FOWD: Karl Swedberg on How to Take Advantage of JQuery and other JavaScript libraries for your design

Javascriptlibraries

Karl Swedberg, of Fusionary Media, talked about the advantages of using JQuery and other JavaScript libraries in your Designs.

Karl recommends JavaScript as a prototyping tool, to get a start on a design and then passing it along to the developers. One of the big advantages of using JavaScript is that it keeps your HTML squeaky clean. It can add design enhancements without cluttering up the base HTML. JavaScript can interact with the Server without a page refresh and therefore allows valuable user feedback without slowing down the experience.

He recommended using JavaScript Libraries as they enable you to mock something up quickly and allow easy cross-browser solutions. Plus, you can leverage what you already know about HTML & CSS. And the interesting tid-bit I learned: With a JavaScript LIbrary you get better CSS support than with plain CSS. In short, JavaScript Libraries encourage Progressive Enhancements. Karl mentioned the 5 big players out there: Prototype, Dojo Toolkit, Mootools, YUI Yahoo! User Interface and jQuery.

This could have ben such a powerful presentation, would Karl just have used a few visual examples. When speaking at a design conference where 75% of attendees are designers, make sure to use visuals. Karl lost me mid-through his presentation. Such a lost opportunity.

Learning JQuery

3 Comments leave a comment below

  1. Good feedback. Some quick feedback from me. Karl stepped in late to help me out as I had to back away from presenting this due to a death in the family. So I hope you can bear with him on this as he really was a huge help to me and FOWD during a very difficult time.

    I know that he worked very hard to get info that would be relevant to the design community and could be presented in a somewhat framework agnostic way.

    I would definitely urge you to reach out to Karl and provide him some feedback that would help him improve his presentation so that designers can benefit even more from his work.

    Would you be willing to help with this?

  2. javascript libraries future of web??
    dude go sell your tomatoes somewhere else

  3. Hi Tina,

    Rey pointed me to this blog post, so I wanted to thank you personally for the feedback. I’m sorry that you didn’t find the presentation terribly helpful, and I agree that visuals would have been a big plus. Never having been to a design conference like FOWD, let alone spoken at one, I seriously misjudged the audience and their expectations. Aside from what Rey mentioned about the circumstances surrounding my involvement, I would definitely take a much different approach if I had a chance to do it all over again. Oddly enough, though, the 3 1/2 hour workshop I gave the day before seemed to go very well with a great response from the attendees.

    Thanks again. If there is anything I can do to make it up to you, please let me know.