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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Free overnight shipping; a liberal return policy; friendly service: it’s no secret that Zappos.com positions the customer as the cornerstone of their brand promise. Yet despite their success, Zappos.com was a website with a problem: their business growth had outpaced the slowly-evolving aesthetic of their website. While the site enabled customers to make their purchases quickly, it didn’t capture and embrace the hallmarks of the Zappos.com culture. Enter Happy Cog. (Read more.)

Filed under: clients, Design, Happy Cog™, launches, Redesigns, Websites

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In Issue No. 289 of A List Apart, for people who make websites: 90% of web design is redesign. The hardest redesigns are the ones you do for yourself. In this special issue, we look at how two of the great ones handled the challenge of redesigning their own sites.

Erskine Design Redesign

by SIMON COLLISON

In a mere two years, Erskine Design grew from two people working at home into a full-fledged agency of eight, working with major clients. Their website needed to better reflect their achievements, abilities, and team strengths. They also sought to improve the quality of data collected during client inquiries. Simon Collison explores the agency’s thought processes, and the decisions they made as their own client.

Redesigning Your Own Site

by LEA ALCANTARA

Redesigning your freelance website is an exercise in masochism. There are no colleagues to share the pain: It’s just you. As the designer who wrote The Art of Self-Branding, freelancer Lea Alcantara knew her site had to be just right. People were bound to scrutinize any update to the design, and she couldn’t afford to damage her credibility. Follow her process and decide for yourself if she succeeded.

[tags]design, redesign, self-branding, webdesign, alistapart[/tags]

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, Redesigns, Web Design, Websites

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• Blog post template final (with rotation in footer)
• About page template final (with rotation in footer)
• Contact page template final (with yadda, yadda)
• 404 page – my favorite!
• New! 21 May Subscribe page
• New! 21 May Style switcher in footer
• New! 22 May WordPress tout page
• New! 22 May (mt) Media Temple tout page

Note: Top left and top right footer elements rotate. ALA element (top middle) changes every two weeks, upon publication. Bottom three elements are static, at least for now.

Thanks to Mark Huot for the rotation script (same one we use on Happy Cog) and Noel Jackson, Daniel Mall, and Media Temple for the love and support.

A couple more templates to go, and then we can build this thing. Can’t wait.

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, design, redesign, designingfromthecontentout[/tags]

Filed under: Design, development, Redesigns, Web Design, work, Working, Zeldman, zeldman.com

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And the saga continues. I took a few days off from the redesign project while in Seattle. Today I designed and quickly prototyped a simple masthead. Have a look. I’m going to live with it for a while.

Filed under: CSS, Design, Redesigns, zeldman.com

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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[/tags]

Filed under: An Event Apart, Appearances, Browsers, Career, client services, Code, Community, content, creativity, CSS, Design, eric meyer, events, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, Images, industry, Information architecture, jobs, Redesigns, Seattle, speaking, Standards, State of the Web, Surviving, The Profession, tweets, twitter, Working, Zeldman

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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[/tags]

Filed under: A List Apart, An Event Apart, art direction, Boston, Chicago, cities, Code, conferences, content, CSS, Design, development, eric meyer, events, Happy Cog™, links, Redesigns, San Francisco, Seattle, Standards, User Experience, UX, Web Design, work, Zeldman

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There’s something new at Apple’s online store: web standards and accessibility.

Apple.com has never lacked for panache. It has always looked more stylish, more elegant, more beautifully designed than most business sites. The site’s combination of utility, seduction, and understated beauty is practically unique—in keeping with the company’s primary point of product differentiation.

But while its beauty and usability have always run ahead of the pack, its underlying source code has not always kept pace. Now the online Apple Store’s inside is as beautiful as its exterior—and as far ahead of the mainstream in web development as a company like Apple needs to be.

One day, all sites will be built like this. View Source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be.

And next time your boss, client, or IT director annoyingly proclaims that you can’t have great looks and good markup, point them at store.apple.com. Who knows? They might buy you an iPhone or MacBook as a token of thanks.

Opinions are no longer being solicited, but you can read the 101 comments that were shared before we closed the iron door.

[tags]apple, css, markup, accessibility, webstandards, jinabolton, aneventapart, aeasf07[/tags]

Filed under: Accessibility, An Event Apart, business, Design, Redesigns, San Francisco, Standards

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In i love typography’s carefully curated “15 excellent examples of web typography (part one),” A List Apart, Happy Cog’s twice-monthly magazine for people who make websites, leads the pack at number one. Jason Santa Maria designed this version of A List Apart; Eric Meyer cunningly crafted the CSS; and Kevin Cornell illustrates. Other top-ranking examples of typographic excellence cited include Shaun Inman dot com, FontShop, Jesús Rodríguez Velasco, and Kevin Cornell’s BearskinRug Shop. Congratulations to all 15 extraordinary websites.

[tags]typography, web, design, webdesign, webtypography, webtype, awards, galleries[/tags]

Filed under: A List Apart, Design, eric meyer, Redesigns, work

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Oops, there goes our anniversary. On 31 May 2007 this site turned twelve years old. Ah, memories! Who can forget …

• Gifplex (1995, an early “web multimedia” art experiment)
• The Ad Graveyard (real ads that almost ran, 1995–1998)
• Pardon My Icons (unusual icons for your desktop or website, 1995–1998)
• 15 Minutes (interviews with movie stars and “cyber stars,” 1996–1999)
• Ask Dr Web (an early guide to designing websites; taken offline because the presentational HTML techniques it advocated have long since become outdated thanks to web standards)
• Mr Jenkins’s Last Martini (1996, the web’s first alcoholic haiku contest)

… and all the other juicy Web 1.0 Goodness™. Not to mention a couple dozen discarded designs, legions of obsolete splash pages, and a certain Daily Report that was initially dumped onto a page called coming.html and maintained daily and steadily for years before it became conscious of itself, acquired a title, and moved to the site’s front page.

The web found me and claimed me. Everything else followed. Maybe you feel that way, too. Thank you for what you bring to the web, and thank you for twelve years or your part of it.

“The independent publisher refuses to die.”

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Daily Reports from 1997 On

You don’t need the WayBack machine to go way back in zeldman.com history. Enjoy these representative Daily Report pages from 1997 on (including the famous HTML Fist).

[tags]zeldman, zeldman.com, blogs, blogging, independent content[/tags]

Filed under: 12 years, Design, development, Redesigns, writing

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