#btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 11 - 13 May 2015

Dave Shea

Dave is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential website csszengarden.com, and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005) with Molly Holzschlag.

His current role is VP of User Experience at Mobify Inc in Vancouver, Canada. Previously he ran Bright Creative, working on projects for New York University, Google, CNet, Joyent and others. He speaks internationally at conferences and workshops, and was an organiser of the North American arm of Web Directions, a popular international conference series.

His extracurricular interests have included icon design, the Processing visual language, GPS tracking his road cycling trips, and improving his home craft brewing techniques. Find Dave on Twitter as @mezzoblue.

Want to watch this video on YouTube directly? This way, please.

A Brief History of Web Design

The web is almost 25 years old, but the chances are that your professional career started much more recently than that.

Web design has been around almost since the beginning, but what it means to build a web site has changed as dramatically as the web itself. From grey backgrounds to font tags and tables, from simple style sheets to responsive sites, from 640x480 to the thousands of screen sizes we encounter today, the march of progress continues.

But as we move forward, it's useful to consider lessons from the past. And that's a rapidly-fading past; links rot. References fade. Information disappears. During a career that started during the Browser Wars, Dave has seen a lot of it first hand, and would like to reminisce about how things were so we can avoid repeating past mistakes.