Black Slate Media

There is something to be said about that giddy feeling derived from reminding myself exactly what I do for a living. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remind me I’m not in some bizarro dream state. Okay, well not really. But still, when you are willing to lock yourself in a room for two days to hear panelists discuss job-related matter, it is a powerful thing. There is only a thimble-full of people I know who feel that kind of passion and motivation for their career. I certainly wouldn’t be writing this had I chosen to become an accountant.

I attended An Event Apart in Boston last year. Not only did both conferences take me to a new city, but they also reinforced my enthusiasm for my job. If your company’s budget allows for you to attend conferences, I highly recommend this one. Hell, I’d probably even pay out-of-pocket. The learning experience is worth the price alone, and I had fun. A lot of it.

I want to take a brief moment time to highlight a few points that I feel were worth mentioning.

Day 1

Jeffrey Zeldman Understanding Web Design

Mr. Zeldman preached about employing empathy into our designs. In order for a site to be successful, we need to know whom we are designing for and how to do design for them. This struck a chord with me from a previous job. We (the company) completely cut the user out of the equation when it came time to redesign our site. Unfortunately, we (the designers) were completely cut from the design process. Baffling, huh? I’m assuming many designers within large organizations have experienced this type of irritating situation – the demeaning feeling of being handed an IA that reflects the internal structure and culmination of executive egos that you are powerless to fight.

I can go on forever about why and how that I think that is, which is probably worthy of a separate post down the road.

Jeffrey went on to explain another problem, one perpetuated by designers – allowing the design overshadow the content. In my early days, I would have balked at this. I mean, why would you visit a site that didn’t look good? Oh yeah, because we’re not here to marvel at a work of art. We’re here to fulfill a specific purpose. “Good web design is about the character of the content, not the character of the design.” Jeffrey closed his discussion with a remind to “always bring it back to the USER.”

Eric Meyer The Lessons of CSS Frameworks

Eric Meyer’s panel on the first day dealt with the subject of CSS frameworks. I was curious what he had to say because he didn’t really strike me as an advocate for such things. He compared 7 of the more widely used frameworks over a variety of criteria, including naming conventions, font-sizes, and attaching methods.

So, after about an hour of going through such an exhaustive comparison, which CSS framework came out on top? Was it Blueprint? Was it the 960 grid? Nope. The best framework is YOUR framework. Eric suggested that we create frameworks that work both for us and our organizations.

I was waiting for this line throughout his entire panel and was so happy to hear him say that. Anyone that goes under the hood of Politico will notice that we do not use web standards at all. This is something that I am working to fix, and I want to develop a framework that will be intuitive enough for the not so CSS savvy among us.

Here are a few suggestions for creating your own framework:

• Create a directory structure for your CSS files
• Use separate files for layout, typography, and colors
• Develop a descriptive naming convention
• Consider using a debug stylesheet

Jason Santa Maria Good Design Ain’t Easy

Jason’s panel focused on using design to support storytelling. On the web, Jason explained, “We’ve distilled stories down to their content.” To illustrate this, he displayed a few magazine articles with visuals that effectively established the mood and tone intended by the author. Then he showed us how those same stories were blandly translated to the web. His point was that design for the web is driven by technology rather than designing by the story.

Working for a news company, we certainly do plenty of storytelling. I’m curious how we can use design to tell stories when we’re trying to beat CNN (or whatever) to break a story. I don’t have an answer for this. But what I can say is that we also do plenty of feature stories that are not as time-sensitive. Maybe this can be our opportunity.

Brian Oberkirch Kick It Like Pele

As a soccer fan of Brazilian descent, the title of Brian’s presentation, “Kick it like Pele,” automatically garnered my full respect. But he wasn’t there to talk about the beautiful game. Pele’s infectious enthusiasm for the sport was simply a metaphor for enhancing the user experience.

A great user experience can be achieved through a variety of ways, including saving them time though more usable navigation. Your copy should be communicative. For example, Sammantha Warren wrote an article about how Wuffoo’s support page includes a field that asks for the user’s emotional state. There are plenty of other ways out there. Don’t require registration to access content. Don’t ask for passwords for other services to find contacts. Create a sense of trust, and you will be rewarded.

Cameron Moll Good Design vs. Great Design

I have seen Cameron’s panel before at An Event Apart Boston 2007. It was very very good. Perhaps my favorite part is his discussion of solutions-focused vs. problem-focused design. He talks about how WWI planes in terms of the gun. One man suggested putting placing metal panels on the back of the propeller so the bullets do not damage the blades. While this solution was successful as means of shooting down more aircraft, it didn’t tackle the problem at hand. After all, the propeller was still getting shot! A man by the name of Anthony Fokker solved the problem by creating a camshaft that did not allow the gun to fire when the blade was directly in front of the gun.

Another great discussion that Cameron brought up was the issue of reading vs. scanning. We, the internet browsing masses, have reduced our attention spans down to the blink of an eye. If a site fails to get our attention, it fails completely. My former company’s previous would have been a great example of this (actually, so is the present version). The homepage had 62 links. 62 LINKS!!! The cognitive load was so high, there was no way to tell exactly what the company did or what do from there. Trim the fat, use proper wording, and consider contrast.

Dave Shea Living, Breathing Design

Dave asked if we can create a site that looks great on the monitor, the iPhone, the cell phone, the TV, and the Wii? How do we do it? Well, we don’t. It is just not practical to expect a site be optimized for ALL of these viewing conditions. One solution he proposed was using resolution-dependent JavaScript. This is really cool, but I don’t think it is something that works when your site relies on selling specific ad sizes for specific sections of the site.

Planning for change is an important part of web design, so I am glad Dave decided to cover this. Navigation can change. Content type can change. This is something to keep in mind when you create your design and write your markup. If you decide to go with a modular design, it is a good idea to make your columns an equal width.

There was a lot of more to Dave’s presentation, so I apologize if I cannot get to everything.

Andy Clark Underpants Over My Trousers

Andy not only had one of the best presentations of the conference, he had the best haircut. Seriously, if my scalp weren’t so prone to sunburn, I’d probably have cool hair. Andy spoke about how his favorite comic books served as his inspiration for a Puerto Rican site he was designing. Using the grid-adherent Watchmen comic, he showed us how deviating from the normal panel widths are used to create timing and tension. He then took that theme and beautifully translated into a functional web design.

Lean, semantically correct markup is also Andy’s specialty, so I was glad to see this mentioned in his presentation. I’m not going to go over that in full, but I recommend that you take a look at Transcending CSS. It is wonderfully written and will change the way you look at writing markup.

In creating comic books, all parties are involved along all stages in the process. In a way, it is sort of like a screenplay. It would be nice if this approach was applied to designing websites.

Greg Rewis Special Adobe Session: From Prototype to Web Page

Adobe CS4 is in development, and we were fortunate to get a sneak peek. Fireworks CS4 will have the capability to export designs to an interactive PDF. But that’s not it. CS4 will feature bitmap 9-slicing!

We also got to see Dreamweaver CS4. I really didn’t think I’d be too excited about this since I write all my code by hand. There hasn’t been a single useful Dreamweaver enhancement in years. In CS4, things will be different! Here is one reason: The Webkit rendering engine is built right into it! The Live Preview button allows you to view the site just as if you were using Safari. Running JavaScript? No problem. It runs scripts well. The split view will show exactly how your scripts are affecting your html.

Day 2

Eric Meyer Debug / Reboot

Eric Meyer’s second presentation was about CSS Reboots. For more information on that, check out his article on 24 Ways

Stephanie Sullivan Design Challenges, Standards Solutions

Stephanie Sullivan had a great presentation to those that are still rather new to what this whole CSS thing is all about. Still though, I got a couple useful tips, such as using ordered lists for form fields, and using <span> to achieve multiple lines in block level elements.

Aaron Gustafson Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript

As the title states, JavaScript needs to be used as a progressive enhancement for any website. Content should never be reliant on a script. He reminded us that many companies block JavaScript as a security measure, and that we should exercise restraint when using it. Before writing your JavaScript, create and style your content to look fine with out it. This way, if the script doesn’t load, the site fails silently. If the script loads, the user gets the enhancement.

Aaron Walter Findability Bliss Through Web Standards SEO

Nowadays, we all know that publishing content using clean, non-presentation markup will yield better search results. However, it we still see <div class="header"> today. It is very important to know that HTML is in fact machine readable. In other words, there is a big difference between a heading and paragraph.

So, what can we do to improve our rankings? Make the page title brief. Don’t try to cram keywords into it. Google reads the content of your page and not its meta keywords. Use alt and title attributes, which you should be doing for accessibility anyway. Place keywords in your URLs and the logo’s filename. As I stated earlier, content loaded via script will not be visible to search engines.

Aaron was kind of enough to provide a link to Sitening. They have a free, simple SEO checker. I recommend using it.

Robert Hoekman, Jr. On-the-Spot Usability Reviews

I liked this section. Robert looked at audience-submitted sites and provided a free usability review. One point he really drove home was keeping the amount of content and bullet points to a minimum. I wish my last company would have listened to me when I said that. Unfortunately, my position in the food chain was right above the cleaning crew.

Jeffrey Zeldman Web Standards: The Return of the King

It was interesting to hear about the hard work and insurmountable tasks the web standards movement faced in its early days. Jeffrey also touched on the heated issues of version targeting and HTML5. Version targeting is using specific meta data to activate IE8’s rendering engine. The reason for this was because when IE7 was released, many of the sites created to work in IE6 broke. Thankfully, Microsoft has since backed down to the development community and will not support version targeting.

It is safe to say that nearly all websites created today have a header, a main content area, and a footer. With XHTML, we create unique identifiers for these sections when writing our markup. HTML5 looks to eliminate that redundancy by implementing elements for these sections. It seems pretty simple, but this is starting to encroach on presentational HTML. There is still much controversy that needs to be sorted out, but we will see how the dust settles.

Jeff Veen Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps

Jeff’s speech on data visualization was my personal favorite. He brought the right amount of energy and and enthusiasm to the final panel of the conference. Working in news, specifically political news, displaying data is vital to how our stats measure up during elections, primaries, and caucuses. Showing a graph of data is fine and dandy, but you want to find the story in the data. Adding a layer of interactivity will take this one step further. Just be sure not to sacrifice usability.

Outside of the Conference

New Orleans is an incredible city and I am so glad I had the opportunity to see it and meet some really cool people. I want to thank Brooks for all of his recommendations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a chance to venture outside the Quarter. Casting my good health aside, I ate a Po’ Boy at Johnny’s Po’ Boys, coffee and beignets at Cafe Du Monde, a muffuletta and Pims glass at Napoleon House, a fancy dinner and banana fosters at Brennan’s, and saw the Marsalis Band while enjoying a fantastic dinner at Club 300.

There was a lot more to the trip. I wish I can share everything, but this post is already too long. Check out my flickr set or leave comment if there is anything you’d like to add.