An Event Apart Atlanta features seven sessions on Monday, six sessions on Tuesday. There’s a lot to cover, so the event starts promptly each morning at 9:00 am.
In association with:
Sponsored by:
Three Days Of Design, Code, And Content
An Event Apart Atlanta features 13 great speakers and sessions. Following the two-day conference comes an intense full-day learning session on Responsive Design led by Ethan Marcotte (author, Responsive Web Design, A Book Apart, 2011). You can register just for the two-day conference, or just the full-day learning session on responsive design, or save $100 when you sign up for all three days.
Monday, February 6
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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.
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10:15am–11:15am
Inclusive Design: It’s In the Details
Cindy li, Product Designer, Yahoo! Applications
Audiences are the reason we invest time planning a design. Their very existence creates the factors that influence how we design. Appreciate the diversity of your users and think past the code into content, platform, accessibility, and cultural influences. Explore examples from around the globe and critique what works and what can be improved.
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11:30am–12:30pm
Handcrafted Patterns
Dan Cederholm, Co-Founder, Dribbble.com
When learning a new creative skill, we often follow a progression: Imitation, repetition, and innovation. We learn by dissecting the work of others, building our own tools, and later adding our own uniqueness. We’ll apply that thinking to designing flexible interfaces in an HTML5 and CSS3 world, exploring the process of crafting your own markup and style pattern library. What lessons can we learn from breaking websites into micro frameworks? What happens to these patterns under varying browsing conditions? Dan will share how patterns have helped him build bulletproof websites.
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12:30pm–1:30pm: LUNCH
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1:30pm–2:30pm
In Your @font-face
Jake Archibald, Front-end designer, Lanyrd
We finally have the ability to serve custom fonts to all popular browsers. However, as with everything in our profession, to succeed with web fonts we must navigate a minefield of gotchas and peculiarities between browsers, devices, and operating systems. Although fonts are a design asset, this talk will be deeply technical. We’ll look at what goes into a font file and how you can optimize font files for rendering and download performance, investigate common performance pitfalls made by most font delivery networks, and explore legal problems connected with font usage.
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2:45pm–3:45pm
Hacking Your Users’ Brains
Aviva Rosenstein, UX Lead, Salesforce.com
Ask yourself: are you making important design decisions based on assumptions about your end users? What’s the risk of making the wrong guesses about your users’ needs? You may think you don’t have the resources for conducting user research, but Aviva Rosenstein will give you tools for understanding your users that don’t require a lot of lead time or budget. You’ll learn how to structure an interview to get honest and useful answers, how to set up a site visit, and techniques for recording user behavior. She’ll teach you tricks for finding out how users perceive your site and for helping them find the information they need. Along the way, Aviva will also review research insights about how end users make sense of information, and show you how to exploit the principles of perception to design more usable web sites and applications.
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4:00pm–5:00pm
Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content
Karen McGrane, Founder, Bond Art & Science
For years, we’ve been telling designers: the web is not print. You can’t have pixel-perfect layouts. You can’t determine how your site will look in every browser, on every platform, on every device. We taught designers to cede control, think in systems, embrace web standards. So why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will “live” on a web page? Why do we give in when they demand a WYSIWYG text editor that works “just like Microsoft Word?” Worst of all, why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? What worked for the desktop web simply won’t work for mobile. As our design and development processes evolve, our content workflow must keep up. Karen will talk about how to adapt to create more flexible content.
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5:15pm–6:15pm
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.
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7:00pm–??pm
Opening Night Party
Gordon Biersch Buckhead
3242 Peachtree Road NE
Buckhead, Atlanta, GA 30305
(404) 264-0253
Kindly RSPVP
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 announced as the conference draws near, so stay tuned!
Tuesday, February 7
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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.
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10:15am–11:15am
Our Best Practices Are Killing Us
Nicole Sullivan, Co-Author, Even Faster Websites
For years, we’ve been suffering with the myth that if we just try 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 session, 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.
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11:30am–12:30pm
Buttons Are a Hack
Josh Clark, Author, Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
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.
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12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH
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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.
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3:15pm–4:15pm
Bridging the App Gap
Marco Arment, Founder, Instapaper
Native apps and the web aren’t at war: each can borrow from the other to create web services with rich interfaces tailored to many different contexts and devices. In this session, we’ll explore these hybrid apps, the techniques and technologies that power them, and how to decide which to use for your application.
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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, February 8
Responsive Web Design
What is responsive design, you ask? In this full-day learning session, we’ll cover the fundamental ingredients of the approach—combining flexible layouts and media queries—before diving into the deep end of the pool. We’ll review advanced layout techniques, so that you’re as comfortable working with a fluid grid as a pixel-heavy one. We’ll discuss strategies for managing different kinds of media, from images to third-party video and advertising. And we’ll review why progressive enhancement is critical to designing for today’s Web, whether you’re working responsively or not.
Throughout the day, we’ll discuss how we might adopt more flexible design practices: from prototyping our ideas for clients, to establishing more collaborative workflows for creative teams. Perhaps most importantly, we’ll discuss criteria for when a responsive approach is right for your project—as well as discuss situations when it isn’t.
Key topics will include:
- Responsive design strategies
- Flexible grid fundamentals
- Advanced layout
- Managing media and media queries
- Progressive enhancement
- Feature detection
- Establishing an accessible baseline
- Responsive content
This full-day session follows An Event Apart Atlanta and runs 9:00am - 4:00pm on Wednesday, February 8. You can register online and save over $100 when you sign up for both An Event Apart and Responsive Web Design.
NOTE: The full-day session on Responsive Web Design is not a hands-on learning session or small-group workshop; upwards of 200 people typically attend.
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Great Hotel, Special Savings
The InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta has arranged a special room rate of $199 with complimentary internet for AEA attendees. To get these savings, call (404) 946-9000 and request the “special An Event Apart room rate.”
The InterContinental Buckhead Atlanta sets high standards of quality with international flair and southern hospitality. This non-smoking hotel on Peachtree Road puts you close to the Buckhead community’s thriving business and shopping districts, and provides easy access to attractions such as the Georgia Aquarium, the High Museum of Art, the New World of Coca-Cola, and the CNN Studio Tour.