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Three Days Of Design, Code, And Content
An Event Apart Seattle features 12 great speakers and sessions. Following the two-day conference comes A Day Apart, an intense learning session on Mobile Web Design led by Luke Wroblewski (Web Form Design). You can register just for An Event Apart or A Day Apart, or save $100 when you sign up for all three days.
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Monday, March 28
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9:00am–10:00am
Elements of Rich Web Experience
Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Ed.
What makes a website great? What transforms an ordinary site into an extraordinary experience? Is it the content, the graphic design, or the subtle UX “touches” that bring a website to life and transform it from a radar blip to a beloved destination? In a word, yes—it takes all the above to make your site stand out from the pack. Study content, design, and UX details of great and not-so-great sites to learn tricks that can inspire devotion and transform your site into a source of endless inspiration.
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10:15am–11:15am
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.
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11:30am–12:30pm
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.
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12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH
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2:00pm–3:00pm
Making Monkeys Dance: The High Art of Persuasive Design
Robert Hoekman, Jr., author, Designing the Obvious
Our users are not monkeys, nor we their monkey-masters, but our job nonetheless is to coerce and compel our customers to do all sorts of little dances to earn us money and fame. In this convincing session, Robert Hoekman, Jr, leads us from the blue-sky concepts to the down-low details of the principles of persuasive design, showing us at every step just how susceptible we all are to the power of suggestion and how to ethically influence our fans, followers, and customers by mapping our needs to their impulses. More than just a rehashing of Cialdini’s famous guidelines, Hoekman delivers directives, shows us how it’s done, and even takes a few of us along for the ride. See it for yourself for a limited time only.
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3:15pm–4:15pm
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.
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4:30pm–5:30pm
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 can rock the mobile Web.
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7:00pm–??pm
Opening Night Party
Sponsored by (mt) Media Temple
Belltown Pub
2322 1st Ave (between Bell St. and SR99)
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 448-6210
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. Venue details will be announced in March.
Tuesday, March 29
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9:00am–10:00am
The CSS3 Anarchist’s Cookbook
Eric Meyer, author, CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Ed.
A decade ago, Eric first showed the world how to use CSS for evil. Now, thanks to CSS3, we have even more powerful weapons at our disposal, and the time has come to make use of them. Join Eric for a live-without-a-net nuts-and-bolts tour of the dark side of CSS and see exactly how to torment friends, relatives, and co-workers with cruel tricks both subtle and gross. Start practicing your evil overlord laugh now!
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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 endeavour. Find out how important good design principles are to any project, whether it’s a website, a framework, or the World Wide Web itself.
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11:30am–12:30pm
Transforming Ideas into Interfaces
Aarron Walter, author, Building Findable Websites
You’ve got ideas swimming in your head about the next website or web app you want to make, but translating abstract thoughts into a usable, successful interface is no easy task. How do you make sure you’re designing something relevant to your audience? Should you wireframe, prototype, or both? How do you build an interface quickly while planning for the future? Aarron will share practical advice from the interface design school of hard knocks that will help you make your ideas a reality.
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12:30pm–2:00pm: LUNCH
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2:00pm–3:00pm
Ballpoint, Penn, or Bust
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.
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3:15pm–4:15pm
The Dimensions of a Good Experience
Alexa Andrzejewski, founder, Foodspotting
Good designs are useful, usable and desirable. But what is a good experience? While crafting the experience of her own startup, Foodspotting, Alexa Andrzejewski found answers in urban design. Asking the same question about urban experiences, Kevin Lynch, author of “Good Urban Form,” extracted a set of dimensions for evaluating experiences. By applying these principles to interactive experiences, you can identify what kind of experience you’re creating for users: Is it adaptable? Does it tell a story? Are there signs of life? You’ll leave with a set of guidelines that, unlike traditional heuristics, will enable you to evaluate the experiential qualities of your designs.
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4:30pm–5:30pm
To Be Announced
Jeff Veen, author, Art & Science of Web Design
Jeff Veen’s presentation this year is so special, not even we know what it’s about. But we do know two things: 1.) It will rock. 2.) We’ll be as mesmerized as the rest of you, sitting there with eyes wide and jaws on the floor, drinking up the wisdom and inspiration Jeff Veen so masterfully dispenses.
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5:30pm–8:30pm
WebINK Cocktail Party
Sponsored by Extensis
Maritime Event Center
Bell Harbor International Conf. Center
2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66
Seattle, WA
Ready to debrief after a long day of presentations? Join your fellow attendees and speakers to chat about the day over appetizers and festive libations. Adjacent to the conference center, we look forward to seeing you in the distinctive and unique waterfront setting of the Maritime Event Center!
Wednesday, March 30
A Day Apart: Mobile Web Design
The mobile web is the biggest, fastest-growing strand of the World Wide Web. Mobile expert Luke Wroblewski will lead a full-day. in-depth exploration of designing for the mobile web—the different devices, the changed interaction patterns, the constraints and opportunities inherent in mobile design. If you’re even thinking of doing mobile web design—and you should be thinking of it—then you won’t want to miss a single minute of Luke’s insights and experiene.
A Day Apart Seattle follows An Event Apart Seattle and runs 9:00am - 5:00pm on Wednesday, March 30. You can register online and save over $100 when you sign up for both An Event Apart and A Day Apart.
The Venue
Gorgeously situated at Pier 66 on the downtown Seattle waterfront, Bell Harbor provides stunning views of the city, and across Elliott Bay to Mt Rainier, plus easy walking proximity to the shops and restaurants of world-famous Pike Street Market. Oh, and did we mention that the facility brags wonderfully comfortable seating, world-class Wi-Fi, and fine catering to keep your tummy happy while you feed your brain with design and code?