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

Filed under: An Event Apart, Announcements, Appearances, apps, Atlanta, Authoring, Best practices, business, cities, client services, clients, Code, Community, Compatibility, conferences, content, content strategy, creativity, CSS, CSS3, Design, Designers, development, editorial, Education, eric meyer, events, Fonts, Formats, glamorous, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, industry, Information architecture, interface, IXD, Jeremy Keith, Platforms, Real type on the web, Redesigns, Responsive Web Design, Scripting, speaking, spec, Standards, State of the Web, The Profession, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, webtype, work, Working, Zeldman

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Meeting of the Minds: Ethan Marcotte and AEA attendee discuss the wonders of CSS3. Photo by the incomparable Jim Heid.

THE SHOW IS OVER, but the memories, write-ups, demos, and links remain. Enjoy!

An Event Apart Boston 2011 group photo pool

Speakers, attendees, parties, and the wonders of Boston, captured by those who were there.

What Every Designer Should Know (a)

Jeremy Keith quite effectively live-blogs my opening keynote on the particular opportunities of Now in the field of web design, and the skills every designer needs to capitalize on the moment and make great things.

The Password Anti-Pattern

Related to my talk: Jeremy Keith’s original write-up on a notorious but all-too-common practice. If your boss or client tells you to design this pattern, just say no. Design that does not serve users does not serve business.

What Every Designer Should Know (b)

“In his opening keynote … Jeffrey Zeldman talked about the skills and opportunities that should be top of mind for everyone designing on the Web today.” Luke Wroblewski’s write-up.

Whitney Hess: Design Principles — The Philosophy of UX

“As a consultant, [Whitney] spends a lot of time talking about UX and inevitably, the talk turns to deliverables and process but really we should be establishing a philosophy about how to treat people, in the same way that visual design is about establishing a philosophy about how make an impact. Visual design has principles to achieve that: contrast, emphasis, balance, proportion, rhythm, movement, texture, harmony and unity.” In this talk, Whitney proposed a set of 10 principles for UX design.

Veerle Pieters: The Experimental Zone

Live blogging by Jeremy Keith. Veerle, a noted graphic and interaction designer from Belgium, shared her process for discovering design through iteration and experimentation.

Luke Wroblewski: Mobile Web Design Moves

Luke’s live awesomeness cannot be captured in dead written words, but Mr Keith does a splendid job of quickly sketching many of the leading ideas in this key AEA 2011 talk.

See also: funky dance moves with Luke Wroblewski, a very short video I captured as Luke led the crowd in the opening moves of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (a)

“The next talk here at An Event Apart in Boston is one I’ve really, really, really been looking forward to: it’s a presentation by my hero Ethan Marcotte.”

Ethan Marcotte: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow (b)

Ethan’s amazing talk—a key aspect of design in 2011 and AEA session of note—as captured by the great Luke Wroblewski.

An Event Apart: The Secret Lives of Links—Jared Spool

“In his presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jared Spool detailed the importance and role of links on Web pages.” No writer can capture Jared Spool’s engaging personality or the quips that produce raucous laughter throughout his sessions, but Luke does an outstanding job of noting the primary ideas Jared shares in this riveting and highly useful UX session.

An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays—Jeremy Keith

Luke W: “In his All Our Yesterdays presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages.”

Although it is hard to pick highlights among such great speakers and topics, this talk was a highlight for me. As in, it blew my mind. Several people said it should be a TED talk.

An Event Apart: From Idea to Interface—Aarron Walter

Luke: “In his Idea to Interface presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Aarron Walter encouraged Web designers and developers to tackle their personal projects by walking through examples and ways to jump in. Here are my notes from his talk.”

Links and Resources from “From Idea to Interface”

Compiled by the speaker, links include Design Personas Template and Example, the story behind the illustrations in the presentation created by Mike Rhode, Dribble, Huffduffer, Sketchboards, Mustache for inserting data into your prototypes, Keynote Kung Fu, Mocking Bird, Yahoo Design Patterns, MailChimp Design Pattern Library, Object Oriented CSS by Nicole Sullivan and more!

An Event Apart: CSS3 Animations—Andy Clarke

“In his Smoke Gets In Your Eyes presentation at An Event Apart in Boston, MA 2011 Andy Clarke showcased what is possible with CSS3 animations using transitions and transforms in the WebKit browser.” Write-up by the legendary Luke Wroblewski.

Madmanimation

The “Mad Men” opening titles re-created entirely in CSS3 animation. (Currently requires Webkit browser, e.g. Safari, Chrome.)

CSS3 Animation List

Anthony Calzadilla, a key collaborator on the Mad Men CSS3 animation, showcases his works.

Box Shadow Curl

Pure CSS3 box-shadow page curl effect. Mentioned during Ethan Marcotte’s Day 3 session on exploring CSS3.

Multiple CSS Transition Durations

Fascinating article by Anton Peck (who attended the show). Proposed: a solution to a key problem with CSS transitions. (“Even now, my main issue with transitions is that they use the same time-length value for the inbound effect as they do the outbound. For example, when you create a transition on an image with a 1-second duration, you get that length of time for both mousing over, and mousing away from the object. This type of behavior should be avoided, for the sake of the end-user!”)

Everything You Wanted to Know About CSS3 Gradients

Ethan Marcotte: “Hello. I am here to discuss CSS3 gradients. Because, let’s face it, what the web really needed was more gradients.”

Ultimate CSS3 Gradient Generator

Like it says.

Linear Gradients Generator

By the incomparable John Allsopp.

These sessions were not captured

Some of our best talks were not captured by note-takers, at least not to my knowledge. They include:

1. Eric Meyer: CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook
2. Mark Boulton: Outing the Mind: Designing Layouts That Think for You
3. Jeff Veen: Disaster, DNA, and the Fathomless Depth of the Web

It’s possible that the special nature of these presentations made them impossible to capture in session notes. (You had to be there.)

There are also no notes on the two half-day workshop sessions, “Understand HTML5 With Jeremy Keith,” and “Explore CSS3 With Ethan Marcotte.”

What have I missed?

Attendees and followers, below please add the URLs of related educational links, write-ups, and tools I’ve missed here. Thanks!

Filed under: An Event Apart, Archiving, Boston, Career, cities, Code, Community, conferences, content, creativity, CSS, CSS3, Design, Designers, development, Education, events, Fonts, glamorous, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, industry, Information architecture, IXD, Layout, Marketing, Markup, people, photography, Real type on the web, The Profession, This never happens to Gruber, Typekit, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, Websites, webtype, Zeldman

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From the floor of An Event Apart Seattle 2011:

“Mobile is huge. The iPhone, iPad, and Android are huge. On the one hand, they are standards-facing, because they all support HTML5 and CSS3, so you can create great mobile experiences using web standards. You can create apps using web standards. On the other hand, there is also the temptation to go a proprietary route. In a strange way, although the browsers are much more standards compliant, it seems like we are redoing the browser war. Only now, it’s not the browser wars, it’s platform wars.”

Video interview, plus transcript: Interview with Jeffrey Zeldman on the State of Web Design. Thank you, Michael Slater.

Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, An Event Apart, better-know-a-speaker, Code, Community, conferences, content strategy, Design, Designers, DWWS, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, industry, Interviews, ipad, iphone, IXD, Standards, State of the Web, The Essentials, The Profession, type, Typekit, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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SARAH PARMENTER (@sazzy, sazzy.co.uk) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 44, available for your listening and dancing pleasure at 5by5.tv/bigwebshow/44.

Sarah owns You Know Who, a small design studio based in Leigh-on-Sea, specializing in the User Interface Design of websites, iPhone, and iPad applications.

Her wide-ranging discussion with co-host Dan Benjamin and me includes the thin line between sharing and oversharing on Twitter, yourself as your brand, the virtues of smallness and honesty, coping with stalkers and sexism, running iOS workshops, native vs. web design, the connection between acting and client services, and much more.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Filed under: Big Web Show, Design, Designers, development, The Big Web Show

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HEY, YOU WITH THE STARS in your eyes. Yes, you, the all too necessary SXSW Interactive attendee. Got questions about the present and future of web design and publishing for me or the illustrious panelists on Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel at SXSW Interactive 2011? You do? Bravo! Post them on Twitter using hashtag #jzsxsw and we’ll answer the good ones at 5:00 PM in Big Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center.

Topics include platform wars (native, web, and hybrid, or welcome back to 1999), web fonts, mobile is the new widescreen, how to succeed in the new publishing, responsive design, HTML5, Flash, East Coast West Coast beefs, whatever happened to…?, and many, many more.

Comments are off here so you’ll post your questions on Twitter.

The panel will be live sketched and live recorded for later partial or full broadcast via sxsw.com. In-person attendees, arrive early for best seats. Don’t eat the brown acid.

Filed under: Announcements, Appearances, Authoring, Best practices, Brands, Design, Designers, development, E-Books, editorial, events, glamorous, HTML5, industry, Interviews, Luls, Microauthoring, Microblogging, microformats, Micropublishing, Molehill, New Riders, Platforms, plugins, podcasts, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Responsive Web Design, software, Standards, State of the Web, Tempest, The Big Web Show, This never happens to Gruber, twitter, type, Typekit, Urbanism, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Websites, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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BRIAN ALVEY (home, Twitter) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 39, recording live Thursday, February 16, at 12:00 PM Eastern at 5by5.tv/live.

Brian is CEO of Crowd Fusion, a publishing platform that combines popular applications like blogging, wikis, tagging and workflow management, and a leader in the content management world. He co-founded Weblogs, Inc.—home to Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW and more—and built the Blogsmith platform, both of which were acquired by Aol and are essential to their current strategy. Brian has been putting big brands on the web since 1995 when he designed the first TV Guide website and helped BusinessWeek leap from Aol to the web.

Brian built database-driven web applications and content management systems for many large companies in the 1990′s including Intel, J.D. Edwards, Deloitte & Touche and The McGraw-Hill Companies. His 1999 Tech-Engine site was a “skinnable HotJobs” which powered over 200 online career centers including XML.com, Perl.com, O’Reilly & Associates Network, DevShed, and Computer User magazine.

He has been the art director of three print magazines (I met him in 1995 when he was art director for “Net Surfer” or something like that) and was the Chief Technology Officer of Rising Tide Studios where he developed The Venture Reporter Network, which is now a Dow Jones property.

In 2003, Brian invented and launched Blogstakes, a sweepstakes application for the blogging community. He is a former Happy Cog partner of mine; at Happy Cog, Brian built content management systems for customers including Capgemini, A List Apart, and the Kansas City Chiefs. He was also the creator and host of the Meet The Makers conference, a series of talk show-style events that were so compelling, they helped inspired me to create An Event Apart with Eric Meyer.

And I’ll stop there. Ladies and gentlemen, a legend and true creative force in this medium. Please join us at tomorrow on 5by5.tv/live for a lively and wide-ranging discussion.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

The Big Web Show #39: Brian Alvey.

Filed under: Applications, apps, architecture, art direction, Authoring, Best practices, Brands, business, Community, content, Damned Fine Journalism, Design, Designers, development, Happy Cog™, Journalism at its Finest, Microblogging, Platforms, State of the Web, The Big Web Show

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JASON SANTA MARIA (website, Twitter) will be our guest Thursday December 9th, 2010 during Episode No. 30 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), co-hosted by Dan Benjamin and recorded at 1:00 PM Eastern before a live internet audience.

Jason is a self-described Graphic Designer living in sunny Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder and principal of the design studio Mighty, creative director for Typekit, a faculty member in the MFA Interaction Design program at SVA, co-founder of A Book Apart (Brief Books for People Who Make Websites), vice president of AIGA/NY, founder of Typedia, a shared encyclopedia of typefaces online, and creative director for A List Apart for people who make websites. A former designer and creative director at Happy Cog, Jason has worked for clients such as AIGA, The Chicago Tribune, Housing Works, Miramax Films, The New York Stock Exchange, PBS, The United Nations, and WordPress, “focusing on designing websites that maintain a balance of beauty and usability.”

The Big Web Show records live every Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern on live.5by5.tv. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Filed under: Big Web Show, Design, Designers, Jason Santa Maria, The Big Web Show

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THE UNDER-KNOWN HAVE EVERYTHING going for them except recognition. Let’s do something about that. Name talented web designers who deserve wider attention. Include at least one URL and a Twitter-length comment as to why their work merits wider study. Post to this thread. Thanks.

Filed under: Acclaim, Deserving, Design, Designers, Web Design

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Attention, web design geeks, contest fans, standards freaks, HTML5ophiles, CSSistas, grammarians, bookworms, UXers, designers, developers, and budding Haikuists. Can you do this?

Do not tell me I
Am source of your browser woes.
Template validates.


Write a web standards haiku (like that one), and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #bbd4 between now and November 30th—which happens to be the fourth international Blue Beanie Day in support of Web Standards.

Winning haikus will receive free books from Peachpit/New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) and A Book Apart.

Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition and I will determine the winners.

Enter as many haikus as you like. Sorry, only one winning entry per person. Now get out there and haiku your heart out!

See you on Blue Beanie Day.

P.S. An ePub version of Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition is coming soon to a virtual bookstore near you. Watch this space.

Filed under: Blue Beanie Day, books, Browsers, creativity, CSS, CSS3, Design, Designers, DOM, DWWS, E-Books, editorial, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, industry, tweets, twitter, Voting, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webtype, XHTML, Zeldman

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“Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a newer, more mature, more ubiquitous web?”

—The Future of Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

Originally written for .net magazine, Issue No. 206, published 17 August in UK and this month in the US in “Practical Web Design” Magazine. Now you can read the article even if you can’t get your hands on these print magazines.

See also: I Guest-Edit .net magazine.

Filed under: Accessibility, Adobe, Advocacy, Apple, Applications, apps, architecture, Authoring, Best practices, Browsers, business, Code, content strategy, CSS3, Design, Designers, development, editorial, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, industry, javascript, Platforms, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Standards, State of the Web, The Essentials, The Profession, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webtype, Zeldman

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