• 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.

Zeldman on Journalism and The Web from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

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

Audio transcription

Zeldman: I started zeldman.com in 1995. And I wrote what I guess now you would call a blog post ... about Lawrence Welk, a little thing about Lawrence Welk that seemed funny to me. And I put it out there to see, to see if anyone else would read it. And The Wall Street Journal called me. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called me in 1995 and said, "Uh, why are you so fascinated with Lawrence Welk? Are you obsessed? Is it a cult?"

(Laughter)

Zeldman: So I, you know, and I thought, "I'm kind of getting into the web design business and I'm talking to The Wall Street Journal. That's never going to happen again. I'm going to let this guy think whatever he thinks. I'm not going to lie to him, but I'll let him, ..." So I said, "Well, Lawrence Welk certainly is interesting, isn't he." And he said, "Yes, Lawrence is interesting." I said, "Well, what do you think?" And I got him to talk and then he wrote an article. And, so, my website was in The Wall Street Journal. [Gestures.] And this is the result.

(Laughter)

Zeldman: Okay? So. What I'm suggesting is that, if you're in some kind of web business, or even just have some home page, and a newspaper reporter starts talking to you, if they think there's a story, and you play to it, you can get coverage.

Eric Meyer on generated content (An Event Apart New Orleans 2008) from Jeffrey Zeldman on Vimeo.

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

Audio transcription

Eric Meyer: So you either have "quote quote, quote quote" in some browsers and "quote quote" in other browsers, or you have "quote quote" in some browsers and no quotes in other browsers, okay? First problem. Second problem is that quotation marks [are supposed to be] localized. Not everyone uses the little quote marks we use. Different cultures use different quotation marks. But basically no browser does this. Maybe one. So that reason's out the window, and if there ever comes a point where browers are consistent about the quote marks they generate, then I might think about it.

Eric Meyer: But there's this part of me that thinks, yeah, then when someone comes to my site using a mobile device that doesn't support CSS, and all the quotation marks are gone, how is that going to impact reading comprehension. Right? For the same reason that I would not use CSS counters to generate the numbers in online legislation, because there's lots of references to section numbers in legislation, and if I rely on CSS to label each section by the right number, and then someone comes in on a mobile device [that doesn't support CSS], and there are no numbers, and they can't refer to the legislative numbers, and then they can't fight their parking ticket, and I end up in court for $20 million because, right? I don't need that kind of hassle. If it's important, it should be in the content. It shouldn't be generated.

Sample sessions include:

Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z

Dan Cederholm

As the browser landscape changes, so does our approach to implementing flexible design. Learn 26 ways to help your interfaces become more adaptable, worry-free, and bulletproof.

Patterns in the Process

Jeremy Keith

From scribbling the first sketch to finely crafting the finished markup, CSS, and JavaScript, each step of the design process offers different challenges and opportunities. When the same challenges keep cropping up in different projects, it’s good to have an arsenal of tried and tested solutions. Learn how to develop a nose for design patterns and build a robust toolkit of reusable snippets.

2.0 Workflow: Merging Agile and UCD

Kelly Goto

The new web has become more than interaction, more than design. In this rapid-paced environment, companies and teams need to rethink their processes and methodologies to keep pace. Learn how combining Agile and User Centered Design (UCD) methodologies can create a new arsenal of best practices for design and development. Understand team dynamics and how to apply the appropriate methods to your specific situation.

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 July 21 and save $100 off your conference pass. Hurry, tickets are first-come, first-served, and seating is limited.

The Event Apart Mailing List

That’s right: you can now join the select group of people who will get occasional e-mail straight from the crack team that brings you An Event Apart! It’s quick and easy, and it uses the Mighty Power of AJAX (With Fallbacks for The Scriptless) to get you signed up in a jiffy. Just submit a valid e-mail address, hit the confirmation link in the mail you’re sent, and that’s it! Really, that’s it: just an e-mail address. Nothing else. Ten seconds and you’ll be halfway there (the rest is up to the mail system).

As for why you should join, well, that’s easy:

1. You’ll be one of the first to get the latest announcements regarding speakers, schedules, socializing, and sundry special snippets of An Event Apart news.
2. You’ll get inside information about speakers, like what they’re working on, what they plan to present, and where they shop for their swanky laptop bags.
3. From time to time, we’ll send out special discounts that are just for our subscribers. And who doesn’t like discounts?
4. You’ll start getting compliments about your hair. If you already get compliments, then you’ll get even more. True!

As it says on the signup page, we swear on a stack of W3C specifications that we’ll never share your address with anyone else. This is just between us. So sign up today!

Location and Schedule

The conference takes place at the newly renovated Hilton New Orleans Riverside, located on the Mississippi River near the French Quarter, Riverwalk Marketplace, Harrah's Casino, and Aquarium of the Americas:

Hilton New Orleans Riverside
2 Poydras Street
New Orleans, LA 70130
Phone: (504) 561-0500

An Event Apart runs from 8:30 a.m.-7:15 p.m. and features seven sessions per day, plus a bonus eighth session sponsored by Adobe® on the first day. All sessions take place on the 3rd floor of the hotel, in the Napoleon Ballroom. Signs will direct you to the right spot.

There's a lot to cover, so the event starts promptly each morning. For best results and a good seat, show up early.

The schedule for both days is available on our site.

Registration

Event registration will be open in the Court Assembly, outside the Napoleon Ballroom on the 3rd floor, during the following hours:

Wednesday, April 23: 4:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.
Thursday, April 24: 7:00 a.m.-6:30 p.m.
Friday, April 25: 8:00 a.m.-6:30 p.m.

Food

Bring your appetite! Breakfast and lunch will be served on both days. Buffet luncheon will include something for everyone. Beverages and snacks will be served throughout the show.

Laptops

Laptops are not necessary, but they are welcome. We will provide charging stations at most seats to keep laptops juiced all day, but we still advise you to charge your laptop's battery before the show.

Session Notes Online

On the first day of the show, downloadable speaker session notes will be posted at a secret URL for conference attendees only. And after it ends, the session notes will stay up, so you can refer to them indefinitely. Don't blog the secret URL! You can, of course, share the presentations with your colleagues at the office.

Special Adobe Session

On Thursday, April 24, from 6:15 to 7:15 p.m., Adobe will present a special bonus session:

"From Prototype to Web Page"
Greg Rewis

Explore current standards and best practices for web page prototyping and design, and get a sneak peek at how the upcoming releases of Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks will address some of these concerns.

Opening Night Party

On Thursday, April 24, beginning at 7:30 p.m., (mt) Media Temple sponsors an opening night party for all attendees and speakers.

Crescent City Brewhouse
New Orleans French Quarter Microbrewery
527 Decatur Street in the French Quarter
New Orleans, LA 70130

Open bar, light munchables

Featuring live jazz nightly, the Crescent City Brewhouse is one of New Orleans' premier restaurants and the only French Quarter microbrewery. Mingle with speakers and your fellow attendees. Discuss the first day's sessions, network wildly, or just enjoy a brew and the view.

Flickr Group

Share your photos with the world on our public Flickr group:

flickr.com/groups/aeanola08/

Be sure to tag your photos "aeanola08" (and anything else that suits the content and your fancy).

Attendees want to see other attendees. Take plenty of shots of your friends and colleagues. Before shooting attendees you don't know, please ask their permission. Not everybody wants to have their picture taken and posted to a website.

Speakers are fair game. You don't need their permission. Speaker action photos are encouraged (just don't flash our speakers right in the eyes while they're presenting). After the session, don't be shy about asking your favorite speaker if you can take a picture with him or her.

Details, Details

It's a non-smoking event. Sorry, smokers! Still photography is permitted (how else are we going to fill up that Flickr group?), but audio and video recording are forbidden.

• Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing With Web Standards, on the current state of web standards and understanding the very nature of web design itself
• Eric Meyer, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, on the lessons we can draw from popular CSS frameworks and ways to use CSS to make your development and debugging easier
• Kimberly Blessing, Web Development Platform Team Lead at PayPal, on defining and spreading standards in the enterprise
• Doug Bowman, Visual Design Lead at Google, on design principles that scale up beyond your wildest dreams
• Andy Budd, author of CSS Mastery, on the nine keys to a perfect user experience
• Christopher Fahey, Founding Partner at Behavior, on the relationship between form, function, and style
• Peter-Paul Koch, author of ppk on JavaScript, on best practices in unobtrusive and maintainable scripting
• Ethan Marcotte, co-author of Web Standards Creativity, on bridging the gap between high-end design (and designers) and standards-compliant coding
• Jason Santa Maria, Designer at Happy Cog, on telling and evolving stories with great design
• Jared Spool, Founder of User Interface Engineering, on which of the five types of navigation page works best in which circumstances
• Jeff Veen, Design Manager at Google, on cutting through the Web 2.0 hype to find the design lessons embedded within
• Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design Best Practices, on the ways good design can smoothly guide users through web applications

Last year's Boston show was a sold-out smash success, and seats are already going fast for this year's. Don't get left out!

Thanks for talking with us, Matt! Kindly tell us a little bit about ifoh designs (including what the ifoh is all about!) and your role there.

Ah, I am not giving up that easily, bud. The "ifoh" started off as an inside joke. I couldn't think of anything for a company name. Complete blanks. I didn't want to go with something ordinary, or generic; that is about all I knew. My sister and used to laugh about this saying, because our insane father said it once. Anyway, I figured (and this is probably the worst attitude to have, but) that it didn't really matter what the name was-- all that mattered was what I was offering, and the quality of my work.

So, sorry, but for now it stays at rest.

Okay, fair enough. So what's your main focus at ifoh: design, developer, or both?

Well, ifoh designs is actually not my day job. I work for a financial company in Quincy, MA as a Web Designer, and have been here for the past year and a half. It is a pretty cool job, actually. A great atmosphere, and co-workers, which always makes for a productive employee. The commute is probably the worst part of the job as I live in Providence, RI and make the trek daily.

At ifoh, however, I do it all. Not many designers do both any more, but I think it is really great to have a solid understanding of the platform you are designing for to make the best product and user experience possible.

With that sort of view, I'm going to guess that you're a veteran of the field. How long have you been riding this crazy web train?

I have been on the train since 2001, when I needed to get a site up and running for some amazing high school metal band I was in. As you might have guessed, the site, and the band, were awful. The site might have been terrible, but I knew that I liked doing it, and that was enough for me to start seriously striving to get better. I went to New England Institute of Technology, and graduated in 2006 with a degree in Multimedia & Web Design. College was great. I recommend everyone to attend, and stay as long as you can!

Now I am working in Massachusetts, living in Rhode Island with my lovely fiancée, and driving like a maniac daily.

Given your location, I can see why you attended the Boston 2007 show. What did you like about it?

Right, so enough about me. I can't stress enough how excellent this event is for people of all walks of life. Seriously. It doesn't matter if this is your first, or hundredth web site, there is something for everyone there, and you will definitely leave with even more knowledge than you came with.

It was really great to hear some of the best in the business speak their minds, share insight, and just really get you motivated to try harder and become better. That is really what it all comes down to, being the best we can possibly be at what we do. I didn't even bring my laptop, I just took some notes, and listened. By the end of the second day I couldn't wait to get back to work and try out some of the new things I had learned.

Awesome! In the interests of fairness, was there anything that would have made the show even better for you?

Really the only thing that I thought could have had more time devoted to, was at the very end when you all were up there doing the critiques of user submitted work. It was nice to see what other designers are up to, and your reactions to them, however I would have liked to have seen more.

So you're coming back for more this year, right?

I am definitely planning on attending the June 23rd and 24th event in Boston. I also just checked the website and I should probably get my ticket before May 26th, so I can save $100. I am not going to lie though, my employers paid last year, so this year I am going to have to cough it up myself, but I do not mind one bit.

Why not? What makes AEA worth the investment?

Obviously to hear all the great guest speakers, and this year to network and promote my business.

Networking and promotion, eh? What makes you think AEA is a good place for that sort of thing?

AEA is a great place to network for many reasons. First and foremost, you are sitting in a room with several hundred other people, all of which are either in the same field, or own their own businesses. Even if you are not looking for any help, who doesn't want to make friends? Get some more links coming in to your site, which is always a good thing. Also, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps the person to your left or right is looking for some help with design, while you are not the best programmer. Exchange your information, and you now have something in the works that could benefit both your pockets.

Any other tips for our readers?

Just make sure you get your ticket(s) early enough. If you are going to travel, bring a friend along and make a trip out of it. I would most definitely recommend coming to Boston, just because it is "wicked" good, but all the other locations seem like they won't leave you without anything to do.

Oh, and bring extra money so you can buy the hosts drinks and lavish gifts...

How thoughtful of you! But we much prefer people's presence to any presents, and we're certainly looking forward to seeing you back in Boston. Thanks for taking the time to do this, Matt!

You are absolutely welcome. I too am looking forward to this year's events, and shall see you all in June. Take care!

Q. Why shouldn't web application designers have the same leeway as desktop application developers? It isn't immediately obvious how to achieve every possible task in Photoshop or Excel. As builders of sophisticated, powerful web applications, shouldn't we have the same flexibility as our colleagues at Adobe and Microsoft? Doesn't our emphasis on web usability limit what we can achieve as developers?

Great question! Let's start by talking about Photoshop and Excel, which you mentioned by name.

These, as well as countless other veteran desktop applications, have had a lot of time to bake. Perhaps, too much. As they've matured, we've seen new features added with every release to address new possibilities, and while all these features have the potential to enhance the application for the users that take advantage of them, every addition can also mean making the basics incrementally more difficult to master. This endless cycle of new development can sharply increase the learning curve for newer users, as well intermediate-level users, trying to improve their skills.

But despite all this, even the most complicated applications can be made more usable, without sacrificing their robustness, as long as designers do what they can to ensure that less experienced or less committed users can become proficient.

With this in mind, this is actually a bit of a trick question.

It's not that desktop designers have more leeway than web designers, it's that designers working on veteran applications can be less prone to maintain or improve the applications’ usability. The problem of decreased usability is not exclusive to desktop applications. There are plenty of very complex web applications, and there is plenty of opportunity for advanced or less common features in almost any application. Even simple applications—online or off—can suffer from poor usability.

Mature applications have become more robust simply as a result of their evolution. This is completely understandable. But within this process, designers can continue finding ways to improve the usability of the applications as they evolve. Ultimately, the scope of an application is not that important. Robustness doesn't have to equal poor usability. You can have both.

As I wrote about in Designing the Obvious, a user's ability to utilize an application effectively is primarily the result of applying a few key design principles. For example, users of even the most mature applications can benefit from quality instructive design. By creating short and friendly instructive text, screencasts, screenshot tours, inline tips, succinct Help articles, and so on, we can support all end-users, regardless of their experience level. These elements can not only help new users get up to speed, they can also serve as reminders for the more experienced user who might be struggling with a feature she hasn't used in a while.

Many of the pain points in Photoshop, Excel, and any complex application can be remedied. By doing more to turn beginning users into intermediates, surface the core and most common features, tuck away the more advanced and less common stuff, exclude redundant or irrelevant features, and so on, we can enable people to succeed within the complexity.

Every application can and should be made easier to use, regardless of the platform. What matters most is the users' ability to be productive with an application and to enjoy the experience. This should be a priority for any designer. Achieving this goal can certainly be tricky at times, but as long as we keep pursuing it, we can raise the bar and earn ourselves loyal and happy customers, regardless of how complex an application may be.