An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011

Sunday, August 7

1. 5:30pm–8:00pm

   WebINK Cocktail Party

   

   Sponsored by Extensis

   Brit’s Pub
   1110 Nicollet Mall, Clubhouse
   Minneapolis, MN
   

   Flying in early? Before the conference gets into full swing, join your fellow attendees and speakers for an evening of appetizers and festive libations plus a chance to win an iPad. Once you check-in step on over to Brit’s Pub. We’d love to have you join us to mix and mingle with other web enthusiasts. RSVP to save your spot!

Monday, August 8

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Content First!

   

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

   When “everyone is a designer,” what does it mean to be a web or UX designer? The rules of design engagement are changing. You may no longer be in control of the user’s visual experience. Succeeding in today’s web is more challenging than it has been in years. Yet challenges are opportunities, and today is the best time in over a decade to create websites and applications. Learn the skills and opportunities facing every designer today, from mobile and small screen strategy (and the difference between them) to the design principles of HTML5. Then put it all together with an approach to designing websites that puts the content (and the person who uses it) first.

2. 10:15am–11:15pm

   On Web Typography

   

   Jason Santa Maria, Mighty

   Achieving a thorough grasp of typography can take a lifetime, but moving beyond the basics is within your reach right now. In this talk, we’ll learn how to look at typefaces with a discerning eye, different approaches to typographic planning, how typography impacts the act of reading, and how to choose and combine appropriate typefaces from an aesthetic and technical point of view. Through an understanding of our design tools and how they relate to the web as a medium, we can empower ourselves to use type in meaningful and powerful ways.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Detail in Web Typography

   

   Richard Rutter, co-author, Blog Design Solutions

   Great typography is all about sweating the little details. The development and uptake of CSS 3 is finally giving designers the ability to control those details on the web. This session will zoom in on the finer aspects which can be applied now to improve your web typography - one glyph at a time - from hyphenation and ligatures, to punctuation and numerals.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   Mobile Web Design Moves

   

   Luke Wroblewski, author, Web Form Design

   Mobile dances to a different beat. Learn how to transition what you know about designing for the Web to Mobile and pick up a bunch of new moves along the way that’ll help you rock the mobile Web.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   Crafting the User Experience

   

   Sarah Parmenter, You Know Who

   As we journey through life we are moulded into various experiences and influenced by design around us. What makes us click “buy” on one website compared to another? What small design details can we add to truly enhance our design for positive benefits? How can design shape our everyday interactions without us realising? Sarah will serve up a large helping of practical UI advice for both mobile and the web, through her experiences as a User Interface Designer.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Responsive Designer’s Workflow

   

   Ethan Marcotte, co-author, Designing With Web Standards 3rd Edition

   There’s been a lot of great discussion about responsive web design: merging media queries and flexible, grid-based layouts to create more adaptive, universal designs. But how does a responsive approach affect our design workflow? And when is responsive design right for your project? We’ll look at sites and strategies to try and answer these questions, and learn to become more responsive designers.

9. 7:00pm–??pm

   Opening Night Party

   

   Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple

   The Local
   931 Nicollet Mall
   Minneapolis, MN 55402
   (612) 904-1000

   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.

Tuesday, August 9

1. 9:00am–10:00am

   Using Flexible Boxes

   

   Eric Meyer, author, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed.

   Off in a mostly unregarded corner of the CSS modularization effort, the Flexible Box (a.k.a. Flexbox) module has quietly charted a course into three of the four major browser rendering engines. In this practical, real-world session, Eric will take a tour of the surprising features and robustness of Flexbox and consider its place in our toolbox as well as ways to use it now without leaving older browsers grasping at shards.

2. 10:15am–11:15am

   Design Principles

   

   Jeremy Keith, author, HTML5 For Web Designers

   All software is inherently political, reflecting the biases and beliefs of the people behind it. These beliefs can be made explicit through the publication of design principles: pragmatic rules of thumb that underpin a shared endeavor. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it’s a website, a framework, or the World Wide Web itself.

3. 11:30am–12:30pm

   Our Best Practices are Killing Us

   

   Nicole Sullivan, co-author, Even Faster Websites

   For years, we have been suffering with the myth that if we just tried 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 talk, 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.

4. 12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH

5. 2:00pm–3:00pm

   A Content Strategy Roadmap

   

   Kristina Halvorson, author, Content Strategy for the Web

   How to make a website: discover, define, design, develop, deploy. It’s a familiar framework for most of our project processes. Now along comes this content strategy thing. Sure, it sounds like a great idea, but how does it fit in with what we’re already doing? Kristina will walk us through a typical website project to demonstrate why, how, where, and when content strategy happens.

6. 3:15pm–4:15pm

   Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

   

   Andy Clarke, author, Hardboiled Web Design

   Animation on the web has traditionally been low-fidelity and shares much common ground with the work of early animators. Web animations have always been the domain of Flash because equivalents couldn’t easily be created using open standards. That is until now, with ever increasing support for CSS3 Animations. Learn about the latest CSS animation techniques and how to create effective, accessible fallbacks for all browsers, including those with limited capabilities.

7. 4:30pm–5:30pm

   The Secret Lives of Links

   

   Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

   Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site. Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site’s links.

8. 6:00pm–??pm

   Closing Night Party

   

   Sponsored by Typekit

   Seven
   Rooftop Dome
   700 Hennepin Ave
   Minneapolis, MN 55403
   7steakhouse.com

   End the conference on the right note and share a drink with your fellow attendees and speakers!

Wednesday, August 10

A Day Apart

HTML5 and CSS3 are the most exciting news in web standards in over a decade, and serious browser support is nearly at hand. What will the new specifications mean to you? How will they change your work? What benefits do they provide to web designers, clients, and users, and how can you start using them today?

To answer these questions and more, two of our favorite speakers (and your favorite authors) have created a special one-day learning event focused on practical, usable takeaways and exciting new creative possibilities.

Understanding HTML5 with Jeremy Keith

• Learn about the history of HTML5 and the design principles that drive its development.
• Find out how new native form controls can provide a level of accessibility that stopgap emulated solutions could never match.
• Come to grips with the new structural elements and ARIA roles introduced in HTML5.
• Learn about new rich media elements that you can start using today.
• Figure out a strategy for migrating to HTML5.

Exploring CSS3 with Ethan Marcotte

• Learn what’s new in CSS3.
• Master progressive enrichment with CSS3 that works today.
• Explore web fonts and the future of type.
• Enjoy flexible color with RGBA.
• Experiment with transitions and transformations for happy modern browsers.