Austin Power
As snow falls prettily on the island of Manhattan, Mrs Zeldman and I prepare for our annual junket to sun-baked, star-studded Austin, Texas, accompanied by the keynote speaker of 2025 and cradling the blessed StarTAC. Most of Happy Cog and the A List Apart staff will be there as well, many with speaking roles. Here are a few panels I found (with more to come):
Writing, Better
Ballroom F
Saturday, March 10th
10:00 am - 11:00 am (same time as “A Decade of Style,” below)
If content is king, why don’t designers talk about it? Panelists will discuss what makes for good writing, what each person does to keep fit with verbs and vowels, and what the future might hold for the written word in a world that is being inundated with podcasts and video.
Moderator: Greg Storey
Greg Storey Principal/Creative Dir, Airbag Industries LLC
Bronwyn Jones Mktg Comms, Apple Computer
Erin Kissane Editor, Happy Cog
Ethan Marcotte Vertua Studios
A Decade of Style
Room 19AB
Saturday, March 10th
10:00 am - 11:00 am (same time as “Writing, Better,” above)
A small group of grizzled veterans reflects on a decade of successes, triumphs, failures, disappointments, reversals of fortune, and just plain fun in the world of CSS and web design.
Moderator: Eric Meyer
Molly Holzschlag Pres, Molly.com Inc
Eric Meyer Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting
Chris Wilson IE Platform Architect, Microsoft
Douglas Bowman Visual Design Lead, Google
After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration
Room 18ABCD
Saturday, March 10th
11:30 am - 12:30 pm
You’ve received the creative brief; now what? Learn how to draw creative inspiration for your web design projects from a number of likely and unlikely sources.
Moderator: Jason Santa Maria
Jason Santa Maria Creative Dir, Happy Cog Studios
Cameron Moll cameronmoll.com
Rob Weychert Art Dir, Happy Cog Studios
Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad
Room 18ABCD
Saturday, March 10th
4:05 pm - 4:30 pm
With the exploding popularity of DOM Scripting, Ajax and JavaScript in general, it’s important to know what to do—and what not to do—when dealing with these technologies.This session will walk you through several real-world examples, pointing out common mistakes that hinder usability, accessibility, and searchwhile teaching you ways to avoid them altogether, either programmatically or simply by altering the way you think about JavaScript-based interactivity.
Aaron Gustafson Sr Web designer/Developer, Easy! Designs LLC
Sarah Nelson Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
Book Signing
SUNDAY, MARCH 11
3:00 pm
I’ll be signing Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition in the SXSW Bookstore, located in the Trade Show + Exhibition.
Robert Hoekman Jr. Designing the Obvious
Jeffrey Zeldman Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition
Brendan Dawes Analog In, Digital Out
Phil Torrone MAKE Magazine
John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing-The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide
Marrit Ingman Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers
Gina Trapani Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tips
Elliot McGucken Own the Risk: The 45Surf.com Guide to Hero’s Journey Entrepreneurship
Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0
Room 18ABCD
Monday, March 12th
10:00 am - 11:00 am
Is your team mired in the goo and muck of old-school thinking? Are your designers and developers divided on their approach and about to throw in the towel? This panel features formerly stuck experts as well as those who have helped clients get out of the muck.
Moderator: Liz Danzico
Liz Danzico Director, experience strategy, Daylife
Kristian Bengtsson Creative Dir, FutureLab
Chris Messina Co-founder, Citizen Agency
Luke Wroblewski Principal Designer, Yahoo!
Jeffrey Zeldman Founder and Executive Creative Director, Happy Cog
Preserving our Digital Legacy and the Individual Collector
Room 8ABC
Tuesday, March 13th
11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Many great art, book and manuscript collections survive because an individual had the foresight or good luck to save the good stuff. Libraries and museums owe a debt to individual dealers, collectors and packrats for saving illustrated Czarist plate books from the Soviets, and WWII letters from the trash-heap. Who are today’s collectors? What are they preserving? How will they manage fragile born-digital collections long enough share with future generations?
Moderator: Carrie Bickner (aka Mrs Zeldman)
Carrie Bickner, Director of Education Outreach, The New York Public Library
Josh Greenberg Assoc Dir Research Projects, Center for History & New Media
William Stingone Curator of Manuscripts, The New York Public Library
Megan Winget Professor, UT at Austin
Tags: sxsw, sxswi, austin, texas, mrszeldman, alistapart, happycog
Filed under: A List Apart, Happy Cog™, SXSW, events
I’m looking forward to leaving the snow behind here in Milwaukee, WI and also most of the panels you just mentioned. You better have that StarTAC ready if I see you down there!
B
I look forward to seeing your panel (and your illustrious phone) in Austin.
By the way, to help make sense of the lineup at SXSWi this year, may I humbly suggest looking at Conferenceer, a SXSW networking site I’ve just launched. I put it together because I wanted to subscribe to the panels in iCal, download vCards of the speakers, and (most of all) read the blogs of all the folks I would meet in Austin.
Right now, all of the panelist profiles, including yours and that of your missus, are up on the site, as are about a hundred new folks. And hey, here’s a link to your panel page right here…
Fantastic, Jacob!
Really, you sign your book? I mean I knew you had an ego, but really?
Do you really think content is the king? Many bloggers think it is. But for designers, it may be a different story.
I’m quoting panel description copy, not stating an opinion. The panel is about writing for the web.
I feel so left out : (
Time and money constraints are the reasons I can’t attend SXSW. I do plan on getting there one day!! I just hope this buzz continues right through to @media in London as I plan on attending.
Sam Hill:
1. At SXSW, everyone who has a book signs the book.
2. If people line up to get a book signed by the author, that’s not ego, it’s business.
3. Don’t be such an ass.
@Marla Erwin. Your third point is so so informative. Totally nice advice :-)