Q: What do you get if you put a bunch of geeks together in a room?

A: Actually, quite a fun conference…

But then, this is @media, so we’re generally talking the creative side of web production and frontend development. These are the people who obsess about semantic HTML and web standards but love good design too. And i’m one of them…gulp…

But seriously, first impressions are that this is a pretty good conference, lots of very friendly people all chatting away to complete strangers and some interesting conference sessions.

What follows are my random thoughts and scribbled notes from each session.

Jesse James Garrett - Beyond Ajax 

The opening keynote by Jesse James Garrett, “Beyond Ajax” was much more interesting than i’d anticipated. Ajax isn’t something I ever get a chance to use hands on at the moment, so i’d sidelined it in my head. But the thinking behind his talk was a great headstart on the day, focussing on AJAX as primarily a user experience issue rather than some clever scripting.

He also mentioned his diagram “The elements of user experience”, which makes for interesting reading and showed a collage of hundreds of web 2.0 logos which I can see coming in useful next time i’m in a presentation and someone asks me for some examples of that beknighted buzzword and a nice summing up of the concept as “products that get better with use.”

Looking at it as a series of building blocks, you start with the technology, build onto it with features but then those, when done well, come together to form a great user experience. But it’s not all about features and benefits. Jesse James made a nice comparison between the Rio Carbon MP3, which was first to market with a wide ranging feature set, and the iPod, later to market, a few basic core features and cost more. But because the user experience on the iPod is so streamlined and enjoyable, it became a product which transformed and of course owned its marketplace.

It was also interesting to hear him comparing the way users interact with products which have a certain integrity and personality to their branding, like the friendly little Tivo logo. To a developer these products are data, wrapped in logic, wrapped in a UI. To an end-user, its a cloud of magic, wrapped in a UI.

Jason Santa Maria - The Devil is in the Detail

While Jason’s talk didn’t necessarily teach me anything new, he’s an engaging speaker and he reminded me how much I like the Saul Bass style of illustration.

 Ack…who am I kidding, i’m never going to get time to write all of this up in detail. But suffice to say the rest of the conference kicked ass too. Seeing the passion with which Joe Clark speaks in person was great, Dan Cederholm (who’s work i’ve been a fan of for a long while) gave a good talk about design and microformats which made a nice companion piece to Tantek Celik’s talk on them too.

It was nice to finally get my head around why microformats might be useful, although I think they’re still going to be something of a slow burner. It was also interesting to put a face to the name Tantek Celik, entirely not what i’d expected!

A lot of ink, both digital and traditional has already been spilt on the subject of the new logo for the London 2012 Olympic games, developed by Wolff Olins. Personally I agree with my mate Chris, who’s initial opinion was that it looks like a stylised version of Lisa Simpson giving head.

So toddling along to see what else Wolff Olins had been upto lately, I was surprised (well, actually not really) to see that their website is a Flash extravaganza with its own quirky navigation to get to grips with and a triumph of style over content. But fear not, standardista’s…there’s an HTML version, which you can only get to if you disable Flash and click past the “You need flash to view this site” message, no automatic detection or progressive enhancement here, no sir.

This grudging attempt at catering to those who prefer not to use Flash, commits all the classic sins of old skool design. Tables for layout, image text and a pretty much total lack of structural markup and CSS.

If this is the best that a multi-award winning, leading design agency can come up with, you’ve got to wonder what they spend the money on.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of being off to @media tomorrow, and my web standards/accessibility hackles rising, maybe a couple of days rubbing shoulders with my fellow geeks will help…maybe not.

UPDATE: I’ve just read that they’ve now had to edit the promotional video, as portions of it were causing people to have epileptic fits. I look forward eagerly to the forthcoming 2012 online flashtacular that is no doubt forthcoming…

 ALSO: It seems i’m not the only one to have spotted the fellatio connection…this is superb…