Design Competition

At London Web Standards last night we announced a website design competition. London Web Standards is getting organised, we’re getting passionate presenters and an amazing group of new and regular attendees. We want the website to reflect this. If you’re interested in helping out, read on.

Aims of the site

• To be a focal point for all of London Web Standards (LWS) online activities
• To take the discussion online
• To promote London Web Standards
• To promote web standards
• To be a focal point that collects all London Web Standards related materials (video, blog posts, photos, events, presentations and speaker bios), linked from the site

Content

Check out the current website (this is it) for an idea of the information we currently have. We’re going to be adding to this. We thought about drawing you an IA diagram, but then realised you’re one of the talented designer/IA or UXD professionals who come to LWS. So here’s the content we need somewhere in the site:

• The exisiting LWS logo (we like the design and were hoping to complement it with a new site design)
• Aim paragraph for LWS (still being written)
• Links (and/or content) to services that LWS uses: Flickr, Vimeo, Twitter, LWS Yahoo Group
• Eventbrite booking page (yep, right there within the London Web Standards site)
• Blog posts, including embedded videos and slides, as well as links to video, slides, comments, pictures and tweets from events
• A prominent place for sponsor logos
• Public calendar of upcoming events (fed from Google Calendar)
• Information about the venue
• Contact information, LWS and organisers twitter names, email address, web form
• Promote up coming speakers – a bios page with relevant links to their work

Our technical bits and UI requirements

• Our site is based on WordPress so whatever you produce will be applied to a theme
• We need your designs to be accessible, for example – think of colour blind users (of course it’s not limited to this).

What do you get out of it?

Kudos? Satisfaction that you’ve made the site look less boring? A high value item in your portfolio for a cutting edge community group website.

You’ll get a link of the type “Site designed by X” at the bottom of every page and a link back to your personal site. Plus, between competition close and Monday 5 April, every entry will be displayed in a voting section of the current site with a link back to your website.

What we need from you

We need the graphic and UI design from you. Initially we’d like 3 templates:

1. The homepage
2. A blog page
3. A generic template page

We can work around what you produce (creating the Eventbrite and calendar pages), but if you want to design more templates please feel free.

We’d prefer graphic design files in any format openable in one of the Adobe Creative Suite applications (things like Fireworks and Photoshop). For speed, you can send through a .JPEG, .GIF or .PNG file in the first instance, but we’ll need access to a layered (.PSD or Fireworks .PNG) version of the designs when converting your designs into a working theme. We’ll also accept code-based designs (if you prefer to design in the browser) and other supporting documents (things like IA and design justifications). However, we must make it clear we’re looking for graphic and UI design, not fully formed code (we can do that). If we have trouble opening your work we’ll get back to you.

What, where and when to submit

Entries can be submitted via email attachment to competition@londonwebstandards.org. We can receive messages of up to 25Mb in size. We don’t mind you putting them in a compressed file (such as a Zip), in fact it’s probably easier that way.

You will get confirmation of your submission within 24 hours. If you’d like to arrange another way to give us your work, get in touch with us at organisers@londonwebstandards.org, but please give plenty of time before the deadline.

The competition will start on Monday 15 February, it will be announced at the meetup and you’ll be able to submit entries until Monday 15 March 2010, entries will need to be received on or before 12 midnight.

Deciding the winner

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 6 April 2010. They will be decided in an open public vote. Each entry is guaranteed to be displayed (along with a link back to your site) on the LWS site between competition close and when the winner is announced.

The LWS Organisers reserve the right to update this information as clarifications become necessary. If there are any major changes that will significantly affect your entry we will email the LWS email list with an update. If you’d like to sign up for these emails please register with our Yahoo Group. It’s also worthwhile periodically checking back here if you can. If you have any general questions please put them in the comments below.

Tickets now available for “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!”

You can sign up for our event on 15th February, “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!” via Eventbrite at http://lwsaccessibility.eventbrite.com/.

Event Details

Sandi Wassmer, Web Accessibility Enthusiast, Inclusivity Advocate, Action for Blind People Blogger and MD of digital agency, Copious, will be talking about why she is rooting for Inclusive Design to lead Accessibility.

We’ll be starting with a couple of lightning talks (please contact Ben Dodson via ben.dodson@londonwebstandards.org if you have something you’d like to present for 5 minutes) at 7pm before moving on to our main presentation at 7:30pm.  There will then be a Q&A session followed by informal discussions.

We look forward to seeing you there!

January 2010 Roundup

Hi Everyone,

First of all a big thank you to Ben Weiner for his presentation on Web Fonts and for all of you who attended. There is a writeup of the event available on our blog.

Next Meeting

I’m happy to announce that our next talk at London Web Standards will be on the topic “Move over Web Accessibility, inclusivity is heading straight at you!” presented by Sandi Wassmer (@SandiWassmer). The event will take place at 7pm at the Square Pig in Holborn on Monday 15th February – tickets will be available on EventBrite at 3pm this Friday (29th Jan).

Sandi is a Web Accessibility Enthusiast, Inclusivity Advocate, Action for Blind People Blogger and MD of digital agency, Copious, and will be talking about why she is rooting for Inclusive Design to lead Accessibility.

Attendance

Over the past couple of meetups we have had record numbers of people signup for our events which has led to us having to create and administer waiting lists. Unfortunately, a large number of people become unable to attend and don’t notify me leading to empty places at the event which could have been filled by people who weren’t quick enough to get a ticket. If I could remind everybody to be courteous to our presenters and other members and let me know in advance if you are unable to attend as otherwise we will need to introduce a more vigilant registration process which I don’t think should be necessary.

Design Competition

We’re planning on overhauling our website shortly and so will be running a design competition so you can show off your creative sides – the winning design will be used for the new londonwebstandards.org website! We’ll be releasing further details shortly.

Job Vacancies

We are hoping to launch a job board at some point in the future but for the time being I’ll be adding any relevant job vacancies to these monthly emails. If you are interested in a vacancy or have one you would like to add then let me know.

* Unboxed Consulting build Ruby on Rails web solutions and iphone apps for the media and creative industries. We’re passionate about innovation and quality and our web solutions illustrate this. Unboxed are looking for a front-end developer to join the team. If you can work CSS and javascript magic and want to work in an Agile environment get in touch with richard.stobart@unboxedconsulting.com

* PHP / XHTML Developer in Pimlico, London – New media agency based in Pimlico, London looking for a full-time web developer to take a lead on a number of new and exciting projects. As an agency specialising in video, the majority of their previous websites have been made with Adobe Flash but they now require a developer who will be able to build both brochureware and basic CMS sites using a combination of PHP and XHTML / CSS along with jQuery or an equivalent JavaScript framework. Due to the nature of the previous websites, your role will be unique as on the only standards based web developer on-site with a wide ranging brief to help shape the agencies website portfolio. You will have direct input on how the development department should be run leading to excellent experience for future roles. For more information or to apply for this role, please forward your CV to me via recruitment@bendodson.com or visit http://bendodson.com/recruitment/

Until Next Time

I’ll be posting another message here and on our Twitter feed (@webstandards) on Friday once tickets are available for the Web Accessibility event.

Ben Dodson
LWS Organiser

Important changes to London Web Standards

Dear London Web Standardistas,

We have a number of important updates to share with the community today.

Our beloved Jeff Van Campen is moving on to become a father for the first time and has handed over the important activity of organising London Web Standards to a new group of enthusiasts. We would like to wish Jeff the best of luck in future and look forward to seeing him sneak out of from the clutches to parenthood every now and then to discuss the important matters of properly formed HTML5, rounded corners with CSS3, linked data, RDFa and so on!

London Web Standards is moving from strength to strength. We have now set up our own dedicated web site at http://www.londonwebstandards.org and have our own professional logo. This megalithic structure will require looking after by a team of well rounded individuals who know a thing or two about these matters. At our handover meeting, we decided the following team structure:

Ben Dodson (@bendodson) will be the main organiser of events and the venue
Nick Smith (@twitrnick) and Jason Grant (@flexewebs) shall be documenting decisions and maintain the content on the web site
Rob Enslin (@robenslin) will be taking care of the social network engagement aspects of LWS
Joe Lanman (@joelanman) will be in charge of back end technical infrastructure for LWS web site

Our last two meetings have been held at ‘The Square Pig’ near Holborn and we will be continuing to use this venue for the foreseeable future. It’s a great central venue with projection facilities and good beer…

Now our website is up and running, we would like to grow the group further in a very open manner and have therefore decided to move over to Upcoming for event organisation as well as Yahoo Groups for various discussions. Our Twitter channel (@webstandards) is still open as usual. We’ll be running a website design competition shortly (more details at the meetup) and hopefully all of the above changes will become a lot clearer then!

Please make sure to signup to the new Yahoo Group as we will be sending all future emails from there. We will no longer be using meetup.com after this months meeting.

We will go over all of these changes at the next meeting which is on 7th September at 7pm at The Square Pig in Holborn and will feature Michael Smethurst (BBC Information Architect) and Yves Raimond (BBC Software Engineer) who will be leading a discussion on Linked Data. They will be covering the basics of Linked Data, and will then be taking any questions or comments. We will also be running some quick-fire 5 minute warm up speeches at the beginning of the meeting covering a wide ranging number of topics. In our October meeting, Phil Archer will be giving a presentation on Mobile Web Best Practices and we have a presentation around web based typography planned for November. If you know of anybody who may want to present in the future, then please email Ben via ben.dodson@londonwebstandards.org

It’s going to be a busy time for us whilst we make the changes listed above but if you have any suggestions on how we can do things better then please let us know by emailing organisers@londonwebstandards.org – we look forward to seeing you on 7th September.

London Web Standards Team