To celebrate the arrival of 2009, we’ve launched a brand-new design at aneventapart.com; published the complete, detailed schedule for our first show in Seattle; and opened the store for all four shows. Now you can claim a seat at any of this year’s fantastic events: Seattle, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco!

We’re really excited about this year’s lineup, and thanks to Google alerts, we know lots of people out there are too. We hope to see you at An Event Apart in the new year!

For web designers, there are four keys to surviving bad economic times: do good work, charge a fair price, lower your overhead, and be sure you are communicating with your client.

The short, tip-packed article focuses on getting and keeping work, even if you have lost your job.

24 ways is the “advent calendar for web geeks,” publishing a daily dose of web design and development every day through December 24th. Other authors contributing to 2008’s 24 ways include An Event Apart speakers Andy Clarke, Jason Santa Maria, Kimberly Blessing, and Jeremy Keith, plus many more.

Seattle

May 4–5, 2009
Bell Harbor Conference Center
2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66
Seattle, WA 98121

Boston

June 22–23, 2009
Boston Marriott Copley
110 Huntington
Boston, MA 02116

San Francisco

December 7–8
The Palace Hotel
5 New Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

Confirmed speakers for the 2009 schedule include:

• Andy Budd
• Dan Cederholm
• Heather Champ
• Andy Clarke
• Derek Featherstone
• Kristina Halvorson
• Robert Hoekman Jr.
• Jeremy Keith
• Ethan Marcotte
• Aarron Walter
• Dave Shea
• Jared Spool

… And of course your hosts Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman.

More speakers (and possibly an additional city) will be announced soon. Not every speaker listed here will appear at every show.

Passes to the event will be available for purchase in January 2009. If you’re committed to attending and concerned about potentially missing a show, you can pre-order via this (PDF) form.

If you missed the opportunity to join us in Chicago, we’ll announce An Event Apart’s 2009 schedule on October 1, 2008. Stay tuned to this channel for the first word on where and when we’ll appear in the coming year!

Ah, Chicago! Home to great architecture; fantastic museums; die-hard Bears, Bulls, Sox, and Blackhawks fans; kids splashing in Millennium Park; the Blues Brothers; deep-dish pizzas; and two days jam-packed with the best and brightest in web design.

Join Andy Clarke, Curt Cloninger, Jason Fried, Robert Hoekman Jr., Cameron Moll, Sarah Nelson, Derek Powazek, Jeff Veen, Rob Weychert, Jason Santa Maria, Eric Meyer, and Jeffrey Zeldman on October 13-14 at the Sheraton Towers Chicago for An Event Apart Chicago 2008.

The usual price for two days, twelve great speakers, and fourteen sessions on web standards, best practices, great design, and inspiration (plus meals, party, and swag) is $995. If you register by September 15th, which is now a week away, you’ll pay only $895.

Seats for this event are filling up fast. So don’t delay a moment longer—register today!

• Andy Clarke – Author, Transcending CSS
• Curt Cloninger – Author, Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process
• Jason Fried – 37signals
• Robert Hoekman Jr. – Author, Designing the Obvious
• Cameron Moll – Author, Mobile Web Design
• Sarah Nelson – Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
• Bronwyn Jones –  Senior writer, Apple.com
• Jeff Veen – Author, Art & Science of Web Design
• Rob Weychert –  Co-author, Web Standards Creativity
• Jason Santa Maria –  Designer, Happy Cog
• Eric Meyer – Author, CSS: The Definitive Guide
• Jeffrey Zeldman – Author, Designing With Web Standards 2nd Edition

Serious topics for passionate practitioners

An Event Apart is never about fads, trends, and buzzwords. It’s about content web professionals can use to move from good to great. Sample sessions at An Event Apart Chicago 2008 include:

Design Criteria: Actionable Ideas

Sarah Nelson

As the complexity of our projects increases, so does the need to develop and maintain a consistent vision. When faced with a thousand small decisions, how do you know which are the right ones to make? Design criteria can provide your team with a touchstone from which you can empower, inspire, and evaluate your work. We will look at examples of design criteria in action, explore different types of criteria, and discuss how to generate your own.

The In-House Designer

Cameron Moll

The fundamental principles of design remain constant irrespective of organization size, technical discipline, and the like. Yet within larger organizations, the dynamics of applying these principles, the ability to produce quality output, and overall job satisfaction are a challenge at times. Learn how to hone your technical skills, and, more importantly, your soft skills, to effectively grapple with the politics and red tape that are common to larger organizations—or, for that matter, to client services work.

Save money when you order early

There are fourteen great sessions in all, from the leading creative minds in web design and development. And because An Event Apart is a uniquely single-track event, you never have to decide which session to skip, which session to see. Come see them all!

Register through September 15 and save $100 off your conference pass. Hurry, tickets are first-come, first-served, and seating is limited.

The usual price for two days, twelve great speakers, and fourteen sessions on web standards, best practices, great design, and inspiration is $995. If you register by July 21st, which is now just under a week away, you’ll pay only $895.

Better still, enter discount code AEAZTF and you’ll pay just $795.

But these combined savings end after July 21st, and seats for this event are filling up fast. So don’t delay a moment longer—register today!

Shot by Bonnemaison of Baltimore, MD. Edited by Ian Corey. Music courtesy Jason Dove.

Audio transcription

JEFF VEEN: The first part of this talk is designing with data. Because frankly we are awash in data. We have so much data in our lives, we have sensors out in the world that are constantly aggregating data and bringing it into the computers that process all this data and sending it out via the networks we’ve built — there’s just so much data — and it’s a bit of a cliche, right, to think about how much data we have to deal with even in an hour of our lives online, compared to, say, our great grandparents, who probably did not see that much data in their entire lifetimes.

JEFF VEEN: And just as a couple of examples … I think of a statistic I heard when I was at work the other day about YouTube. Every minute of the day, ten hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube. So every minute that goes by, another ten hours! I don’t know what this video is, but that’s tremendous, that’s a tremendous amount of content that’s being shared by everyone around the world.

JEFF VEEN: I was very excited, a few months ago I bought a big TB hard drive. I was like, man, a TB! Now, I’ve been online a long time, I’ve been using technology for years, my first computer was a Commodore 64. To think about a TB! … And I tell one of the engineers who works on analytics, and he kind of chuckles and says, yeah, we fill up one of those every couple of hours.

JEFF VEEN: It made me start to think, right, if our great-grandparents only saw this much information over the course of their lifetime, that we see in just an hour, that’s significant, right? Because we’re no different than them. We haven’t evolved as a species. We have the same eyes and the same senses and the same ability to process that they had, with these tremendous new requirements placed on all of us all the time.

JEFF VEEN: And it made me think, so our computer science has done all this amazing, Moore’s Law, everything getting faster and better, and that’s great, these business models that have happened have really changed the world, especially now that we’re all online, and we’re all doing stuff with all this data, but it’s the responsibility of designers to help the rest of us with all this data, make sense of it all. And that’s what I want to talk about … taking this data, this flood of data that comes out all the time, and making sense of it.

Shot by Bonnemaison of Baltimore, MD. Edited by Ian Corey. Music courtesy Jason Dove.

Audio transcription

CAMERON MOLL: [Talking about his uncle, a computer novice.] He bought one of those early iMacs and that was his first computing experience. He brought me over one day. He asked me to come fix something on his computer. I don’t remember what it was, but I said, sure, let me see what I can do.

CAMERON MOLL: So I sat down with him. This is essentially what his Finder looked like. Now, he’d never been exposed to computing before, so he didn’t understand directories and lists and things like that. He treated the computer as if it were this physical object. So imagine his Finder being something just like a giant table. And he would take files and set them on the table [demonstrates] in groups and categories.

CAMERON MOLL: He was big into fishing. So over here, he’d have anything related to fishing. Pictures and web addresses and so forth. Also big into airplanes, so over here, something related to airplanes and so forth.

CAMERON MOLL: So if this was a physical object, his Finder, it would have been something like four by six feet. There were probably two or three times as many files as I’m showing here, I kind of recreated this. Probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 500 files in this Finder set up just like this.

CAMERON MOLL: And so I said, you know what? I can’t fix this problem this other problem you’ve asked me to fix until I fix this one. I can’t even get through these files.

CAMERON MOLL: And so here’s what I did. I thought I’d help him out by cleaning up that nasty arrangement of icons. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

CAMERON MOLL: Now I cannot articulate the look on his face when I did that. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] Because as you know, this is not un-doable.

Andy Clarke on Web Layout from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

Shot by Bonnemaison of Baltimore, MD. Edited by Ian Corey. Music courtesy Jason Dove.

Audio transcription

Andy Clarke: How often do we consider the space and the time that somebody is supposed to spend, or we want somebody to spend, looking at a particular panel. So if we look at something like this, there’s a conversation going on at the bottom here. ‘Actually, she turned out to be quite sweet. I actually took her out a few times.’ ‘Seriously?’ ‘No.’ And it carries on. So those panels are smaller because we’re supposed to take less time reading them. It’s this flow and this rhythm. And this is something that comic books have done for a very, very long time. And it’s something that potentially we can bring into the layouts that we make for the web.