Just launched and just wonderful! The 10K Apart contest (“Inspire the web with just 10K”) presented by MIX Online and An Event Apart hearkens back to Stewart Butterfield’s 5k Contest of yesteryear while anticipating the HTML5-powered web of tomorrow … and encouraging us to design that web today.

We want beauty. We want utility. We want excitement. And we want it all under 10K:

• SIZE — Total file size, including images, scripts & markup, can’t be over 10K.
• STANDARDS — We encourage HTML5, and apps must work equally well in IE9 Dev Preview, Firefox and a WebKit browser.
• LIBRARIES — You can use one or more of these libraries, and it won’t count against your 10K.

Prizes, we got prizes! One grand prize winner will receive registration to An Event Apart plus $3,000 cash and a copy of HTML5 For Web Designers. Three runners-up (Best Design, Best Technical, and People’s Choice) will win free registration to An Event Apart plus a $1000 Visa cash card and HTML5 For Web Designers. Nine honorable mentions will receive HTML5 For Web Designers.

The judging panel that will evaluate all this awesomeness is made up of Jeremy Keith, Nicole Sullivan, Eric Meyer, Whitney Hess, and yours truly.

Sorry, no back-end, this is a client-side contest only.

Check the 10K Apart site for more info. Happy designing and developing!

Filed under: A Book Apart, An Event Apart, Code, Design, HTML, HTML5, Happy Cog™, Standards, State of the Web, Tools, UX, User Experience, development

Comments off.

Update! Episode 14 is now available for your listening and viewing pleasure at 5by5.tv.

Josh Williams, founder of Gowalla, is our guest at 1:00 PM ET today, July 29, in Episode 14 of The Big Web Show. Whether you’re a social media user/creator, an entrepreneur, an application developer, an iconist or illustrator, a freelancer with big dreams, an API wizard, a devotee of marketing 2.0, a web designer, a Gowalla fan, or what, you won’t want to miss this episode.

The Big Web Show is taped in front of a live internet audience, and you can be part of it. Join co-host Dan Benjamin and me at 1:00 PM ET today to participate in the live taping of Episode 14.

If you miss the live taping, you can watch the show on our website or via iTunes later tonight.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Photo: Keegan Jones.

Filed under: Apple, Applications, Code, Dan Benjamin, Design, Formats, Google, The Big Web Show, apps, art direction, downloads, ipad, iphone, mobile

Comments off.

The show’s over but the photos linger on. An Event Apart Minneapolis was two days of nonstop brilliance and inspiration. In an environment more than one attendee likened to a “TED of web design,” a dozen of the most exciting speakers and visionaries in our industry explained why this moment in web design is like no other.

If you were there, relive the memories; if you couldn’t attend, steal a glance at some of what you missed: An Event Apart Minneapolis: the photo pool at Flickr.

Next up: An Event Apart DC and San Diego. These shows will not be streamed, simulcast, or repackaged in DVD format. To experience them, you must attend. Tickets are first-come, first-served, and every show this year has sold out. Forewarned is forearmed; we’d love to turn you on.

Photo: Jared Mehle.

Filed under: A List Apart, An Event Apart, Appearances, Best practices, CSS, CSS3, Curation, Design, Designers, HTML, HTML5, Happy Cog™, Ideas, Images, Minneapolis, Responsive Web Design, Typography, UX, Usability, User Experience, W3C, Web Design, Web Standards, Zeldman, better-know-a-speaker, conferences, content, content strategy, creativity, engagement, eric meyer, industry, people, photography, webfonts

Comments off.

With respect to clarity, simplicity, and boldness of line, the Japanese have been a thousand years ahead of us in fine art and graphic design. Our best painters learned minimalism, cartooning, and much else from the Japanese during the “Orientalism” period of the late 19th century. Before that, western fine art was judged in part on its complexity and detail. And our posters and advertisements! Don’t ask.

Even the way the Japanese design chopsticks reveals this genius for simplicity coupled with a reverence for the natural world. Your Chinese chopstick is all lathe work. It’s about the gloriously smooth finish of the stick. Chinese chopsticks are miniature masterpieces that we tragically toss away after a single use. But they are masterpieces of human skill.

In contrast, the Japanese don’t change the shape of the wood. They simply put a small crack in one side—just enough that you can snap it like a wishbone when you’re ready to use the chopsticks. The Chinese chopstick is about Man and His Craft. The Japanese chopstick is about the sacred, ephemeral beauty of the revealed world.

Given Japan’s world-leading preference for the boldly simple in the applied and graphic arts, it’s puzzling that so many Japanese website designs prize clutter over clarity. The online presence of Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare is typical of the style. See also Japan Airlines, stat.go.jp, mora.jp and so on. Even web consultancies show off their capabilities on sites that are models of this strangely cluttered aesthetic—an aesthetic that is doubly strange coming from a culture that has long prized elegant simplicity.

Certainly, the West has its share of crazy cluttered sites, and there are plenty of big Western internet companies like Yahoo and MySpace that paste the content thickly to the page. But here the cluttered approach to design wins no awards and is considered a sign of design amateurism—a guilty pleasure at best. It is odd that in Japan, land of world-leading minimalism in the traditional arts and design, web users and skilled web design practitioners believe more is more.

Filed under: Design, The Profession, Web Design, Web Design History

This post has earned 96 responses so far.

Vincent (no last name given) has designed a beautiful, extremely useful, feature-rich interface design framework for web designers who create their initial design mock-ups in Adobe Illustrator. And it’s free for personal or commercial use (credit link required).

The set includes:

• GUI library – Hundreds of vector elements for interface design
• Minimal UI icons set – 260 vector icons for Illustrator
• Styles library – 200 styles to apply in Illustrator

I’d pay cash money for the color schemes alone: 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

The back-link requirement may be a deal breaker in some situations. I’d happily use these GUI icons on a personal project, but I might refrain on a client project if it seemed awkward to include a widget credit on the site. (It all depends on the client.)

That possible caveat aside, this is an extraordinary set of widgets and gizmos many web designers will want to have in their tool kit.

Filed under: Adobe, Design, Tools, software

Comments off.

• HTML5 audio and video WordPress plugin lets you embed media for native playback in supported browsers; content degrades gracefully in unsupported browsers.
• 10 Tips for Designing Mobile Websites. Great stuff.
• The downside of free fonts.
• Flipboard, superhot new “social iPad magazine,” will be powered by semantic data.
• Nick Usborne: “Why I don’t much like the phrase, ‘content marketing.’”
• JK Rowling may allow digital Harry Potter books.
• We all have movie star issues now. Reputation and privacy in the digital age.
• Ready Media: Roger Black and friends offer professionally designed magazine and web templates “at a fraction of the cost.” Pushback ensues.
• With beautiful type comes great responsibility.
• Veerle: Gradient rings in Illustrator
• Douglas Bowman: A Browsable, Searchable Archive of Tweets
• A Feed Apart is live! Share your experiences of An Event Apart Minneapolis or enjoy the conference vicariously.

Filed under: links

Comments off.

IF YOU’RE BONING UP on HTML5 and CSS3, you’ll want to consider two remarkable learning experiences taking place live on the web this summer:

Learn HTML5 with John Allsopp

Here is a great educational opportunity that’s also an amazing value. Experience eight structured sessions, two live Q&A sessions, private discussion forum, practical exercises and more, from one of the world’s best and most experienced teachers of standards-based design. All for just US $9.95. That is not a typo. Live classes start 26 July 2010.

Learn CSS3 with John Allsopp

And the hits keep on coming. This virtual classroom led by Allsopp includes twelve structured sessions, three live Q&As, and more, for just $14.95. It’s the perfect complement to any other reading or training you may be doing, at a price that’s impossible to beat. Classes start 16 August.

A Book Apart Discount

As if this deal wasn’t great enough, participating in either course earns you a coupon code good for a 20% discount off Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers, the A Book Apart inaugural pub that’s taking the web design world by storm. The discount is good through September 1st. No, you can’t apply it retroactively to a book you’ve already purchased. (So if you’ve already bought the book, buy a second copy—one for home, one for office. Or get it for a friend. Or don’t buy it. What matters is your health. Are you eating enough? You look thin.)

Filed under: Authoring, CSS, CSS3, HTML, HTML5

Comments off.

Editor Michael Nolan walks writer Aarron Walter through the fine points. Photo: Ari Stiles.

All our Big Web Show interviews are personal to me and feature people who make a difference in our community, but this week’s guest is especially special. Michael J. Nolan (@mikaln) is the acquisitions editor who “discovered” me, and who has brought to light (or should I say brought to print) more web leaders with distinctive voices and visions than just about anyone out there.

Michael works as a senior editor for Pearson’s New Riders and Peachpit imprints, focusing on web design and development. His first book in the genre, David Siegel’s Creating Killer Websites, was a mega success and jump-started discussion on how to design the web. It was followed by a long list of books from a Who’s Who of digerati, including Jeffrey Veen, Clement Mok, Richard Saul Wurman, Derek Powazek, Jesse James Garrett, Christina Wodtke, Dan Cederholm, Garr Reynolds, Joshua Porter, Dan Brown, Kristina Halvorson, Marty Neumeier, and Jeffrey Zeldman (that’s me!).

Michael is proud of the positive impact books these Voices That Matter have had on the medium, which he sees as humankind’s best last chance to survive and prosper. I’m proud to know Michael and to be his friend.

As always, Big Web Show co-host Dan Benjamin will join me for this special hour of insights into how publishing really works, where it’s going, and how it will survive—plus, I hope, plenty of stories about your favorite authors and designers, and tips on how to identify talent for those who are hiring, and how present yourself as a talented and desirable catch for those who are trying to boost their visibility and career prospects.

Please join us this Thursday, July 22, at 1:00 PM Eastern for the live taping of Episode 13.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) is taped live in front of an internet audience every Thursday at 1:00 PM ET on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards (often within hours of taping) via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web.

Filed under: Community, Publications, Publishing, Respect, The Big Web Show, Web Design, Web Design History, books, editorial, engagement, peachpit

Comments off.

The first printing of Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers has sold out.

For a book about web forms, semantics, and the history of markup, it’s done pretty well:

• The book sold 1,000 copies during the first hour of pre-sales.
• It sold 5,000 copies during the first 24 hours of pre-sales.
• The first printing sold out within two months.

Haven’t ordered yours yet, and now they’re sold out? Not to worry: a second printing is in the works; orders will ship the week of July 26.

So where’s my book, already?

We ship worldwide. Orders generally ship within 3 days and take 7–10 days to arrive. Some orders take longer, typically because of hold-ups at your local post office, over which we have no control. (Intriguingly, foreign orders shipped quickly, in many cases arriving much sooner than US orders.) We have expedited all remaining shipments to get you your book faster.

We ship via US Postal Service, so no tracking numbers are available.

If you ordered before June 30 and still have not received your order, please be patient a few more days, and thank you for bearing with our learning curve. We know a lot about web design, but we’re still getting the hang of interpreting what mail houses and the US Postal Service mean by “guaranteed fast shipping.”

If you need to speak to someone about your order, write to us.

I want an ebook, not a dead tree! What gives?

Stay tuned; we’re working on ebook versions. Follow @abookapart to learn when they’re released.

Filed under: A Book Apart, Authoring, HTML, HTML5, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards

This post has earned 33 responses so far.

Starting in the fall of 2010, the Continuing Education Department of The Cooper Union, in conjunction with the Type Directors Club, will offer a Certificate Program in Typeface Design.

More information about this remarkable program is available at coopertype.org.

The gorgeous typefaces used on the Coopertype website are FB Franklin Web (Benton Sans) designed by Tobias Frere-Jones & Cyrus Highsmith, and Farnham, designed by Christian Schwartz. The site design is by Nick Sherman of Brooklyn and Font Bureau.

Filed under: Design, Education, Fonts, Typography, type

Comments off.