Geek in the Park is an all-day family event for web developers and designers, including a relaxing picnic and an evening of illuminating talks by web industry leaders.
Geek in the Park: 2009
Friends and families enjoyed a very sunny afternoon picnic in
Jephson Gardens the Royal Pump Room gardens on Saturday 15th August 2009. Followed
by very interesting talks by Simon Collison on managing your own projects
and Remy Sharp on the new and upcoming hot topic HMTL5.
Attendance was great and feedback has been positive making the third annual event in Royal Leamington Spa
a success.
Visit the official 2009 event page for more details…
The Discussions
Simon Collison kicked off the evening event talking about how to make your own projects successful with some of his own experiences and practical suggestions for “Nailing Your Own Projects”. Remy Sharp introduced this years hot topic, HTML5, with practical examples of what you can use today in your own projects and how you should contribute to the future of HTML.
Nailing Your Own Projects
Simon Collison
Despite not owning a computer until 2000, Colly took to the web like a duck to water, and soon began building sites for illustrators, record labels, bands and everything else. In 2006 he co-founded Erskine Design with a desire to do exceptional things. As part of the talented Erskine team, he’s now working with established clients ranging from established magazines to polar explorers. Colly’s written bestselling books about web standards, and likes nothing more than presenting his ideas to geeks in pubs.
HTML5 & Friends
Remy Sharp
Remy is the founder of jQuery for Designers and the Full Frontal JavaScript conference, whilst by day he’s running his own company Left Logic, in Brighton where he’s a developer and blogger. Regarding code: he’s about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter.
Geek in the Park: 2008
The geeks gathered in Leamington Spa, but the clouds got there first. On 9th August 2008 it rained, as it had for much of the summer in the UK. But although t-shirts where rain-spotted and damp, spirits were not and Geek in the Park turned out to be the success it promised to be.
Visit the official 2008 event page for more details…
The Discussions
Jon Hicks talked about icon design, and outlined some principles and techniques for creating compelling and successful icons, drawing on his experience of designing for Firefox and Silverback. Drew McLellan took the older geeks on a trip back to their childhood with the help of Brian Cant. Cleverly camoflaged by photos of Humpty and Jemima from Play School was a serious look at the benefits of microformats.
Pixel Pushing: An Introduction to Icon Design
Jon Hicks
One half of the creative partnership at Hicksdesign, based in Oxfordshire, UK and most widely known for the Firefox, Thunderbird and Miro icons, Jon likes to design for both print and 'new-fangled media' as he calls it. He blogs about web standards, CSS, browsers and design, and dreams about cheese a lot.
What Brian Cant Never Taught You About Metadata
Drew McLellan
Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, a strong advocate of best practises, and is currently a Group Lead for the Web Standards Project. He is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement. He blogs at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24ways. Drew has been hacking on the web since around 1996 and since then he's spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now works as a Web Developer for edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK.
Geek in the Park: 2006
The very first event was in 2006. A successful picnic and impromptu football match during the day. Then in the even Patrick H. Lauke & Bruce Lawson both talked on the topic “Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Web Accessibility and Pragmatism”.
Visit the official 2006 event page for more details…
The Discussion
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Web Accessibility and Pragmatism
Patrick H. Lauke & Bruce Lawson
Patrick H. Lauke is the web editor for the University of Salford and a member of the Web Standards Project Accessibility Task Force. Patrick also writes on splintered, his freelance creativity and design site.
Bruce Lawson is also a member of the Web Standards Project Accessibility Task Force, who is an evangalist for Opera. Bruce also writes on his personal site.