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: 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.
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”.
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.