LUKE WROBLEWSKI has worked at eBay and Yahoo!, had a startup acquired by Twitter, written three popular design books, and made people all over the world see the mobile web and mobile design in a new light. He’ll bring his unique wisdom and humor to our stage throughout 2012, so we asked him what he’d be saying there as well as a few other questions.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

My talk is titled Mobile to the Future for a simple reason. Starting with 30 years of desktop and 20 years of Web design isn’t going to unleash the real potential of mobile Web experiences. Yet that’s what most Web teams are doing because that’s what they know. Instead of looking backwards we need to look forward and build new experiences that take advantage of what mobile can really do. My talk is full of examples how.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

If you want to dictate an email or text message on your iPhone but don’t want to look odd in public, just tilt the phone up to your ear and the ambient light sensor will trigger voice recognition mode automatically. To anyone around you it will look like you just picked up and answered a phone call. Smooth…

Q. What professional website are you visiting most these days?

I visit TechMeme many times a day and have done so for years. It’s the best place I’ve found for keeping up with what’s happening in technology right now.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

My most visited places are coffee shops, mountain bike trails, and airports. In that order and priority.

What separates a good design from a bad design are the decisions that the designer made.

In this hour-long video, recorded live at An Event Apart San Diego 2010, Jared Spool explores the five styles of design decisions, showing you when gut instinct produces the right results, and when designers need to look to more user-focused research.

Jared Spool (@jmspool) is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a leading research, training, and consulting firm specializing in website and product usability.

Jared has been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers. He spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helping clients understand how to solve their design problems, explaining to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year.

He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.

An Event Apart, the design conference for people who make websites, is an intensely educational three-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is for you.

As CSS3 support spreads to more and more browsers, designers are able to create better and better interfaces while still retaining good experiences for users who aren’t fully up to date. In this entertaining and illuminating full-length talk, recorded live at An Event Apart San Diego (November 1-2, 2010), Dan Cederholm explores some of the emerging features in CSS3 and shows how to use them wisely, all while telling a compelling story about some stuff we left on the moon.

Dan Cederholm is a web designer and author living in Massachusetts. He is the founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio, and co-founder of Dribbble, a design community. A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, Dan co-founded the wine community site, Cork’d and has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo and others.

Dan is the author of four best-selling books: CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart), Bulletproof Web Design 3rd Edition (New Riders), Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design with Ethan Marcotte (New Riders), and Web Standards Solutions (Apress/Friends of ED). He runs a popular blog where he writes articles and commentary on the web, technology and life. And he plays a mean ukulele. Follow Dan on Twitter: @simplebits.

A VETERAN of the browser wars, Peter-Paul Koch (better known as PPK) has made the mobile web his passion over the past few years, doing more in-depth testing, analysis, and writing about standards and the mobile web than perhaps anyone else on the planet. He also founded Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and will speak at AEA Seattle this coming April.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

Touch events are a new class of events, and require a separate interaction designing process. Although it may seem that they’re pretty much the same as the mouse events, except that they work with touches, they’re not, really. There are a few fundamental differences (touch interaction is not the same as mouse interaction), and a few more differences due to browser implementations (the touchmove event, for instance, continues firing when a mousemove event would stop).

All this sounds pretty complicated, but it isn’t, really. You just have to know a few basic rules, and then you’re ready to roll your own touchscreen interfaces. Come to my Seattle session to learn more.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

The fact that you can decide, per touch event on a case-by-case basis, whether to handle the event in your script, or send it on to the OS to be processed. For instance, if you have a horizontal flick-scroller, any horizontal touch movement should be handled by your script, but vertical movement should be sent on to the OS for normal processing: i.e. scrolling the page.

Q. What professional website are you visiting most these days?

Mostly sites that monitor the mobile ecosystem as a whole, such as Asymco, Communities Dominate Brands, Vision Mobile, WAP Review, and Mobile Industry Review.

I would love to visit more tech-oriented sites about mobile, but it turns out most of the tips and tricks are stuff that I already know, or heavily focused on libraries, which I don’t use. So general information it is – for now.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

I’m a historian originally, and have an excellent knowledge of (Western-)European and classical history. Back in the day one drinking game my friends and I played was that they’d give me a year, and I’d tell them what happened in that year.

Meanwhile I’ve lost some of my knowledge (for instance, I’ve lost the ability to name all 12th-century emperors of Germany in order with regnal years), but I continue to read a lot of history. Currently I focus on the Roman Republic and Dutch political history since 1848. (And to be clear: these two subjects have absolutely nothing to do with each other.)

More often than not, the mobile experience for a web application or site is designed and built after the PC version is complete. Learn the three reasons web applications should be designed for mobile first: mobile is exploding; mobile forces you to focus; and mobile extends your capabilities.

Captured on video and shown here for the first time is Luke Wroblewski’s seminal presentation at An Event Apart. It’s an illuminating and engaging talk, and the spark that gave rise to the best-selling book of the same name.

Luke Wroblewski is the founder of LukeW Ideation & Design, a product strategy and design consultancy. He co-founded and was Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Bagcheck which was acquired by Twitter Inc. just nine months after being launched publicly. Prior to this, Luke was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital and the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo! Inc. where he worked on product alignment and forward-thinking integrated customer experiences on the Web, mobile, TV, and beyond.

Luke is the author of three popular web design books (Web Form Design, Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, and Mobile First) and many articles about digital product design and strategy. He is also a consistently top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and a co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

KIM GOODWIN has spent more than a decade working to make design a more central part of everything we do. Author of the bestselling Designing for the Digital Age, Kim was for many years a vice president at Cooper, where she led cross-disciplinary teams and developed internal curricula. We spent a quick minute chatting with her about her upcoming talk at AEA Seattle and a few other things.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

I’ll show you how scenarios–which are essentially character-driven stories–can help generate better solutions faster, while also building commitment on the team.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

Most designers are used to making stuff up, but that blank-whiteboard effect is a real barrier to generation for some people. When I teach, I’ve started using detailed journey maps of the current experience to help people get started imagining a better future. It’s been working very well.

Q. What professional website are you visiting most these days?

I’ve been pretty focused on organizational culture and design leadership lately, so the Harvard Business Review is a frequent stop.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

I think the first few minutes after sunrise is the best time of day, especially when I have a camera in my hand.

• Andy Clarke — Author, Hardboiled Web Design
• Kristina Halvorson — Author, Content Strategy for the Web
• Jeremy Keith — Author, HTML5 For Web Designers
• Jenny Lam — Co-founder, Jackson Fish Market
• Ethan Marcotte — Author, Responsive Web Design
• Sarah Parmenter — Founder, You Know Who
• Jason Santa Maria — Founder, Mighty
• Jared Spool — Founder, User Interface Engineering
• Aarron Walter — Author, Designing For Emotion
• Luke Wroblewski — Author, Web Form Design
• Eric Meyer — Author, CSS: The Definitive Guide
• Jeffrey Zeldman — Author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition

Save money when you register early

Learn from the leading creative minds in web design and development. There are twelve great sessions in all — plus an optional all-day workshop on Designing Mobile Web Experiences with Luke Wroblewski. And because An Event Apart is a uniquely single-track event, you never have to decide which session to skip or which session to see. Come see them all!

You can attend just An Event Apart, or just the day on mobile web design, or save more than $100 when you register for both. But don’t delay: tickets are first-come, first-served, and seating is limited.

ALL-AROUND POLYMATH Simon Collison is a world-renowned designer, author, organizer, and thinker. In the hopes of stealing just a smidgen of his brilliance for our own use, we asked Simon a few questions ahead of his appearance at AEA Seattle.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

The focus is on restraint and economy in the systems we build. I’ll be looking at ways to improve the dialogue between us and our audiences, with some subtle, almost invisible methods. Conversely, I’m interested in how we often strive for simplicity at the expense of complexity, the latter being a valuable thing in the right hands. It’s all about improving communication, and putting richer, more rewarding experiences in front of people.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

This is embarrassing, as I use Photoshop almost every day, and I’m pretty good with shortcuts. Anyway, I’ve spent years scrolling up and down the Layers palette frantically trying to find and select the layer I need. It was often trial and error and lost me loads of time. I just thought that was how it worked: badly. Then my friend Greg showed me the light.

With the Move Tool selected, uncheck Auto-Select (makes it easier to dictate selection), choose Layer in the drop-down. After that, any time the Move Tool is selected, you can do command-click on any layer to automatically select it.

Like I said; embarrassing.

Q. What professional website are you visiting most these days?

Gimme Bar. I’ve been using it to collect the web, but with more folks to follow since it was opened up, it’s become a wonderful voyage into serendipity. Through my Discovery feed, I find articles, quotes, techniques, and inspiration from the designers I admire. Its usefulness as a professional site depends on how you curate it, but for me it’s like a portal into the minds of others. I see how they collect, what inspires them, and the things they read. It’s an almighty bucket of inspiration, yet not too proud to throw me an animated kitten or two.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

In the Summer of 1998, I saved Icelandic Hip-Hop. It’s not exactly my genre, but I’m proud of my contribution to its history. This is something probably best explained over a drink in Seattle, so by all means ask me when we have more time.

Designing for multichannel content delivery (mobile, anyone?) means an entirely new set of considerations and challenges for web professionals everywhere.

Unfortunately for content creators, it’s nearly impossible to predict whether their writing will maintain impact and readability across each and every platform.

But forget about the medium for a minute; it’s the message that matters most. In this hour-long presentation live at An Event Apart, Kristina Halvorson teaches you to identify your key business messages, understand how they inform your content strategy, and learn how they impact multi-channel content development and design.

An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design. If you care about code as well as content, usability as well as design, An Event Apart is the conference you’ve been waiting for.

Founded by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, and dedicated to the proposition that the creators of great web experiences deserve a great learning experience, An Event Apart brings together twelve of the leading minds in web design for two days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment. See our home page for information about upcoming An Event Apart conference events plus workshops on mobile and responsive design. And watch this space for more extraordinary An Event Apart presentation videos.

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