David Hickox

I’m a web designer from Birmingham, AL with 15 years of agency experience building websites big and small for a wide variety of clients. I’m passionate about usability, obsessive about typography, and addicted to the mobile web. When I’m not designing, I also make music and grow a beard. I’m a freelance designer and also a contractor for Modern Tribe, which is a name that I’m sure is recognized in the WordPress community.

I’m a huge typography nerd and am passionate about creating great content presentation and reading experiences on the web.

Speaking Session

Designing for Content in the Designer track

About your presentation

In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

My hope is that all attendees will come away with some basic guidelines for laying out great-looking text on the web. Those at a more advanced level will also gain some specific implementation details that ought to help them write clean and reusable CSS to build a base typography stylesheet.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’ve done this talk before and was very surprised by the the feedback and enthusiasm I got from the attendees. I wanted another venue for giving the talk and I’ve heard Toronto is a beautiful city, so it was an easy choice.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

As a designer who has always coded, there was a missing piece that kept me from being able to be self-sufficient and build out websites from start to finish. WordPress fill in that piece in a very easy to learn and approachable way. And the community around it is fantastic.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Advanced Custom Fields – it’s super easy to use and allows me to customize pages and templates in an effortless way.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people, seeing a city I’ve never been to.