An Event Apart ’11, San Francisco
|13.Dec.2011As a web designer I have long enjoyed the genius behind the crew at A List Apart. Their passion for standards-based web design is the foundation for An Event Apart (AEA), the two-day conferences that take place all over the United States. As they so clearly state, “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.”
It has taken a couple of years, and a dip into my savings, but I finally took the jump and purchased my conference ticket to the AEA San Francisco show, along with the extra third-day Mobile Web Design workshop with Luke Wroblewski.
My roommate is colleague Lauren Gulde of Santa Clara Design, who has not fled Twitter guilt as I have, but instead has tweeted her way through each of the sessions. Twitter fans can follow AEA at A Feed Apart and photos are going up on the Flickr group.
Some of the sessions are not as relevant for me as a web designer, not developer. Still, as a designer I am responsible for content management and display, design flow, and best practices, so understanding a bit of the “bones” of a website hardly hurts. In other words, I am all ears.
Day Two has just started, but on Day One I thoroughly enjoyed the entertaining Jeffrey Zeldman‘s opening session on Content First. Zeldman reminded me that “If you don’t have the content, you aren’t designing, you’re decorating.” Ouch! I was challenged and excited by Ethan Marcotte‘s session on The Responsive Designer’s Workflow. Marcotte made a strong argument for a mobile-first approach, but my biggest take-away was the importance of promoting critical information to the top and “clearing the cruft“.
Today there is much more on the dock in my area of interest. Most specifically, I look forward to hearing Our Best Practices are Killing Us led by Nicole Sullivan, Idea to Interface by Aarron Walter, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Andy Clarke, and finally, A Content Strategy Roadmap with Kristina Halvorson.
Special shout out to Eric Meyer, co-founder of A List Apart, as well as an incredibly laid-back guy with an amazing penchant (okay fine, EXPERT) on CSS and web standards. The photo above is of Meyer during his session on Using Flexible Boxes.
