An Event Apart is from our smart friends at A List Apart. Popular web designer/developers such as Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jason Keith, Jason Santa Maria and others were on hand last year to unleash a can of knowledge whoopass on us eager attendees last year. Now that a year has passed and I’m preparing for this year’s version, I’ve decided to reflect and share on some of the practical tips I learned from last.

Photo Courtesy: kurafire

Before we begin, the fine people at An Event Apart (AEA) have bestowed upon me a coupon code whereas you can obtain a $50 discount during checkout for the upcoming San Francisco Conference that has now just finished Early Bird Registration. It works for other events too, so if you’re not in the Bay — help yourself and help your wallet by using the TypeSett coupon code: AEATYPE for the event near you!

Now back to our regularly schedule programming:

From Jeffrey Zeldman – Understanding Web Design

“Good Design Is Invisible”

Being a person who designs and develops website as a professional, you’d think that “Understanding Web Design” would amount to nothing more than a cute speech for the project managers in the audience.

Wrong. Zeldman simplified and broke down the essence of what we do for a living. Sure, we work hard on delivering practical and functional solutions that amaze the eyes – but in the end why does anybody vist any website? The content. So it’s about time we realize that it’s the “character of the content” and not the “character of the designer”.

Towards the end of his lecture, he goes on to list 12 specific tips. The fourth tip really spoke to me:

Sell ideas, not pixels

When you’re in those all important meetings with clients, sell the concept behind your design. Never forget that the people visiting your website are human beings with emotions, ideas, intelligence (hopefully) and a purpose. Use those to your advantage and design web interfaces that can challenge your users in the right way. Sell your client on these ideas and not the pixels.

A List Apart — Can be described as transparent and designed to facilitate the content rather than the website itself.

Web Designer Wall — Comes to mind every single time I need an example of a flamboyant website design.

Both websites are popular communities that deliver quality content. Which is the approach that you would take?

From Eric Meyer – The Lessons of CSS Frameworks

Meyer’s lecture basically consisted of a breakdown of the different CSS frameworks. He looked at popular frameworks such as 960, Blueprint and others (9 total). He compared them based on how they handle certain web design aspects such as heading sizes, body sizes and etc. He also took a look at how they handled implementation and extra features such as sketch files, compression and hacks for cross browser compatibility.

The main lesson learned at the end of the lecture is no secret. CSS frameworks are not perfect for every job, individual and or technical implementation. They do shed a lot of light on diagnosing what you do and don’t need in a CSS framework. So create your own, mix and match, evolve one to your own wants and needs.

Right now, I blend a variation of 960 with a custom Meyer-based CSS reset and some other tweaks. This personal “framework” is portable for me and I can use it project after project and evolves over time.

From Jason Santa Maria – Storytelling By Design

For me, Santa Maria’s lecture was the most inspiring and eye-opening of the entire event. He basically builds on what Zeldman was preaching and basically asks — If content is King, how come we treat it like a pauper?

Santa Maria practices what he preaches. Visit his website and see how he’s currently experimenting with web layout.

He showed us specific examples of websites that were functional and practical from a usability standpoint but challenged the user in a good way. He quotes the philosopher Bertrand Russell:

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”

Think of it this way… is it possible to distill the entire purpose of your client’s business in a single sentence? Would you want to? I don’t know the answer and he clearly states that neither does he. But I think we both would agree that you can’t template creativity and that it would suit you well to properly explore solutions to telling your client’s unique story.

Google does a lot of things for us but in the end, doesn’t the search feature essentially help us learn something new every day? Does this graphic help tell the story of the company and what they offer?

Luke Wroblewski – Web Application Hierarchy

Wroblewski is a principal designer at Yahoo! Inc. and a book writer of such web form design classics such as — Web Form Design: Filling In The Blanks. It’s actually a very practical reference book for web design, I highly recommend it.

I admit that going into the conference I was aware of the intense scrutiny of how some companies handle forms – especially in e-commerce websites – but I wasn’t aware of the practical science and metrics Wroblewski offered. In his lecture summary, he writes:

Visual Communication is part Visual Organization and part personality. Visual Hierarchy is a deliberate prioritization of Visual Weight enabled by the manipulation of Visual Relationships to create Meaning for users.

The most important lesson I learned from him is that I should not take the user for granted when designing a web application. Not only should I practice sound design and best practices but I should test and continually learn from my experiences as a developer and a consumer to better serve the users.

From Heather Champ – Shepherding Passionate Communities

Champ is the Director of Community at Flickr and oversees member activities. For most of us, we design and develop websites not meant for critical mass. However, we can learn from somebody who works on a 24 million member website and the unique problems they encounter.

Specifically, for me — she’s a master at dealing with fuck-ups. Here’s a nice guide from Champ for when the shit hits the fan:

• Always be nice
• Inform them
• Keep them updated
• Make the best of the situation

Photo Courtesy: thelastminute
For us long-time Flickr users, we know of those funny and unique “We’re Down” pages where they pull images from user-contributed contests they created for this very reason. When websites give you lemons, make lemonade.

Twitter to a degree has been gracing us with the “Fail Whale” for a few years now. It’s not nearly as interesting as having the creativity of your audience deliver this message for you but at least it has a jovial tone.

More Than A Conference

Honestly, I would have to admit that up until I attended last year’s conference I was unsure of what I wanted in my career. I never shied away from web design and development but I couldn’t say that I dreamed of doing this since I was a kid. The enthusiasm, inspiration and the community of the people of the event answered those questions for me. I couldn’t recommend this conference enough if you have any questions of where your career is heading creatively while transitioning away from traditional graphic design.

I have no formal connection with AEA, but my contact over there has decided to offer a coupon code for the viewers of this website: AEATYPE

Thank You For Reading, Drop A Note If You’d Like!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 12:28 am and is filed under An Event Apart, Web Design, Web Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.