Category: events

Places to go, people to see. Conferences, seminars, festivals.

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart events industry people work

Of writing and rosters

Events called me away, but I return, bringing news.

Tantek Çelik joins An Event Apart NYC roster
Tantek Çelik has joined the roster of An Event Apart NYC, where he will bring unparalleled insights on microformats and web standards to Code Day, July 11. Tantek is chief technologist at Technorati, co-founder of the microformats movement, creator of the Tasman rendering engine and the Box Model Hack, a contributor to the CSS and XHTML specs, and more. Come meet and learn from the man Meyer and Zeldman call “Master.”
A List Apart 216: Making Time, Sharpening Skills
Issue 216 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, features great articles from Derek Powazek and Ryan Carson. Mr Powazek’s Calling All Designers: Learn to Write! explains why it’s important for user-interface designers to sharpen up their writing skills. And Mr Carson’s Four-Day Week Challenge offers an approach to getting more done in less time. It’s a treat to publish Powazek again and a delight to welcome Carson.
Categories
An Event Apart cities Design events Standards

An Event Apart New York City

Join Adam Greenfield, Aaron Gustafson, Jason Santa Maria, Khoi Vinh, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman for two days of design and code in the heart of New York City.

July 10 & 11, 2006
Scandinavia House
58 Park Avenue at 38th Street
New York City 10016

Register before June 9th to save $100 off the price of this special, two-day event.

Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart cities Design events Standards

An Event Apart Chicago

Announcing An Event Apart Chicago. Join Eric Meyer, Jason Santa Maria, Jim Coudal and Zeldman in the windy city for a mind-blowing day of insights into design, development, and how to stay happy running a creative business. Register now to reserve your seat and save $50 off the admission price.

Friday, June 2nd, 2006
9:00 – 5:00
The Gleacher Center
450 North Cityfront Plaza Drive
Chicago, IL 60611-4316
(Map)

The Speakers

An Event Apart offers the opportunity to meet and learn from creative and technical stars who influence the direction of our industry:

  • Jim Coudal runs Coudal Partners, a design firm in Chicago. They work for companies and they build companies, like Jewelboxing, The Show, and The Deck. Before making websites, films, and real-world products, Jim Coudal was an ad creative director. His insights into conceiving and selling great ideas are not to be missed.
  • Jason Santa Maria has been recognized for designing stylistic and imaginative (yet also usable and effective) web interfaces. He recently won acclaim for the A List Apart redesign, whose secrets he’ll share with attendees.
  • Eric Meyer has conducted complex standards-based makeovers and led intensive multi-day training sessions for such clients as Apple Computer, America On-Line, Yahoo!, Macromedia, Wells Fargo Bank, Cornell University, and others. No one has a deeper or more practical grasp of CSS; no one can teach it like Eric.
  • Founder of A List Apart and Happy Cog, former leader of The Web Standards Project, and author of Designing With Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman helped bring standards to browsers and the design community. He serves clients from Ad Age and Amnesty International USA to Lexico (Dictionary.com) and the United Nations Womens Development Fund.

The Space

The Gleacher Center is 50,000 square feet of high-tech conference space, smack in the heart of Chicago’s business district, blocks from the Loop and steps from Magnificent Mile shopping, restaurants, and hotels. An Event Apart will unfold in one of its spacious, uncrowded lecture halls, where every seat has plenty of room and every view is a good one.

Gourmet lunch and other catering throughout the day will include vegetarian options. Spectacular river and lake views in the separate dining lounge will make you forget how good the food is.

The Sponsors

Lunch is courtesy of Media Temple (“set your sites on us”), web host to the stars. We thank them for their continued support. AIGA Press and New Riders (“Voices That Matter”) will also be on hand to make sure attendees have reading materials to stay mentally stimulated after the event.

And speaking of mental stimulation, new sponsor Jewelboxing will throw a post-event Happy Hour And A Half at a Chicago pub. Schmooze, hobnob, network, or beg for a job while enjoying free cocktails. Further details will come soon.

A good time will be had!

The Deal

Our Philadelphia and Atlanta events sold out fast and we were unable to accommodate many who wished to attend. Chicago, given its size and the depth of its design and user experience communities, will sell out even faster. Seating is limited and availability is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Register during our Early Bird special to save your seat and shave $50 off the price of admission. The full day, including tasty catered lunch and goodies, costs $549. But if you register by May 1st, you can attend for $499. See you in Chicago!

Categories
events glamorous industry Standards

Unmixed

A few weeks back, Microsoft’s Robert Scoble invited me to join Bill Gates, Kelly Goto, Roger Black, Lynda Weinman and other luminaries at Mix 06, a Microsoft-hosted “72-hour conversation” that wraps today in Las Vegas. Purpose of event: to “mix the next web now.”

It was like receiving an invitation from the emperor.

You may think “Web 2.0” and the “next web” are meaningful, industry-shaping concepts, or you may view them as marketing spin. You may trust that Microsoft wishes to be a citizen of the emerging state or suspect that it wants to be king. Whatever you hope or fear, and whatever value you place on such gabfests, to participate would surely be to learn. Plus you’d get to rub elbows with pirates and pundits from Tim O’Reilly and Marc Canter to Molly Holzschlag and some of the big brains behind eBay and Amazon.

Yet after at least two minutes of agonizing inner debate, I declined Microsoft’s invitation. Timing, which is also the secret of comedy, was the problem. Mix 06 followed SXSW too closely. As a business owner, I could afford to stay away from my agency for one week, but not for two.

Although a lot of designers, writers, and technologists seem to have been able to hopscotch from Austin to Vegas without so much as checking their office mailbox, I couldn’t.

Here in New York City there were jobs to finish and meetings to attend. There were clients to see and accountants and attorneys to see and pay. In Las Vegas they might be polishing up HTML 6 or figuring out how to make readers write all the content and pay for it, but back in my studio I had voice mails and RFPs and PDFs and Photoshop comps to sort through. (Just like you!)

Eric Meyer, one of the smartest people I have ever known, is at Mix 06 and has recorded some impressions, the most designer-relevant of which concern how much more CSS work Microsoft plans to do on IE7. (Answer: none.)

There is also a photo of Eric Meyer excessively enjoying free Internet Explorer stickers and bottled water.

Simon St Laurent, another of the smartest people I have ever known, has written a next web column on why the XML web, semantic web, and services web haven’t happened yet (and may never) while AJAX/”Web 2.0″ has, kind-of. Reading Simon’s column might almost be as good as attending Mix 06.

And Tim O’Reilly has blogged what he was planning to talk about while sharing a stage with Bill Gates. (And if I were sharing a stage with Bill Gates you can bet I’d blog it, too. After all, here I am doing nothing and getting a nice post out of it.)

There’s also a post and video of the actual conversation between Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly, although, oddly, the video is not in QuickTime format.

Tim O’Reilly starts the conversation by telling Bill Gates how a Tim O’Reilly blog post launched Web 2.0 and led thousands of people to buy and sell stuff. That is as far as I got watching the video.

I guess if you are talking to Bill Gates you have to tell him who you are, even if you are Tim O’Reilly.

Well, anyway, I didn’t go to Mix 06, so I have lost untold thousands of pundit karma points. But this morning I read Hippos Go Berserk! to my kid. And even though we have read that book together at least 562 times, she found it fresh and exciting and new. And so did I.

Good stories stay new.

Fascinating and industry-changing revelations are likely emerging from Mix 06. I’m a bit sorry to miss the first utterances of them. But however brilliant such revelations may be, and however far their ripples spread, my web will not change. Whatever the pundits and pirates may say this week, my web is about content.

No matter what’s said at any conference, my web will continue to be about good writing and good design. Because that’s what I care about. And your web is your web because you care about what you care about. And whatever that is, there’s plenty of it to be found or made on this big web we share.

No matter how many new marketing phrases and acronyms emerge (some even with concepts attached), and no matter how much money some people make or lose betting on them (and the choice of Las Vegas as venue is telling), what I value does not change.

And that’s what I learned at Mix 06.

Categories
Accessibility Design development events industry Standards writing

Fine Corinthian Leather

Sophia Marie Dominey
A very healthy eight pounds, eleven ounces.
Dissecting The Process
or: How an A List Apart Illustration Comes Together, by the illustrator himself, Kevin Cornell.
simplifier lab
Phoebe Espiritu’s fine blog on the quest for simplicity and minimalism in design.
Rogue Librarian: SXSWi Takeaways
Carrie Bickner Zeldman’s writeup of her SXSW Interactive panel on Digital Preservation and Blogs. See also:
Digital Preservation Panel at SXSWi
Librarian Avengers’s notes on the same panel. See also:
Digital Preservation: What and Whom Are We Saving?
Bill Anderson’s notes on the same panel.
Vantan.org
Personal site of Vanessa Tan, devoted Netizen and musician, blogging from Singapore.
Aspen Design Summit
AIGA-sponsored retreat.
This is Powazek
Beauteous and well-written site of cofounder of JPG Magazine (and creator of bunches of other fab web content, none of which I need to tell you, ’cause you know)
Behind the WaSP Redesign
Designer Clarke discusses creative process. See also:
WaSP Annual General Meeting
Transcribed by Muffin Research Labs.
Does Your Blog Have a Business?
SXSW Interactive panel transcribed by Auscillate.com.
CSS Floatutorial
In CSS layout, float is all. Maxdesign’s step-by-step guide shows how to float elements such as images, drop caps, and next and back buttons to create image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.
CSS Tweak
Now with in-page Help! Andy Peatling’s free web-based tool optimizes your CSS files. “It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.”
A brief history of the “clenched fist” image
Like it says.
GrayBit v0.5 Beta
“GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.”
Interior Desecrations
Horrible home design from the classic halls of Lileks.
George Bush: I Don’t Know Much About Designing Rugs
In Design Observer.
Accessible Web Developers
A public group at ma.gnolia. Creating accessible (and mobile-friendly) sites.
Brit Pack
Proud members.
More Ma.gnolia Marks
See all 345 (and counting) of Apartness’s bookmarks.
Categories
cities events glamorous industry work

SXSW III: Things That Were Said

  1. Jason Fried, the president of 37signals, had just finished speaking to an admirer.

    “It’s always guys,” he said wistfully of his fan base. “Never women.”

    Fried’s colleague, Jim Coudal, said, “Women come up to me all the time. They say, ‘oh my God, do you know Jason Fried? My brother LOVES him!’”

  2. Baby A__ , designer Jason Santa Maria and I were leaving everyone’s favorite egg-and-bean breakfast joint. We paused while Baby A__ and I negotiated the fine points of stroller and sippie cup maintenance.

    A guy with just a touch of yesterday’s ashtray about him, one arm draped over a parking meter, eyed Jason Santa Maria suspiciously.

    “You a Jew?” he asked.

    Somehow it didn’t sound friendly.

    Jason, who is of Italian American descent, answered truthfully in the negative.

    “Have a good day,” I said to the guy, pushing the stroller briskly out of his universe.

  3. A bunch of us had been dawdling in a sunbaked courtyard and now I was alone and late for the green room. Still wearing jet-black sunglasses against the Austin glare outside, I rode the long escalator through the airconditioned cool. Up, up, up.

    I was riding up. Others were riding down. My face was turned vaguely in the direction of the people coming down, but I wasn’t looking at them, and wouldn’t have recognized anyone through my dark glasses even if I had been paying attention to them.

    Suddenly, one of the people coming down was in my face, leaning across the up-down barrier to confront me.

    “Ya know me!” she shouted angrily. “I’m Mary!” [Not her real name.]

    It took all of a cartoon moment. By the time I realized what had happened, Mary [not her real name] was twenty feet below me and about to turn onto a lower escalator.

    I could see by her gestures that she was furiously complaining to a companion about my perceived rudeness in not embracing her with flowers and song, or at least with a hello, as our bodies passed in the vast anonymous convention center space. That I might not have seen her hadn’t occurred to her.

    Off guard and off balance, I tried to rectify a social mistake I hadn’t made by calling down to her rapidly disappearing body.

    “Hi, Mary!” [not her real name] I trilled down the escalator, girlishly waving a hand in her direction. My voice was chirpy and strange to me, my gesture artificial and nanocenturies too late.

    So now there are two dolls in hell.

    There’s the Mary doll [not her real name] that breathes dragon fire and roars, “Ya know me! I’m Mary!”

    And there’s the Jeffrey doll, waving girlishly down the vastness of an endless escalator shaft.

Categories
events

SXSW II

Alice, asleep at her solitaire table, dreamed the cards had come to life. A similar surrealism pervades SXSW, where thousands of your favorite websites become friendly, noisy flesh.

The fun at SXSW Interactive is people. Every year there are more of them, from more places around the world. From Sydney and Stockholm and Tokyo they come, as well as from Denver and Dallas. Each year you ask yourself how much bigger SXSW can get before it starts to suck. Yet each year as it gets bigger it gets better.

This is, of course, a good time to be of the web, and so a special energy buzzes the halls and spills from the stages.

The people provide the kick, the buzz, the juice, but the panels and keynotes aren’t half bad either.

Sunday at 5:00 I led a session on How to Roll Your Own Web Conference. It went well and seemed to provide value, thanks entirely to my wonderful panelists.

(I have found that if you stack your panel with smart people with diverse backgrounds and points of view, the hour takes care of itself and everyone, including you, learns something. This is also the way I run Happy Cog: build a small team of talented people with complementary skill sets, articulate the problem you need them to solve, and stand back.)

Monday morning I’ll have the pleasure of contributing to DL Byron’s panel, Does Your Blog Have a Business?. I’ll also do a book signing and contribute a few nostalgic meanderings to the WaSP Annual Meeting. (It will be the first WaSP meeting I’ve attended since retiring from the group in 2002.)

The session I wish I could see is Carrie’s on Digital Preservation and Blogs:

The emergence of the early web, and of blogging, stands to be like early film; if the preservation of blogs does not begin soon, most of the initial output of this new medium and genre will be lost, and future understanding will be limited to the scraps that survive.This fall, a group of students in the Library and Information School at Pratt worked on a small project to preserve a handful of blogs. Join us as we discuss the technical, social and legal problems posed by this endeavor.

Anyone who has worked long and hard on a blog, zine, or web product realizes how ephemeral they are. (We are Ozymandias.) Preserving blogs is a multilayered task involving curatorial and editorial acumen, systems and programming skills, an understanding of copyright law, and more. If the preservationists do their job right, people 25 years from now will have some inkling of what we have created in this time. If they get it wrong, our work turns to sand.

See you in the hallways, comrades.

Categories
events

SXSW I

Our daughter is a radiant being of pure light. She is also a 17-month-old kid. Fellow SXSW speakers and panelists, if I’m not in the audience for your panel today, it’s not because I don’t love you, it’s because I’m off taking care of little A__.

And if I don’t show up at a dinner or party, it’s because the joint serves hooch, and the State of Texas has laws forbidding little kids from entering such places. We learned about these laws last night when we were unable to join a group for dinner. Ended up in an ice cream parlor. The state frowns at exposing kids to the sins of the bars, but winks at gluttony.

Categories
events

Panelicious

It’s time to pimp my panel at SXSW Interactive ’06:

ROLL YOUR OWN WEB CONFERENCE

Sunday 12 March, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm, Ballroom F

The Pitch

Should you start a conference? How would you do it? What are the risks and rewards? Successful conference creators will share tips on booking speakers and space, getting the word out, spending and making money, and above all delivering value.

The Poop

I picked people from Canada, Australia, and the U.S. who’ve started their own conferences and asked them to be ready for a no-holds-barred session telling why and how they do it.

The Panelists

  • Jason Fried is the president of 37signals, a Chicago-based purveyor of fine web-based collaboration tools for the small business and freelancer market.
  • Molly Golightly has been an organizer of the volunteer-run Webzine conference series since its founding in 1998. Her commitment to Webzine is to bring topics and people you won’t find elsewhere to the stage.
  • After years of music, graphic design, and web development projects, Bruce Livingstone started iStockphoto, “the world’s best royalty-free photo agency.”
  • Maxine Sherrin is a co-convenor of Web Essentials. She believes in bringing people together at events not just so they can learn, but so they can build an industry, resist isolation, and make real connections that will survive the tyranny of geography.
  • Eric Meyer is a globally recognized authority on CSS and web standards. After years of speaking at other people’s events, he co-founded An Event Apart with Jeffrey Zeldman, giving him an eye-opening look at the other side of the conference business.

In other news…

Elsewhere in Conferenceville, An Event Apart Atlanta has sold out.

Categories
An Event Apart Design development events people

Dominey, Santa Maria, join Event Apart roster

It is pure pleasure to announce that famed web designer, developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur Todd Dominey and fast-rising art director/designer/blogger Jason Santa Maria will join Eric Meyer and me on the speaker’s platform at An Event Apart Atlanta.

Todd Dominey is a living preview of tomorrow’s web designer: busy with client services, but also creating his own products; delivering powerful graphic design but always in the context of what the user needs to see; adept at web standards and Flash.

As for Jason Santa Maria, I hired him at Happy Cog and entrusted him with the redesign of A List Apart, so I think he’s pretty good.

Actually, I think Todd Dominey and Jason Santa Maria rock harder than Metallica and am thrilled that we will have them both on our stage. I hope some of you can join us at An Event Apart Atlanta.

  1. Blog post
  2. An Event Apart: Speakers
  3. Todd Dominey mini-bio
  4. Jason Santa Maria mini-bio
  5. Eric Meyer’s website
Categories
Accessibility An Event Apart Design development events Standards

An Event Apart Atlanta

Messieurs Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman are pleased to announce An Event Apart Atlanta:

On 3 April 2006, America’s favorite pastime (designing with web standards) will come to the 755 Club at Turner Field, as the famed ballpark’s spectacularly furnished club hosts An Event Apart Atlanta.

An Event Apart is a concentrated, one-day learning session on modern web design. Check the Event Apart Philadelphia page to get a sense of how the first event, held in the Franklin Institute, went down. Transpose from Philly to Atlanta, think ballpark instead of museum, and you get an inkling of what to expect.

Online registration starts soon; seating will be limited. Subscribe to An Event Apart’s RSS feed to stay ahead of the curve. Can’t make Atlanta? Event Apart seminars in Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles are up next.

Categories
An Event Apart cities Design events film people

A film apart

Couldn’t make it to An Event Apart Philadelphia? Curious about what you missed? Our new, two-minute video reveals all. Well, anyway, it reveals what can be shown in two minutes. Shot on location at The Franklin Institute by filmmaker Ian Corey, it’s packed with thrills, chills, and design geekery.

See Zeldman explain why, the more words you have, the less you communicate. See Eric Meyer unveil the code behind last year’s best web layout. (Okay, so I’m prejudiced.) See Jason Santa Maria squeeze genuine typographic goodness out of two utterly common fonts. See lucky attendees win nifty prizes. See the music, hear the light.

Updated 24 January: SMIL video captioning by Andrew Kirkpatrick. Video playback requires QuickTime 7.

Categories
Design events links people Redesigns Tools

Roadside link jamboree

WHILE I’M WRAPPING Web Design World Boston, here are some links for your pleasure:

In Search of a Perfect Plug-in Technique
First we had Flash embedding the automated way. It worked in all browsers but it didn’t validate. Then came Flash Satay and UFO, FlashObject and Hixie’s nested objects. Which techniques are most accessible and most reliable? Macromedia accessibility expert and occasional A List Apart author Andrew Kirkpatrick checked them all out and drew conclusions worth reading.
gotomobile: the mobile usability and UX blog
In the U.S. a mobile phone is a cell phone for making phone calls. In the rest of the world it’s a rich two-way media device. Starting a year ago, renowned designer Kelly Goto began travelling the world researching how handhelds are used today and discovering the emerging principles of ubiquitous computing. Kelly, who is here lecturing at Web Design World, maintains this mobile usability and user experience blog, to which she posts from her handheld camera/phone/whatever.
Seed Magazine
This beautiful and well-written periodical explores the changing role of science in our global culture. New York’s own Mike Pick and Tim Murtaugh created the clean, elegant, and playful site design (check out the little colored seedlings at the top left).
DropSend
Got big files to share? Files so big you can’t email them? Files too big even for Basecamp hosting and posting? DropSend has you covered. This fresh-off-the-vine web application by Ryan Carson takes ease of use to a new level, working well and simply as advertised. I use it. Try it, you’ll like it.
Folksonomy is such a lonely word
In this New York Times Magazine feature, Daniel H. Pink explains folksonomies to the non-digerati. As most people reading this page know, “folksonomy” is IA Thomas Vander Wal’s 2004 coinage for the tag-powered, communal taxonomies that are not merely changing how websites and web products are structured but how information is perceived and categorized all over.
Greg Storey portfolio
I’ve always thought Greg Storey was a heck of a designer. Now you can more easily see for yourself just how good he is.
Oh, the Plazes you’ll go!
Plazes (beta) is a spanking new web app offering a “grassroot approach to location-aware interaction, using the local network you are connected to as location reference. Plazes allows you to share you location with the people you know and to discover people and plazes around you. It’s the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.” I’m using it right now and it is cool.
Categories
An Event Apart cities Design events people

An Event Apart Philadelphia Postpartum

I returned from An Event Apart Philadelphia with a head full of ideas, inspiration, and snot. Walking the snowy Franklin Parkway at 5:30 am after not sleeping for two nights in a row can give you a heck of a head cold. (It wasn’t nervousness about the show that kept me from sleeping; it was my fourteen-month-old’s nighttime restlessness. Will I take the kid on another business trip? You bet.) Mostly I came home happy to have pulled off our first travelling road show and pleased that it seemed to please most who attended.

Attendees came from as far away as Tokyo and London. There were plenty of locals, too. Philadelphia has a tight and engaged design community — you could see it and feel it.

There were problems. We were promised WI-FI for 150 people and barely had bandwidth for half that many. Some seats were more comfortable than others.

But most of the surprises were pleasant. Every attendee got a free book from New Riders—titles by Dan Cederholm, Hillman Curtis, Steve Krug, Marty Neumeier, Jakob Nielsen, Eric Meyer, and yours truly. Twenty people got free web hosting for a year courtesy of Media Temple. AIGA gave away posters, Pixelworthy gave away drinks. The event would not have been half so good without the caring support of these fine sponsors.

Jon Aldinger, Daniel Mall, Peter Santa Maria, and Rob Weychert provided invaluable ground support on the day of the show and the day before. Filmmaker Ian Corey videotaped the whole day for secret purposes that may be revealed at a later date.

The Philadelphia Standards Organization, blogging live, published the day’s schedule, to which we mostly adhered. In future posts here or at aneventapart.com I may talk more about what we covered and why. For now, I’ll defer to my co-host Eric Meyer, our special guest Jason Santa Maria, and various lovely people who came to the show:

No rest for the wicked

I am now at Web Design World, Boston; tomorrow I’ll keynote on web standards and do a session on the radically under-covered subject of writing as interface design. See some of you here and the rest when I return.

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart Design events people Standards Tools work

ALA 208, AIGA podcasts

Back from Spain, prepping for Philly. An Event Apart is days away!

A List Apart 208

In Issue No. 208 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, we focus on simplicity, both in practice and theory.

Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
by Bert Bos & Håkon Wium Lie
Bert and Håkon gave the world CSS. Now they give us another use for it. Namely, controlling real-world printing jobs. Call it a microformat. An innovation. A heresy. The authors call it “boom!”
Power to the People
by D. Keith Robinson
Your dad doesn’t care about AJAX, Mr Robinson discovers.

More Event Apart AIGA podcasts, Mom!

AIGA, the professional association for design, presents “Talking with Jason Santa Maria: An Event Apart, #04” and “Talking with Zeldman: An Event Apart, #03.”

Each week leading up to An Event Apart Philadelphia, AIGA talks with founders and guest artists about what attendees can expect from the conference. Subscribe to AIGA’s Podcast Directory RSS feed to stay abreast.

This week, AIGA’s Liz Danzico talks with Jason Santa Maria about being An Event Apart’s first guest speaker, his involvement with the first critiques, and upcoming plans for Stan, his virtual persona.