held in the iconic and beautiful Royal Tropical Institute building in the centre of the city. Designers, developers, interested people and agencies from across the globe came to Amsterdam for one mutual interest: to be inspired. From Elements, designer Edwin attended.

Awwwards?

Awwwards is an organisation that aims to create a meeting point where web professionals from across the world can come to find inspiration, a place for debate, a place to share knowledge and experience. A multidisciplinary jury, made up of representatives from across the globe, takes on the difficult task of assessing the talent, effort and dedication that goes into the web projects submitted at Awwwards.

The three day conference consisted out of one day of workshops and two days of inspirational talks with the ability of networking in-between talks or after while drinking a beer. The conference finished off with a prize-giving ceremony and a spiritual party at Hotel Arena.

Day 1: Workshops

The first day there were workshops held by professionals in three different disciplines. I went to a workshop called: ‘Sketching Interfaces’ since that’s very relevant to the work we do at Elements and because I’m interested in learning more about that discipline.

Sketching is a core skill and tool of any designer. It is a quick and cheap way to ideate, develop and iterate on possible design solutions, both alone and with a group. The workshop was held by Eva-Lott Lamm, a German UX Designer and Illustrator, who has worked for companies such as Google, Skype and Yahoo!

In this workshop, we took a closer look at when and how to use sketching in the design process, how to make your sketches communicate more clearly and efficiently and how to run a collaborative sketching session with a group of people. We started with basic sketching techniques and built up the pace through a mix of theory, exercises, practice sessions and group critiques.

Useful

Besides the interesting information and theories, the workshop was also a lot of fun. I learned a lot while doing the many sketching exercises. From sketching wireframes, flows, interactions and transitions to annotating, labeling and explaining your sketches in groups. I think we often underestimate the importance of sketching. It’s the best way to start a creative process and it doesn’t cost too much effort or time. It was interesting to see how other people approach the sketch process and what small details do to the clarity of a sketch. The group aspect of this workshop was really useful and it’s interesting to sketch together with other people and learn from them.

Sketching is a great way to start a conversation with a client, explain your ideas and get your colleagues to join in on the creative process because literally everybody who can hold a pen, can sketch.

Day 2: Talks

The official start of the conference began by welcoming everyone to the conference, especially the people who flew across the world to get here. We first got a quick introduction to the web, from the first computer, to the first internet connection and then the first websites made in HTML and Flash. Especially the bad Flash websites made for a good laugh.

I won’t summarise all the talks, some of them were more interesting than others and therefor I will post about the ones I thought were interesting.

”Centrality of Design”

Josh Brewer — Product Designer (CEO of Habitat, former Designer at Twitter)

Josh had the honor to kick off the conference. It was a real inspirational talk about the growing importance of design in companies. In the last 5–10 years design is becoming more and more a central process in the way companies do their business and create products. In the last 5 years there have been many creative startups bought up by big organisations like Facebook, Google and Twitter who understand the importance of design in their companies. Josh is an evangelist for that subject and wants companies to embrace it, infuse it in their processes.

As he says; ‘90% of being a UX designer is Evangelism.’ It’s time to reverse the stereotype of the nerdy designer with the turtleneck sweater and time to let design take a lead role in companies. He feels that not only the designers should be involved in a creative process but also the client, managers, people from outside the company even. Because more often than not those people have fundamentally important insights the designers sometimes miss. By infusing design in your company from the lower ranks to the high ranks you can be sure that the product you’re concepting, creating, selling and distributing will meet the consumer in the best way possible. Better than when you leave people in charge who see design is a part of the process instead of being the process.

Josh left us with a couple of important tips for how a company should work:

Design your meetings. As in: always involve the client and other people to join a creative process from the beginning. This leaves little space for miscommunication or misinterpretation of a brief.
Prototype all things. Same goes for this one.
Observe & Question: One question can fundamentally turn your perspective. Let people from outside your department in on your ideas, ask around, give people room for critical questions.
Sketch together: The fastest way to get together and share the same view in a project. You can move faster to clarity of you draw together.

“There’s no UX, there’s ONLY UX.”

“VR: Evolving Narratives”

Anrick Bregman — Interaction Director (Unit9)

Anrick talked about how Virtual Reality is being more and more implemented as technology is evolving. It’s becoming a great medium for storytelling and for brands to engage with their users. At the moment companies and agencies are still experimenting with the possibilities of VR and Anrick showed us a couple of cases Unit9 has done with VR and talked about the difficulties VR and 360 degrees videos bring along. For example; There’s no hiding behind the camera in VR 360 and everything they did was an experiment where they had to hide behind walls when the camera started filming otherwise they would be visible. The first shot had to be good right away.

A glimpse of the conference in between:

“Let’s Make the Internet Great Again”

Hi-Res — Digital Agency

Hi-Res is an agency that does things a bit different than most. They find the internet to be too static, too much the same and nobody is trying to push boundaries. They believe it’s the duty of agencies and creatives to get the maximum out of technology, even if that particular project or website is not supported by older versions of a browser or OS. As long as you are innovating.

They showed us parts of their work and that looked pretty awesome although it didn’t really have a function or information, pure aesthetic. You can really tell they are trying to innovate, trying out new stuff on the web and playing around with transitions and animation. I think that’s a good way of being original, creating a name for yourself and finding out with the limits are and what’s possible on the web. Their motto is:

We don’t do this to make money, we make money doing this.

“Fusing COD3 & Celluloid”

Mediamonks — Digital Agency

From extremely interactive to surprisingly traditional, this session took us through different phases of film and it’s role in digital advertising. Two divisions of Mediamonks, COD3 and Celluloid combine their strength to use the strength of film to tell stories and how these filmed stories in online campaigns have totally transformed our business. It’s all about immersive experiences.

They showed us some of their work like the “7 days of rain” campaign for Geox which was received really well and had a lot of exposure because of the storytelling they do through video.

The campaign they did for Weber called “BBQ cultures” won the Awwward for “People’s choice site of the year” and is also being told through video.

Day 3: Talks

Today was the last day of the conference which had another seven talks and ending the day with the prize-winning ceremony and a party to top it off.

“Do It Yourself, Design, Taking risks, Experimenting, Behind the scenes.”

Greg Barth — Artist, Director

Greg is an award winning artist but doesn’t use much digital technology himself. At a digital conference he was a bit of an odd duck but he managed to surprise us all with his work. Greg creates the most amazing and creative clips, commercials and out-of-the-box solutions for clients. It doesn’t get any crazier than him but it was great to see and he got the crowd excited about his work. He went from almost being broke to being one of the most popular freelancers in the UK because a clip he created, when he was at rock bottom, went viral and resulted in a Young Directors Award at the Cannes Lions last year.

“Designing Web Interfaces for Children”

Trine Falbe — User Experience Designer

Trine is a smart UX designer from Denmark and has written books about designing for children and their learning patterns. This was a real interesting subject and she had some handy tips when it comes to interfaces for kids.

What kids are like:

What’s interesting is that kids at the age of two can actually swipe a tablet but can’t draw a straight line yet. Here’s where their first contact with technology starts.
At six years old kids are able to concentrate longer, develop empathy and their motor skills get better, which are fully developed at ten years old.
The most important thing for using technology is their ability to think abstractly. This doesn’t happen until the age of twelve. Before then, kids need to be approached in a different way then adults.

What impacts kids?

Touchscreens at a young age
Kids are used to pressing and tapping buttons because of YouTube. They recognise play and pause buttons.
Kids can’t really spell yet, there’s no use for difficult input fields.
Kids rely on conventions and placement of important aspects on a website. Don’t move things around or try to do something totally different. Kids who can’t read will be lost.

Five handy tips:

Don’t reposition key navigation. Kids are used to having a menu on top of the screen, that’s part of patterns they learn.
Use auto complete and visual search. Kids spell bad and we have to make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. Keep it simple.
Use simple data entries, don’t ask too much information. It takes kids longer to type and they lose interest sooner.
Design for social. Kids love to interact and play with other kids.
Use easy and recognisable icons and images, no abstract drawings or buttons.

“Project Comet”

Bart van de Wiele — User Experience Designer @ Adobe

Project Comet is the next best thing in the digital world. Design meets prototyping! This year Adobe will launch it’s new product and we got to see a sneak peak of the alpha version of the software application. Bart van de Wiele gave us a live demonstration on the big screen to show us what the abilities and functions of Comet (working title) are going to be.

The basic idea of Comet is to be the first all-in-one solution for UX designers. Take UX designs from start to finish with the cross-platform app that lets creatives do it all — wireframing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping, previewing and sharing. And because it’s built from the ground up, Comet delivers innovative tools and breakthrough performance to help creatives design in record time.

Some major functionalities:

Remove all clutter. No longer a thousand buttons and options, just the key ones.
Integration with Photoshop and Illustrator.
Repeat Grid The best functionality so far.
Drag and drop images onto your design.
Live preview of what you’re doing.
Share your prototype online with an easy link provided by Adobe.
Fill your design with Adobe stock images in a matter of seconds.

Personally I’m really enthusiastic about this application. I’ve been working with Sketch for a while and did some prototyping in Principle. This application combines all my favourite tools into one and makes it a lot easier for me to create the best product I can. I’m really looking forward to the release!

Of course there were more talks but they were, to me, not as interesting as those I’ve summarised here.

The best end to a conference

The day ended with a prize-winning ceremony and afterwards we were invited at Hotel Arena for dinner and drinks and a spiritual after party! Hotel Arena is a beautiful venue to host a party like this and the drinks were on the house, which was kind of great!