Form Function & Class 5 Event Report
It was not the conference we needed; it was the conference we deserved.
The 5th Form Function & Class web design conference (FFC), organized by the Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO), was successfully held last Saturday, 8th November 2014, at the Henry Sy Hall of De La Salle University, Manila.
This year’s FFC was particularly special as it hit the five-year mark, featured an enviable roster of speakers who are at the top of their fields, made a stronger push to practitioners from the rest of Southeast Asia, and carried a strong, inspiring superhero theme with the slogan:
“Are you making the Web a better place, or are you going to destroy it?”
Audience
Over 250 participants comprising web design, development, marketing, IT professionals attended the event. A handful came from outside Manila — namely Cebu & Singapore. Around 10% in attendance were students; and the male to female ratio that day was 59.6% to 40.4%. The event was announced on ClickTheCity, Rappler, BusinessWorld, Adobo Magazine, SM Tickets, and PWDO’s various social media accounts.
Partners
Registration opened at 7:30 am, presided over by volunteers from partner organizations UST TomasinoWeb, Ateneo GRIDS, La Salle Computer Society, and Developers Connect Philippines.
Participants received event shirts (sponsored by Elance-oDesk), specially designed trading cards of the speakers, IDs, stickers, swag bags, and other items (sponsored by Foodpanda, Adobe, Mozilla Philippines, Adobo Magazine, Business World, OLX, Google, Skyrocket Studios).
Exclusive discounts from Packt Publishing, Code School, A Book Apart, Punchdrunk Panda, and Interaction Design Foundation were also announced. In addition to the giveaways already included in the participant swag bags, OLX & DevCon had booths where one could win extra items in exchange for signing up.
Programme
The conference started at 9:00 am with a welcome message from the Philippine Web Designers Orgnization co-founder, Sophia Lucero. Fellow PWDO core team member Sarah Cada hosted the event, and introduced the speakers of this year’s FFC.
The morning sessions included Jina Bolton on Living Style Guides, Holger Bartel on Front-End Performance, and Sacha Greif on The Price of Design.
Between each talk, while the speakers were setting up, raffle prizes (sponsored by Punchdrunk Panda, Canva, Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla Philippines) were awarded based on various criteria (e.g. date of ticket purchase, time of arrival at the conference, most number of registrants in a single company, etc.)
Jina, Holger, and Sacha returned to the stage together for the morning Q&A panel. After this, they were presented certificates & tokens of appreciation for gracing the event.
An hour-long lunch break followed, where participants were served dimsum & other eastern dishes. Then the crowed settled in for the afternoon sessions as more sponsor items including shirts, notebooks, and accessories were raffled off.
Up next were the three afternoon speakers: Silas Reyes on Material Design, Eric Clark Su on Designing for Startup Success, and John Allsopp on The Dao of Web Design and the Future of the Web.
For the after noon break, participants enjoyed various flavors of putoflan and yema cheese mamon, sponsored by Katy’s Puto Flan. Aside from a superhero-themed set of songs playing throughout the day, audio-visual presentations from sponsors & partners were also flashed during breaks.
Lightning talks were given by event partners Mozilla (Bob Reyes), OLX (Micael Diaz de Rivera), Microsoft (Amos Changcoco), UX Philippines (Christine Balatbat), and Foodpanda (Mauro Cochieri) before the last three speakers, Silas, Eric, and John, headed back to the stage to answer questions and were presented with their own certificates & tokens of appreciation.
Closing the event was PWDO core team member and UX Philippines organizer Ely Apao, followed by pictorials with all the participants and speakers. Later that evening, an after-party was held at URBN.
Photos by Jelvin Base. FFC 5 is made possible by the following sponsors & partners: BusinessWorld, OLX, Canva, Foodpanda, Microsoft, Punchdrunk Panda, Code School, Elance-oDesk, Mozilla Philippines, Offscreen Magazine, A Book Apart, Adobe, Campaign Monitor, Eastvantage, Google Developers, Packt Publishing, Skyrocket Studios, Katy’s Puto Flan, Adobo Magazine, ClickTheCity, Rappler, DevCon, GRIDS, TomasinoWeb, Interaction Design Foundation, UX Philippines, La Salle Computer Society, DLSU College of Computer Studies.
We would like to thank all the organizations, companies, and people who helped us in making this year’s web design conference a success. We hope to see you again in next year’s FFC!
– the PWDO team
