WebStories Lille

I’ve been attending Web Stories, which—according to their website—took place in the heart of Europe. But as there is still a pandemic going on, I tuned in from the comfort of my own home, and so did everyone else. Web Stories is for those who love the web. Definitely not an empty promise, when you look at the speaker line-up.

Talks & Speakers

• “A History of the Web in 100 Pages” by John Allsopp
• “Designing beyond the pixel-perfect idealistic case” by Stéphanie Walter
• “Project Fugu, the first two years” by Kenneth Rohde
• “You talkin’ to me?” by Léonie Watson
• “The Layers of the Web” by Jeremy Keith
• “Ombromanie: Storytelling with Machine-Learning Infused Hand Shadows” by Jen Looper
• “Scaling yourself: Building what works for you” by Cassidy Williams
• “Design in the Background” by Eric Meyer

Q&A

After each talk, there was a Q&A session, where our host Angela took questions from the chat.

Even I asked quite a few things, but writing down answers as fast as people give them isn’t my strong suit. That said, when the videos are online, I’ll have a way of getting back to the answers to these questions:

• To John Allsopp: G'Day John, do you think the web deviated from the ideas that where there when it was created?
• To Stéphanie Walter: [Not a question:] Thanks so much, Stéphanie! I wish all my fellow designer co-workers were here today to see/hear your great talk.
• To Jen Looper: A question beyond Storytelling: Could this lead to an input mode superior (as in: less Carpal Tunnel-ly) to mouse/keyboard? At least for certain tasks?
• To Cassidy Williams: Tools can help you scale. Do you think our industry is also good in keeping itself busy by spending too much time in the choosing process, and by the migration work required to change tooling?
• To Eric Meyer: It’s one thing to look (back) at the final meyerweb.com, but what was your approach at the start of the redesign journey? Tinker as you go?

Though I do remember parts of the answer to the first question from the list above, where I asked none other than the author of A Dao of Web Design. John answered by flipping the question around, concluding:

Not many technologies have maintained the stability the way the web did. […] The web is not going away. The web has done pretty well.

I like that.