Three, count ’em, three days of design, code, and content. That’s what we’ve got lined up for you in beautiful Seattle, Washington. Including a special one-day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3, led by Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm (pictured above, extolling the virtues of caffeine and CSS).

The complete schedule for An Event Apart Seattle 2010—including A Day Apart with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm—is now available online for your listening and dancing pleasure.

Photo: Warren Parsons.

Machine-tagged photos from An Event Apart San Francisco 2009, ranked by “interestingness.” By Kris Krug, Pete Karl II, Jeffrey Zeldman, and others. Featuring Nicole Sullivan, Andy Budd, and many more.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3247

Live from San Francisco, it’s An Event Apart, for people who make websites. If you can’t join us here today and tomorrow, enjoy the live feed, designed and coded by Nick Sergeant and Pete Karl.

Also:

• An Event Apart San Francisco Flickr pool, featuring the photography of Kris Krug plus the attendees of AEA.
• An Event Apart Caption Contest
• They’re Letting Designers Code Now? — ZDNet live-blogs Dave Shea’s An Event Apart presentation
• Seducing Your Users With Web Design — ZDNet live-blogs Andy Budd’s An Event Apart presentation
• Upcoming listing, AEA San Francisco

Composed at The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3208.

Someone could write a study on how moving and changes in marital status can cause a domain to lapse, and that someone could be me.

Sent from: The Palace Hotel. Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3178. Tweet reference: 6372740541. Why are you reading this?

Registration is now open for An Event Apart 2010. Choose from five great shows in five great cities, plus a special one-day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3!

5 great cities, 11 unforgettable days

An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for. But wait no longer! Tickets are now on sale for all five great 2010 events:

1. Seattle (April 5–7, 2010)
2. Boston (May 24–25, 2010)
3. Minneapolis (August 2–3, 2010)
4. Washington DC (September 16–17, 2010)
5. San Diego (November 1–2, 2010)

Special HTML5/CSS3 Workshop

We’re pleased to announce our first workshop day. And what a workshop it is! Join Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm in Seattle for a special one-day learning experience on HTML5 and CSS3:

A Day Apart
April 7, 2010
Bell Harbor Conference Center
Seattle, WA
Read more

A Day Apart Seattle follows An Event Apart Seattle. You can register just for An Event Apart or just for A Day Apart—or save over $100 when you register for all three days.

Learning with the stars

Whether the topic is creating the right content and features for your audience, designing pages that are a pleasure to read and use, or beating browsers and web gadgets into submission, An Event Apart brings together twelve of the leading minds in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment. Featured speakers in 2010 include:

• Dan Cederholm, author, Bulletproof Web Design and Handcrafted CSS
• Andy Clarke, author, Transcending CSS
• Kristina Halvorson, author, Content Strategy for the Web
• Whitney Hess, strategic partner, Happy Cog
• Jeremy Keith, author, DOM Scripting
• Ethan Marcotte, co-author, Handcrafted CSS and Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition
• Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
• Nicole Sullivan, co-author, Even Faster Websites
• Aarron Walter, author, Building Findable Websites
• Luke Wroblewski, author, Web Form Design
• Jeff Veen, author, Art & Science of Web Design
• Eric Meyer, author, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and Eric Meyer on CSS
• Jeffrey Zeldman (c’est moi), author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition and Taking Your Talent to the Web

Reserve 2010 at 2008 prices

Tickets for all five An Event Apart conferences, plus A Day Apart with Dan Cederholm and Jeremy Keith, are now on sale at the same prices we charged in 2008—and all with a special early bird discount. Reservations are first-come, first-served, so start planning now.

To keep up with the latest AEA doings, become a fan on Facebook, join our Ning social network, or subscribe to our mailing list.

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set

By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.

A Feed Apart Chicago

Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.

Luke W’s Notes on the Show

Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

1. Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
2. Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
3. Kristina Halvorson: Content First
4. Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
5. Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
6. Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
7. Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
8. Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
9. Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
10. Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
11. Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
12. Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
13. Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2695

An Event Apart Chicago has sold out. If you wanted to join us in Chicago on October 12–13 for two days of design, code, and content, we’re sorry to announce that the show has completely sold out. There’s not a spare seat to be had.

That means, if you don’t already have a ticket, you won’t be able to watch Jason Santa Maria, Kristina Halvorson, Dan Brown, Whitney Hess, Andy Clarke, Aaron Gustafson, Simon Willison, Luke Wroblewski, Dan Rubin, Dan Cederholm, and your hosts Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman share the latest ideas in design, development, usability, and content strategy.

We’re sorry about that.

But, hey. If you can’t be with us in Chicago next week, please join us in San Francisco later this year. Or come see us in 2010 at any of these fine cities:

• Seattle (April 5–7, 2010)
• Boston (May 24–25, 2010)
• Minneapolis (August 2–3, 2010)
• Washington DC (Sept. 16–17, 2010)
• San Diego (Nov. 1–2, 2010)

Tickets for all our 2010 shows go on sale November 2nd, 2009, and are first-come, first served.

To keep up with the latest AEA doings, become a fan on Facebook, join our Ning social network, or subscribe to our mailing list.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2651

In this installment: a free tool to create EOT Lite webfonts; An Event Apart interviews CSS web comic creator; Apple is exonerated of censoring iPhone dictionary; and “a new breed of documentary photographers.”

“A New Breed of Documentary Photographers”

Curated by photographer/photo editor Geoffrey Hiller, Verve Photo presents “photos and interviews by the finest young image makers today.” Case in point: Joni Sternbach, and her amazing 8″ x 10″ Unique Tintypes of surfers.

Schiller Responds Re: Ninjawords and App Store

Daring Fireball follows up on its previous Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple, exhonerating Apple of censorship and suggesting that “Apple’s leadership is trying to make the course correction that many of us see as necessary for the long-term success of the platform.”

An Interview With the Creator of “CSSquirrel”

CSSquirrel is both a person and a web comic. Both are profoundly geeky. Picture a comic where, to understand the punch line, you have to follow the politics of the development of the HTML 5 specification or be conversant with the details of RGBa color notation, and you’ll know why we love the subject of this interview.

Ascender Corp. introduces tool to create EOT Lite fonts

In their own words:

Ascender has made a proposal for a subset of the Embedded OpenType (EOT) format with two features removed:

• MTX font compression
• URL Binding (root strings)

…In order to help type designers, foundries and font vendors create an EOT font without these two features, Ascender has developed a simple software utility called the “EOT Lite Wrap Tool.”

This GUI-based tool is compiled to run under Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Features in the tool include:

• Wrap a single font or a batch of fonts
• View the EOT font header information

Ascender is offering a free license to this tool to qualified type designers, foundries and font vendors for use to create EOT versions of their own fonts.

Please review the Read Me file and EULA before requesting a copy.

Tags: webfonts, apple, censorship, ascender, EOTLite, documentary, photographers, photographs, blog, CSS, CSSquirrel, webcomics, aneventapart, interviews

Armed with nothing more than a keen eye, a good seat, a fine camera, and the ability to use it, An Event Apart Seattle attendee Warren Parsons captured the entire two-day show in crisp and loving detail. Presenting, for your viewing pleasure, An Event Apart Seattle 2009 – a set on Flickr.

When you’ve paged your way through those, have a gander at Think Brownstone’s extraordinary sketches of AEA Seattle.

Still can’t get enough of that AEA stuff? Check out the official AEA Seattle photo pool on Flickr.

Wonder what people said about the event? Check these Twitter streams: AEA and AEA09.

And here are Luke W’s notes on the show.

Our thanks to the photographers, sketchers, speakers, and all who attended.

Tags: aneventapart, aeaseattle09, AEA, AEA09, Seattle, webdesign, conference, Flickr, sets, Twitter, photos, illustrations, sketches, aneventapart.com

City of Puget Sound, Jimi Hendrix, and the space needle, here I come for An Event Apart Seattle 2009—two days of peace, love, design, code, and content.

Tags: seattle, aneventapart, webdesign, webstandards, design, conference, conferences, webdesign conference, webdesign conferences, standards, IA, UX, ericmeyer, jeffreyzeldman, zeldman, meyerweb

The annual A List Apart survey for people who make websites is the only public source of data on the shifting salaries, titles, job skills, and work satisfactions of full- and part-time, staff and freelance web professionals.

This year’s survey findings, culled from answers provided by over 30,000 ALA readers, are now up for your pleasure on a specially designed website. We’ve sliced and diced the data, making sense of complex interrelationships, and displaying the results in miniature CSS masterworks by Mr Eric Meyer. (More about the CSS.)

This year’s findings paint a clearer picture of the distinctions between full-time and freelance web professionals: how you work, what you earn, and what you love about the job. Interestingly, too, despite the brutality of a global recession that was already in full swing when we offered the survey, most respondents revealed a surprisingly high level of job security, satisfaction, and confidence in the future.

See for yourself. Read the findings.

Comments off. Please comment on ALA.

Tags: alistapart, aneventapart, webdesignsurvey, survey, forpeoplewhomakewebsites, surveyfindings, findings, meyerweb, css, jobskills, titles, webdesign, webdesigners, webdevelopment, webdevelopers, IA, UX, editors, writers, webmasters

The complete schedule for An Event Apart Boston is now online for your reading pleasure.

Join Eric Meyer and your humble host with truly special guest speakers Jason Santa Maria, Jeremy Keith, Joshua Porter, Whitney Hess, Dan Cederholm, Daniel Mall, Derek Featherstone, Aarron Walter, Scott Thomas, Heather Champ, Andy Clarke, and GoodBarry’s Brett Welch for two days of design, code, and content.

An intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design, An Event Apart brings together thirteen of the leading minds in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, this is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Educational discounts and group rates are available, and everyone saves $100 during the early bird registration period.

Tags: aneventapart, AEA, webdesign, conference, webstandards

There’s a new aneventapart.com in town, featuring a 2009 schedule and a reformulated design. I designed the new site and Eric Meyer coded. (Validation freaks, only validator.nu is up to the task of recognizing the HTML 5 DOCTYPE used and validating against it; the validator.w3.org and htmlhelp.com validators can’t do this yet. Eric chose HTML 5 because it permits any element to be an HREF, and this empowered him to solve complex layout problems with simple, semantic markup. Eric, I know, will have loads more to say about this.)

Family branding concerns drove the previous design. Quite simply, the original An Event Apart site launched simultaneously with the 2005 redesign of A List Apart. Jason Santa Maria’s stripped-down visual rethink was perfect for the magazine and is imitated, written about, and stolen outright to this day. It was a great design for our web magazine because it was created in response to the magazine’s content. It didn’t work as well for the conference because its design wasn’t driven by the kind of content a conference site publishes. But it was the right conference design for 2005 because the goal at that time was to create a strong brand uniting the long-running web design magazine with the new web design conference that sprang from it.

New goals for a new environment

In 2009, it’s less important to bolt the conference to the magazine by using the same layout for both: by now, most people who attend or have thought about attending An Event Apart know it is the A List Apart web design conference. What’s important in 2009 is to provide plenty of information about the show, since decisions about conference-going are being made in a financially (and psychologically) constricted environment. In 2005, it was enough to say “A List Apart has a conference.” Today more is needed. Today you need plenty of content to explain to the person who controls the purse strings just what you will learn and why a different conference wouldn’t be the same or “just as good.”

The redesign therefore began with a content strategy. The new design and new architecture fell out of that.

Action photos and high contrast

The other thing I went for—again, in conscious opposition to the beautifully understated previous design—was impact. I wanted this design to feel big and spacious (even on an iPhone’s screen) and to wow you with, for lack of a better word, a sense of eventfulness. And I think the big beautiful location images and the unafraid use of high contrast help achieve that.

Reinforcing the high contrast and helping to paint an event-focused picture, wherever possible I used action shots of our amazing speakers holding forth from the stage, rather than the more typical friendly backyard amateur head shot used on every other conference site (including the previous version of ours). I wanted to create excitement about the presentations these brilliant people will be making, and live action stage photos seemed like the way to do that. After all, if I’m going to see Elvis Costello perform, I want to see a picture of him onstage with his guitar—not a friendly down-to-earth shot of him taking out the garbage or hugging his nephews.

So that’s a quick overview of the redesign. The store is now open for all four shows and the complete Seattle show schedule is available for your viewing pleasure. I hope to see some of you in 2009 at our intensely educational two-day conference for people who make websites.

Tags: aneventapart, design, redesign, relaunch, webdesign, conference, events, HTML5, ericmeyer, zeldman

An Event Apart Chicago, the final AEA event of 2008, has sold out. If you’ve already secured a seat for this remarkable two-day web design conference, we look forward to seeing you October 13–14 at the Sheraton Towers Chicago—along with Andy Clarke, Sarah Nelson, Robert Hoekman Jr., Jason Fried, Cameron Moll, Rob Weychert, Derek Powazek, Curt Cloninger, Jason Santa Maria, Jeffrey Veen, and your hosts, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman (that’s me).

If you’ve missed the opportunity to join us this year, we’ll announce An Event Apart’s 2009 schedule on Wednesday, October 1, 2008. Stay tuned.

Update: An Event Apart has announced the first cities in its 2009 schedule.

Tags: aneventapart, webdesign, conference, conferences

Take a dip in the Flickr photo pool from An Event Apart San Francisco 2008. Day Two is about to begin.

Tags: aeasf08, aneventapart, webdesign, conference, sanfrancisco