LUKE WROBLEWSKI’S notes on most of the sessions from An Event Apart Atlanta, 2012, Feb. 6–8, 2012. Thanks, buddy!

• Properties of Intuitive Web Pages — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: The Future of CSS — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: CSS Best Practices — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: Buttons are a Hack — February 7, 2012
• An Event Apart: Content First — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Inclusive Design — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Handcrafted Patterns — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Hacking Users Brains — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Adaptive Web Content — February 6, 2012
• An Event Apart: Rolling Up Our Responsive Sleeves — February 6, 2012

RIGHT HERE I’ll be sharing links, write-ups, and ideas from An Event Apart San Francisco – three days of design, code, and content for people who make websites. Keep watching this space!

1. A Feed Apart – live tweeting
2. AEA SF 2011 Notes by Andrew – live blogging
3. AEA SF 2011: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow: Luke Wroblewski’s notes on the presentation by Ethan Marcotte AKA @beep
4. An Event Apart: Content First – Luke Wroblewski’s notes on my opening keynote
5. An Event Apart: Great Responsibility. In his With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Elliot Jay Stocks talked about what matters in effective Web design (hint not new technologies). Notes by Luke Wroblewski
6. Design Principles – Jeremy Keith
7. Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid by Wilson Miner
8. Content page design best practices by Luke Wroblewski
9. Typograph – Scale & Rhythm This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages.
10. Now in private beta – Typecast: Design with web fonts, in the browser.
11. Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography – video
12. Robustness Principle (Postel’s Law): Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept.
13. “Software, like all technologies, is inherently political. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators.” @adactio
14. “Solve real problems” is a design principle of the HTML5. You’d be surprised at the number of W3C working groups working on largely theoretical problems.
15. Metcalfe’s Law: So many people are on Facebook because so many people are on Facebook.
16. An Event Apart: Design Principles – December 12, 2011 by Luke Wroblewski: In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco CA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future.
17. Respond.js by Scott Jehl on Github. A fast, lightweight (3kb minified / 1kb gzipped) script to enable responsive web designs in browsers that don’t support CSS3 Media Queries – in particular, Internet Explorer 8 and under.
18. An Event Apart: Dimensions of Good Experience: “at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Alexa Andrezejewski shared ten principles from urban design that provided unique lenses for evaluating and thinking about mobile and web user experience designs.” Luke Wroblewski’s notes on the session.
19. AEA Playlist on Last.fm
20. AEA Playlist on Rdio
21. Stay in the loop! Follow An Event Apart on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook, or subscribe to our mailing list.
22. CSS: Our Best Practices Are Killing Us – Luke Wroblewski reviews Nicole Sullivan’s presentation
23. Bootstrap – toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. Includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
24. An Event Apart: A Content Strategy Roadmap: In her presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical web design workflow. Notes by @lukew.
25. Watch the Madmanimation CSS3 animation demo. (Requires Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or IE10.)
26. Invision: “UX prototyping made beautiful” via @aarron
27. Mad Men animated GIFs via @malarkey
28. An Event Apart: From Idea to Interface: @lukew captures highlights from Aarron Walters’s inspiring presentation.
29. An Event Apart: A Content Strategy Roadmap: In her presentation at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical web design workflow. Notes by @lukew.
30. Foundation: rapid prototyping tool (via @aarron)
31. Design Personas measured in aarron’s talk
32. FREE YOUR DATA! The Exporter frees liberates your content from Twitter, Gowalla, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+.
33. “Content isn’t copy. ‘Content first’ isn’t ‘copy first.’” @halvorson #contentfirst #cs #aea
34. AEA CONTENT STRATEGY RESOURCES from Kristina Halvorson
35. Back button predicts failure: clickstreams with one back button. @jmspool
36. Pro tip: Your Search logs contain the trigger words your pages are missing. Plug the trigger word from your referrer log onto the page it led the user to, and your users will stop using Search. @jmspool
37. Content chunks are when your editor stays out too late. – @lukew, Day 3
38. Audience Member: Where do responsive design and mobile first meet? Luke Wroblewski: On Jeffrey Zeldman’s bookshelf.
39. The Secret Lives of Links: Luke Wroblewski summarizes a brilliant presentation by Jared Spool at AEA San Francisco.
40. Content First: Luke summarizes the wonderful talk by Kristina Halvorson.

HERE I AM at the Palace on Market Street for another thrilling installment of An Event Apart.

An Event Apart San Francisco features twelve great speakers and sessions. Following the two-day conference comes an intense learning session on Mobile Web Design led by Luke Wroblewski (author, Web Form Design).

Starting Monday, December 12, 2011, follow the live Twitter stream on A FEED APART, the official feed aggregator for An Event Apart.

Hum along to the interstitial AEA Playlist on Last.fm or Rdio.

Stay in the loop! Follow An Event Apart on Twitter or Facebook, or subscribe to our mailing list.

ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS of the second annual 10K Apart contest (“Inspire the web with just 10K”) presented by MIX Online and An Event Apart.

Responsive apps under 10K

Last year’s 10K Apart challenged readers to create the best application they could using no more than 10K of images, scripts, and markup. We wanted to see what you could do with HTML5, CSS3, and web fonts, and you blew us away.

For this year’s contest, we asked you to step up your game by not only awing us with brilliant (and brilliantly designed) apps built using less than 10K of web standards and imagery, but we also insisted you make those awesome apps fully responsive.

(If you found this page by accident, responsive design accommodates today’s dizzying array of notebooks, tablets, smartphones, laptops, and big-screen desktops—and anticipates tomorrow’s—via fluid design experiences that squash and stretch and swell and shrink and always look like ladies. Ethan Marcotte pioneered this design approach, which takes standards-based progressive enhancement to the next level, and which achieves its magic via fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. But I digress.)

We worried. Oh, how we worried.

We worried that demanding responsive design on top of our already tough list of requirements would kill the contest. That it was just too hard. Maybe even impossible. Silly us.

Once again, you overwhelmed us with your out-of-the-box creativity, dazzling technical chops, and inspiring can-do spirit. During the few weeks of our call for entries, people and teams from 36 countries produced 128 astonishingly excellent apps. With that many great entries, judging was a beast! Fortunately we had excellent help. But enough about us. On to the winners!

Grand Prize Winner

The mysteriously named L&L has won the 10K Apart Grand Prize for Bytes Jack, an HTML Blackjack game that is totally fun to play—unless you have a problem with gambling, in which case, try one of the fantastic runners-up: Space Mahjong by Toby Yun and Kyoungwoo Ham (Best Technical Achievement); Sproutable, by Kevin Thompson (Best Design); or PHRASE: Make Lovely Circular Patterns Based on Text Phrases (People’s Choice), by Andy Gott.

L&L will receive a paid pass to any An Event Apart conference event, a $3000 Visa Gift Card, and copies of Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design and Aaron Gustafson’s Adaptive Web Design.

In addition to these four winners, there are twelve honorable mentions that will delight any visitor—and astonish any web designer-developer who tries to figure out how these wizards worked their magic in under 10K. See all the winners or view the entire gallery and decide whom you would have awarded best in show.

P.S. We love you

An Event Apart thanks our hard-working, insanely inspired friends at Mix Online.

The 10K Apart hearkens back to Stewart Butterfield’s 5k Contest of yesteryear. Back then, Stewart challenged web designer-developers to create something magical using less than 5K of code and images—and the community responded with a flowering of creativity and awesome proto-web-apps. Stewart, we salute you!

OCTOBER brings the smells of burning leaves, the warmth of hot cider, and much speaking for yours truly:

On October 12, I’ll deliver the keynote address at Do It With Drupal 2011 at the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn Heights, sharing the stage with the likes of Josh Clark, Angela Byron, and Jeff Robbins.

Then it’s off to beautiful Richmond, Virginia on the 13th for EdUI 2011, the conference for web professionals who serve institutions of learning, where I’ll keynote again and join such leaders as Margot Bloomstein, Brian Fling, Kyle Soucy, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

October 24–26 will find me in America’s capital for An Event Apart DC: three days of design, code, and content with a veritable constellation of web design stars, including a one-day learning session on Accessible Web Design led by Derek Featherstone of Further Ahead.

You can follow my speaking schedule or, better yet, come see me! I’ll keep a light in the window for you.

AEA Minneapolis Sketchnotes by Mike Rohde.

Jared Spool Dances to Beyonce! Photo by John Morrison. As seen in An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011 Flickr group pool.

IN HER PRESENTATION at An Event Apart in Atlanta, GA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical Web design worksflow. Here’s my notes from her talk: LukeW | An Event Apart: A Content Strategy Roadmap.

“IN HER PRESENTATION at An Event Apart in Atlanta, GA 2011 Sarah Parmenter discussed how principles from human psychology can reframe how we think about Web Design. Here’s my notes from her talk:” An Event Apart: Crafting the User Experience.

IN HIS TALK at An Event Apart in Atlanta, GA 2011, Jason Santa Maria outlined the current state of web fonts and how to approach typography online. Here’s my notes from his talk: LukeW | An Event Apart: On Web Typography.

YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.

Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.

The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.

Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.

I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:

• An Event Apart Atlanta three-day schedule
• A Feed Apart – live tweeting, Monday through Wednesday
• AEA Atlanta Flickr Group
• An Event Apart Facebook page

WALT DISNEY AND ME, a typical day, running Happy Cog, building An Event Apart, what’s next for A Book Apart, and more: DIBI, the design/build conference, presents An interview with Jeffrey Zeldman for your pleasure.

(I swear it’s a coincidence the last two posts have begun with inset photos of yours truly.)