An Event Apart San Francisco 2011

Sunday, December 11

1. 5:30pm–8:30pm

   WebINK Cocktail Party

   

   Sponsored by Extensis

   Flying in early? Before the conference gets into full swing, join your fellow attendees and speakers for an evening of appetizers and festive libations plus a chance to win an iPad. Once you check-in step on over to House of Shields. We'd love to have you join us to mix and mingle with other web enthusiasts. RSVP to save your spot!

Monday, December 12

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Content First!

   

   Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Ed.

   The rules of design engagement are changing. You may no longer be in control of the user’s visual experience. Learn the number one job of every web designer, how to persuade clients and bosses not to subject users to dark patterns, why the days of “Best Viewed With…” are finally behind us, and how a mobile (or small screen) strategy can help you improve your content, rethink your web experience, and put the user first.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

   

   Elliot Jay Stocks, author, Sexy Web Design

   Recent developments in web technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 have allowed us to build a richer web, full of advanced visual treatments like web fonts, animations, transformations, and drop-shadows. But have we got carried away with our new toys? Just because we can use a drop-shadow doesn’t mean we have to. In this new and often controversial talk, Elliot looks at solid design principles that will turn a good website into a great website, examines the scenarios where it’s better to stay away from unnecessary visual effects, and attempts to find the sweet spot in between the two extremes. “With great power comes great responsibility,” said Uncle Ben, and Spidey hadn’t even used border-radius!

4. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Design Principles

   

   Jeremy Keith, author, HTML5 For Web Designers

   All software is inherently political, reflecting the biases and beliefs of the people behind it. These beliefs can be made explicit through the publication of design principles: pragmatic rules of thumb that underpin a shared endeavour. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it’s a website, a framework, or the World Wide Web itself.

5. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

6. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Mobile Web Design Moves

   

   Luke Wroblewski, author, Web Form Design

   Mobile dances to a different beat. Learn how to transition what you know about designing for the Web to Mobile and pick up a bunch of new moves along the way that’ll help you rock the mobile Web.

7. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   The Dimensions of a Good Experience

   

   Alexa Andrzejewski, founder, Foodspotting

   Good designs are useful, usable and desirable. But what is a good experience? While crafting the experience of her own startup, Foodspotting, Alexa Andrzejewski found answers in urban design. Asking the same question about urban experiences, Kevin Lynch, author of “Good Urban Form,” extracted a set of dimensions for evaluating experiences. By applying these principles to interactive experiences, you can identify what kind of experience you’re creating for users: Is it adaptable? Does it tell a story? Are there signs of life? You’ll leave with a set of guidelines that, unlike traditional heuristics, will enable you to evaluate the experiential qualities of your designs.

8. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Responsive Designer’s Workflow

   

   Ethan Marcotte, co-author, Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition

   There’s been a lot of great discussion about responsive web design: merging media queries and flexible, grid-based layouts to create more adaptive, universal designs. But how does a responsive approach affect our design workflow? And when is responsive design right for your project? We’ll look at sites and strategies to try and answer these questions, and learn to become more responsive designers.

9. 7:00pm–??pm

   Opening Night Party

   

   Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple

   B Restaurant and Bar
   720 Howard Street
   San Francisco, CA 94107
   (415) 495-9800

   Media Temple’s opening night parties for An Event Apart are legendary. Join the speakers and hundreds of fellow attendees for great conversation, lively debate, loud music, hot snacks, and a seemingly endless stream of grown-up beverages.

Tuesday, December 13

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Using Flexible Boxes

   

   Eric Meyer, author, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed.

   Off in a mostly unregarded corner of the CSS modularization effort, the Flexible Box (a.k.a. Flexbox) module has quietly charted a course into three of the four major browser rendering engines. In this practical, real-world session, Eric will take a tour of the surprising features and robustness of Flexbox and consider its place in our toolbox as well as ways to use it now without leaving older browsers grasping at shards.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Our Best Practices are Killing Us

   

   Nicole Sullivan, co-author, Even Faster Websites

   For years, we have been suffering with the myth that if we just tried harder, our CSS would stay clean. Each time we start a new project, we valiantly follow best practices and commit ourselves to writing beautiful code, but the truth is that our best practices are killing us. In this talk, Nicole will walk through five best practices and show you exactly why they lead to bloated, unmanageable code. You’ll leave this talk armed with techniques to move from organic CSS with no particular architecture to something lighter, more logical, and easier to maintain.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Idea to Interface

   

   Aarron Walter, author, Designing for Emotion

   When you’re working for the man, it’s hard to find time to make something fun for yourself. You’ve got ideas swimming around in your head for your next website or app, but translating abstract thoughts into a usable, successful interface is no easy task. Should you wireframe, prototype, or both? How do you know if your idea is even worth building? Aarron will share practical advice from the interface design school of hard knocks that will help you make your ideas a reality.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

   

   Andy Clarke, author, Hardboiled Web Design

   Animation on the web has traditionally been low-fidelity and shares much common ground with the work of early animators. Web animations have always been the domain of Flash because equivalents couldn’t easily be created using open standards. That is until now, with ever increasing support for CSS3 Animations. Learn about the latest CSS animation techniques and how to create effective, accessible fallbacks for all browsers, including those with limited capabilities.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   A Content Strategy Roadmap

   

   Kristina Halvorson, author, Content Strategy for the Web

   How to make a website: discover, define, design, develop, deploy. It’s a familiar framework for most of our project processes. Now along comes this content strategy thing. Sure, it sounds like a great idea, but how does it fit in with what we’re already doing? Kristina will walk us through a typical website project to demonstrate why, how, where, and when content strategy happens.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Secret Lives of Links

   

   Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

   Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site. Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site’s links.

8. 6:30pm–??pm

   Closing Night Party

   

   Sponsored by Typekit

   Typekit, Inc.
   2601 Mission St., Suite 900
   San Francisco, CA 94110
   

   Join us as we wrap up an amazing year of An Event Apart at Typekit’s headquarters in the Mission.

Wednesday, December 14

Workshop Day: Mobile Web Design

The mobile web is the biggest, fastest-growing strand of the World Wide Web. Mobile expert Luke Wroblewski will lead a full-day, in-depth exploration of designing for the mobile web—the different devices, the changed interaction patterns, the constraints and opportunities inherent in mobile design. If you’re even thinking of doing mobile web design—and you should be thinking of it—then you won’t want to miss a single minute of Luke’s insights and experience.