I spent the first 3 days this week at An Event Apart (Seattle).
This is a conference that I’d been wanting to attend since its inception, but somehow never actually made it down to one. I was really looking forward to a few days of self-affirming web-geekery.
And that respect, I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t know the process by which An Event Apart selects their speakers, but whatever it is, it is good.
From start to finish, the quality of the presentations were excellent - even those whose content I wasn’t particularly interested in. Jeffrey Zeldman got us started in fine form, with a talk, essentially, about mistakes that would be good to avoid in running a studio.
Having been running a shop (or studio) for the past 7 years, this was of very little interest to me - I’ve made those same mistakes previously, I’ve come to many of the same conclusions, I’d offer the same advice to anyone wanting to strike out on their own.
But! I still thoroughly enjoyed it. A light hors d’oeuvre before the meaty sessions that followed.
He’s a great speaker, which made this otherwise too-low-level talk appreciable by all.
Of all the talks, Nicole Sullivan’s, who followed next, was the least inspiring.
It fell between two worlds for me.
She was talking about object-oriented CSS.
Given her background, I was hoping for a super-nerdy, intense look at site-speed optimization & whatnot.
We got a little bit of that - but not with the detail I’d like, and then the second-half of her talk was spent looking at her wish-list for things to be included in future CSS spec.
So, not even actual proposed spec.
Things that she proposes should be in proposed spec that I might get to use in bleeding-edge browsers 3-4 years from now and actual projects a decade or so in the future.
Which felt like a waste of my time, to be honest.
So, while I’m down on her talk, her answers in the brief Q&A were great and I’d love to hear her do a “developer” talk, rather than a “designer” talk, which this seemed to be. Dan Cederholm talked CSS3, and gave some nice tips & tricks.
His presentations are fantastic - but I’ll talk more about him later. Luke Wroblweski gave the talk that I wish every designer in the world could hear.
Titled “Mobile First!”, I think Jeffrey Zelman summed it up best: “Luke Wroblewski’s extraordinary “Mobile First” presentation changed the way I think about web design”.
It was compelling, well-backed-up with samples, and, perhaps best of all, seemed very easy to implement. Aaron Walter’s talk ‘Learning To Love Humans—Emotional Interface Design’ was funny, humble and very very smart - all about how to create an emotional response to design, and moving beyond the idea that functional is the goal (paraphrasing Aaron to sum it up: You never hear a chef say ‘taste this, it’s edible!’ so why should a designer).
If you’ve never heard Jared Spool talk about usability, design & process, chances are you’re doing it wrong.
His insights are incredible.
His talk here was about the anatomy of a design decision - what ‘kind’ of design to teams do, how they arrive at that process, and what effect it has both on productivity and on end-user experience.
The 101-take: Experience is what happens in the space between actions.
His talk, to me, nicely summed the internal conflict that makes Pencilneck Software work so well. I am, by default, an intuitive developer. I rely on tips, tricks, experience and instinct to guide me through what I do.
Jeff, by contrast, is a firm believer in process & methodology to get things done right.
Where we meet in the middle is why we are successful where lots of other firms have failed, I feel - and Jared Spool really captured both the differences in approach and how they each affect teams & workflow.