An Event Apart San Francisco 2012

Monday, November 12

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Styles of Redesign

   

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

   If traditional designs are nouns, the web is a verb. Unlike book jackets and skyscrapers, what we design on the web is never finished. Publish once, redesign forever. But just how do we go about this redesign business? Perpetually tinker? Throw out everything and start over? Buy a new CMS and blame everything on the technology?

   There are as many ways to succeed (or fail) as there are kinds of sites and designers. Make it work! Explore differing strategies, stories, and types of web content to understand where your site fits in and be certain you’re doing or planning the redesign that best suits your brand, content, and users.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Faster Design Decisions with Style Tiles

   

   Samantha Warren, Design Director, Phase2 Technology

   Diving into responsive design projects can be daunting. Old design practices are cumbersome when thinking in terms of web systems that will span a wide variety of devices and dimensions.

   What if we had an artifact that not only helped us communicate with clients, but allowed for developers to jump into the project earlier? Style tiles are a design artifact consisting of fonts, colors and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for the web. They create a strong foundation early in the web design process for talking with clients, establishing a visual language, and working iteratively with developers. Learn how to apply design principles and bring confidence and agility to your process by using style tiles.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Big Type, Little Type

   

   Jon Tan, Co-Founder, FontDeck

   Web typography is growing up. Learn how to set type for advertising, headlines, or at large sizes using display or decorative typefaces, and how to set type for extended reading, information design, or at small sizes. Discover OpenType ligatures, swashes, and alternates for the web. More importantly, learn the why as well as the how of advanced web typography, with examples to leave you inspired, and techniques to help you create exquisite web typography, today.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Mobile to the Future

   

   Luke Wroblewski, Author, Mobile First

   When something new comes along, it’s common for us to react with what we already know. Radio programming on TV, print design on web pages, and now web page design on mobile devices. But every medium ultimately needs unique thinking and design to reach its true potential. Through an in-depth look at several common web interactions, Luke will outline how to adapt existing desktop design solutions for mobile devices and how to use mobile to expand what’s possible across all devices. You’ll go from thinking about how to reformat your websites to fit mobile screens, to using mobile as way to rethink the future of the web.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   HTML5 APIs Will Change the Web: And Your Designs

   

   Jen Simmons, Author, The Web Ahead

   HTML5. It’s more than paving the cowpaths. It’s more than markup. There’s a lot of stuff in the spec about databases and communication protocols and blahdiblah backend juju. Some of that stuff is pretty radical. And it will change how you design websites.

   Why? Because for the last twenty years, web designers have been creating inside of a certain set of constraints. We’ve been limited in what’s possible by the technology that runs the web. We became so used to those limits, we stopped thinking about them. They became invisible. They Just Are. Of course the web works this certain way. Of course a user clicks and waits, the page loads, like this…

   But guess what? That’s not what the web will look like in the future. The constrains have changed. Come hear a non-nerd explanation of the new possibilities created by HTML5’s APIs. Don’t just wait around to see how other people implement these technologies. Learn about HTML APIs yourself, so you can design for and create the web of the future.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   Rolling Up Our Responsive Sleeves

   

   Ethan Marcotte, Author, Responsive Web Design

   We’ve discussed at length the fundamentals of responsive design, combining fluid grids and media queries to create more flexible, device-agnostic sites. So does that mean responsive design is a magic formula that solves all our problems? Well, no. But thankfully, we didn’t get into web design because we wanted to be bored. In this session we’ll review strategies for handling trickier elements that’d make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.

8. 7:00pm–??pm

   Opening Night Party

   

   Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple

   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. Details will be revealed as the time draws near. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, November 13

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   The Future of CSS

   

   Eric Meyer, Author, CSS: The Definitive Guide

   There is a lot of activity happening in CSS right now. Not only are several popular aspects of CSS evolving, but major new ideas are being proposed and, in some cases, already implemented. From selectors to regions, from flexible boxes to filters, from conditionals to compositing, there is a lot coming. In this session we’ll take a look at the most popular and pressing modules, how they’ll affect what you do, and, most importantly, how you can help shape their evolution.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Designing for Content Management Systems

   

   Jared Ponchot, Creative Director, Lullabot

   The job of a web designer these days includes designing for content that changes, is highly dynamic, and often does not yet exist. Gone are the halcyon days of static, five page websites that are just as rigid as a printed brochure (let’s be honest, we don’t miss that). This reality has created a great deal of debate within our industry and a fair amount of difficulty in our design processes. We’ll cover design concepts and principles that can be applied when designing for CMS-driven websites. We’ll also outline some tips and tricks for your design process, and explore some of the biggest hurdles and potential pitfalls in designing for yet created and ever-changing content.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Use Robots to Defeat the Zombies; or, Content Strategy for Mobile

   

   Karen McGrane, Founder, Bond Art & Science

   A zombie apocalypse is upon us: an onslaught of new devices, platforms, and screen sizes, hordes of them descending every day. Dynamic content management systems use robots to automate content delivery across these platforms, displaying and formatting content according to metadata and business rules. But as science fiction has taught us, ceding control to the robots comes at a price.

   Learn what writers do differently when they’re not writing pages, but instead creating “content objects.” Discover how designers think about creating systems that work with adaptive content. And find out who’s the boss of the robots, defining the metadata and business rules that tell the machines how to build pages.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Buttons Are a Hack

   

   Josh Clark, Author, Tapworthy

   Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. Find out why our beloved buttons are weak replacements for manipulating content directly. Learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. But hang on; if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the darn thing?

   Learn to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by making it effortless to discover invisible gestures. This session explains the power of animation, reveals the influence of game design, and offers techniques to build native and web apps according to the new rules of touchscreen design.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   The Real Me: Personality In Design

   

   Aarron Walter, Author, Designing for Emotion

   While some companies use their brand as an opaque facade to hide their questionable practices, others are opening up to their audience and sharing their true personality. The result is a more honest relationship with customers.

   Through real world examples, you’ll see the key benefits personality creates for companies. We’ll discuss how to create Design Personas, the starting point for brand personality, and discover the relationship between brand voice and tone.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Curious Properties of Intuitive Web Pages

   

   Jared Spool, Founder, User Interface Engineering

   When the page works, your user knows exactly what to do. Everything makes sense and they accomplish their goal, pleased with your site. Yet, often pages don’t work and users get flustered and confused. Turns out that intuitive web pages abide by a set of curiously unintuitive properties. Learn how to merge interaction design, visual design, information architecture, and other skills together to assemble pages that delight your users.

Wednesday, November 14

Designing Mobile Web Experiences

Each day, device manufacturers ship more than a million touch-screen phones enabling new ways for people to interact with the web. But when they get to your website or application, what kind of experience will people with these devices have? Will they be delighted by your mobile web experience or frustrated?

In this day-long workshop on web design best practices for mobile devices, Luke Wroblewski will detail how to think about and design for web organization, actions, inputs, and layout on mobile. Through lots of examples, you’ll learn how to:

• Use “content first/navigate second” organizational structures optimized for small screens and mobile use cases
• Design for increasingly prevalent touch interactions with appropriate targets and gestures
• Construct forms and input fields to make input on mobile easier and more pervasive
• Manage layouts across multiple devices with ruthless editing, device experiences, and responsive/flexible designs
• And more!

Armed with these design best practices and principles, you can make sure people have a great mobile web experience whenever they visit your site.

This optional workshop day follows An Event Apart San Francisco and runs 9:00am - 4:00pm on Wednesday, November 14. You can register online and save over $100 when you sign up for both An Event Apart and Designing Mobile Web Experiences.

NOTE: The full-day workshop on designing mobile web experiences is not a hands-on learning session or small-group workshop; upwards of 200 people typically attend An Event Apart workshops.