An Event Apart San Francisco 2007
Left to right: Myself, Annie Liang, Jason Santa Maria, Erin Kissane. Via Annie.
I’ve been at An Event Apart the last couple days. This was the first big conference I’v ever been to, and I had an awesome time! Great speakers, great attendees, and great food.
What follows is a collection of the memorable things I took from most of the sessions.
Eric Meyer’s Secrets of the CSS Jedi
My initial impression of this session was that it was slightly interesting, but mostly a waste of time. Eric spent the majority of the time going through the steps he took to style a financial table like a bar graph. I didn’t really learn anything new, and don’t think I will ever be doing this myself.
After giving it some time to sink in, however, I had a change of heart. I don’t think his point was to create something necessarily useful in our work, but rather to help us understand just how powerful CSS can be—that we have complete (or at least nearly complete) control over the appearance of every element within the DOM. Just because a browser wants something like a table to appear a certain way by default does not mean it has to.
Jason Santa Maria’s Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag
This was a great session. Jason clued us in on his entire design process, complete with examples of how he gets his inspiration and the research he performs to get a deep understanding of the client’s business and demographic.
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Writing the User Interface
Not much here that I haven’t heard from Signal vs. Noise before, but interesting and hilarious nonetheless. I definitely need to keep this stuff in mind while working on Tinabi.
Joe Clark’s Why I Hate Online Captioning
About as enjoyable and worth-while as any opportunity to listen to someone bitch for an hour 43 minutes can be. (Thanks Joe)
Jared Spool’s Why Good Content Must Suck
This session was simply fascinating! Jared is a usability expert, and he spent most of his time going through various usability tests his firm has conducted over the years. His main point was that users are more than willing to click through several pages of a website to get at what they want, so long as the information on each succeeding page is more specific than the last, and the “scent” of what they’re after remains strong. And did I mention that he is hilarious?
Doug Bowman’s Design to Scale
Doug is the mastermind behind Blogger’s new look, and is now occupied working as Google’s Visual Design Lead. I found his session very insightful, and appreciated his excitement toward the design challenges that present themselves when you’re catering to hundreds of millions of people.
Aaron Gustafson’s Learning to Love Forms
Forms have always been the one part about CSS-based layouts that I completely despise. Until yesterday, that is. During the session, something changed psychologically. I now feel willing to deal with them, and embrace the constraints. Knowing which form elements to tweak and which to leave alone is a big part of it.
I am definitely going to keep his slides handy, lest I forget his words of wisdom the next time I approach form styling.
Jeffrey Zeldman’s Selling Design
Jeffrey once again took the stage to talk about how Happy Cog works with their clients throughout the design phase. As I’m not doing much design work for clients anymore, this was not extremely relevant to me, but I am absolutely going to share Jeffrey’s insights with my coworkers.
