Following up on the third Form Function & Class Mini Web Design Conference held last March, the fourth one happened on March 18 at the G2VC Techbar in Ortigas (where the first and second were held). I must say that the talks this time were quite fun. While Rico’s WordPress theme-making presentation was enlightening, Marco’s Photoshop tips were great, and Rene’s talk about assistive web technologies was educational, my two most favorite talks of that night were Ely’s talk on Branding Design and Luis’ discourse on “Finding Your Soulmate”.

Ely’s presentation was your normal informative talk about using branding to make your website sticky, but what made it memorable was how he tried to do a subliminal trick on the audience. Unfortunately, the venue’s projector didn’t display the shocking red background of Ely’s slides so the trick wasn’t as effective. But, nice try anyway. (Ely’s talk actually reminded me of this subliminal advertising video by mentalist Derren Brown, and Ely actually mentioned the video as one of his inspirations. And I only found out now that Derren Brown did a second version of that subliminal trick.)

I’m sure everybody that attended the mini-conference that night would agree that Luis’ presentation was the best of the lot by far. His talk was about finding one’s soulmate and he explained, using a Drake equation–like reasoning that the probability of you meeting your soulmate within your lifetime is very, very slim. Now the question on everybody’s mind was, what has that got to do with web design? Well, Luis, demonstrating a much later statement of his that you can connect practically any concept to web design and development, said that the Web/Internet makes finding your soulmate much more easier (either by having a worldwide audience at your fingertips or by participating in online social networks). Therefore, web designers and developers have a “responsibility” to make their websites fun and easy to use. O, di ba?

A few days after the mini-conference Luis actually put his presentation into action by releasing Everyone.isLone.ly, yet another social networking toy of his making. This guy is brilliant! Hehehe.