IN OUR ONGOING QUEST to learn as much as possible from our brilliant and talented colleagues, we ran a few questions by Karen McGrane of Bond Art+Science. Formerly Vice President of User Experience at Razorfish, currently an instructor at the School of Visual Arts, and a future voyager to the uncharted paradise of the eleventh dimension, Karen will speak for AEA in Atlanta, Seattle, and Boston in 2012.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

Everyone is justifiably freaked about about the challenges we’re going to face getting the entire web onto a bunch of different devices: phones, tablets, TVs, refrigerators, LCD watches, football stadium scoreboards, you name it. The smart people among us have tried to channel their freaking out into practical solutions, like responsive web design. It seems like there are a lot of good ideas about how to get our front-end design and development practices to adapt to the future.

In my session, I discuss how our content creation and management practices need to evolve, too. In short, we need content that’s structured into meaningful chunks, not giant blobs of text and formatting. To get there, we’re going to have to change the way content creators think about writing—and the secret to that is having better content management interfaces and workflows.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

I spent the first half of 2011 traveling all over the country, renting apartments in different cities, and living out of a suitcase. I’ve learned that the most efficient way to pack is to roll your clothes. Don’t fold them, roll them up into cylinders, and you’ll be able to fit more into your bag.

Q. What professional web site are you visiting most these days?

Every day, I take a look at the most popular saved bookmarks on Pinboard. I never fail to find something interesting that I haven’t come across in Twitter or RSS. It feels to me like a very clean, not noisy version of Reddit. I wish they would show historical trends, like how many days a story has appeared in Most Popular.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

After college, but before I started working on the web, I had a job that occasionally required me to dress up as the Muppet character Ernie and do mall appearances.

INTERACTION IS THE SECRET SAUCE of the web. Understanding interaction is key to understanding the web as its own medium—it’s not print, it’s not television, and it’s certainly not the desktop.

Learn how to wield HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft experiences that are native to the web in this intellectually thrilling presentation by Jeremy Keith — author of HTML5 For Web Designers (A Book Apart, 2011), Bulletproof Ajax (New Riders, 2007) and DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed, 2005).

The lecture was recorded live at An Event Apart San Diego, 2010, Nov. 1–2, 2010, at the Westin Gas Lamp Quarter.

This year, Jeremy will speak at An Event Apart Austin July 9–11, 2012, and An Event Apart Chicago, August 27–29, 2012.

An Event Apart is the design conference for people who make websites. Founded by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, and dedicated to the proposition that the creators of great web experiences deserve a great learning experience, An Event Apart brings together twelve of the leading minds in web design for three days of non-stop inspiration and enlightenment.

See our home page for information about upcoming An Event Apart conference events plus workshops on mobile and responsive design. And watch this space for more extraordinary An Event Apart presentation videos.

Previous Video: Ethan Marcotte: A Dao of Flexibility

IT’S THE PRESENTATION that launched a thousand redesigns!

From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting your sites via an increasing array of devices and browsers. Android devices come in over 500 “standard” viewport sizes and don’t even agree what a “pixel” is.

Are your web designs and applications ready for this challenging world of ever-shifting canvases and contexts?

In this historic presentation, Ethan Marcotte, author of Responsive Web Design (A Book Apart, 2011), introduces responsive design at An Event Apart San Diego 2010.

Using methods that involve fluid grids, flexible images, and CSS3 media queries, Ethan encourages designers to think beyond the desktop, and shows how to craft beautiful site layouts that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs.

Founded by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, An Event Apart is the design conference for people who make websites. See aneventapart.com for information about upcoming An Event Apart conference events plus workshops on mobile and responsive design. And watch this space for more extraordinary An Event Apart presentation videos.

OUR SPEAKERS are always thinking about web and application design, and we pester them as often as possible to find out what’s new in their world. This week we caught up with Dan Cederholm, founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio, and co-founder of Dribbble, a design community. Dan will speak for AEA in Atlanta and Boston this year.

Q. What’s the main takeaway from your talk?

My favorite talks are those that share insight into someone’s particular process. I hope to do just that with Handcrafted Patterns, where I’ll be showing the lessons learned while crafting the UI for dribbble.com. I’ve been thinking about patterns a lot lately, and how we can learn an immense amount for breaking interfaces down into micro frameworks. I hope the main takeaway is: learn from dissecting your own patterns.

Q. What’s a useful tip or trick you’ve learned in the last few months?

Well, I learned to use a pizza cutter when cutting up my kids’ waffles in the morn—wait, you probably mean web design.

I’ve been (finally) using Sass a bit lately (and LESS), and it’s extremely helpful for rolling up CSS3 vendor-prefix stacks into reusable modules. I’ll be talking a bit about this as well at AEA.

Q. What professional web site are you visiting most these days?

Two recent favorites are:

• thisismadebyhand.com: A new site for beautiful mini films about people who craft stuff by hand.
• thegreatdiscontent.com: A newish site featuring interviews with interesting creative folks.

Q. Tell us something we don’t know about you.

In the seventh grade, I won an “air band” contest by lip-synching Bon Jovi’s “Shot Through The Heart” to a raucous Vermont middle school.

To show our gratitude for our continued good fortune, we’ve once again donated $5,000 to Computers for Youth (CFY), a non-profit foundation whose mission is “to help students in low-income communities, together with their teachers and families, harness the power of digital learning to improve educational outcomes.”

We made a donation to Computers for Youth in 2010, and our reason for doing so again this year is just the same as it was: because education is the very essence of our community. Ours is a profession of constant learning, and the best way to face that lifelong challenge is to adopt the learning habit early in life. Computers, being such powerful learning tools, should be available to every child, and CFY does all it can to make that a reality. An Event Apart continues to support the mission of Computers for Youth, and we continue to thank all our teachers.

If you feel the same, please consider making a donation to CFY or to the charity of your choice in this season of giving.

In addition to co-founding An Event Apart, Jeffrey Zeldman is the founder and executive creative director of the design studio Happy Cog™, author of the foundational web standards text Designing With Web Standards, publisher and founder of A List Apart Magazine, and publisher and co-founder of A Book Apart (“brief books for people who make websites”).

SXSW Interactive is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies, featuring five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology. Founded in 1995, the Austin-based interactive festival attracts tens of thousands annually.

For anyone who didn’t make it to a show this year, or who did make it to a show and can’t wait to come back, all seven shows in 2012 are open for registration. To help you decide which events you want to attend, in addition to our speaker lineups we’ve published detailed information about each event’s full-day learning session:

• Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski in Seattle, Boston, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco
• Responsive Web Design with Ethan Marcotte in Atlanta and Washington, DC

Every one of our 2010 and 2011 shows sold out well in advance—this year’s San Francisco show sold out two months early. If you’re planning to join us for three days of pure web awesomeness, don’t wait. Register today.

To those of you joining us for An Event Apart DC 2011 next week, or for any of our other upcoming shows, we can’t wait to see you!

At the beginning of August, An Event Apart and our friends at MIX Online announced the second 10K Apart, subtitled “The Responsive Edition.” Over the next few weeks weeks, brilliant individuals and teams spread across 36 countries worked to produce 128 amazing entries. Just like the first contest, we were completely staggered by the ingenuity and creativity of the entrants in filling the 10 kilobyte limit with heaping helpings of awesome—everything from addictive games to informative tools to incredibly useful applications.

Today we are announcing the winners over at the 10K Apart site. The judging was anything but simple, and even though we increased the number of Honorable Mention spots from the planned 9 up to 12, we wished we had room for even more! Since this was “The Responsive Edition” of the contest, we did strongly favor responsive entries over those that weren’t. Still, there are a few Honorable Mentions that aren’t responsive, but were still just too great to let pass unmentioned.

All the winners will be contacted in the near future, and all the entries will remain online in the gallery, which is well worth your time. Thanks to all who participated, and we look forward to the next edition!

• Atlanta – February 6-8, 2012
• Seattle – April 2-4
• Boston – June 18-20
• Austin – July 9-11
• Washington, DC – August 6-8
• Chicago – August 27-29
• San Francisco – November 12-14

Each two-day conference will be followed by an intense full-day learning experience on a single topic:

• Mobile Web Design with Luke Wroblewski in Seattle, Boston, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco
• Responsive Web Design with Ethan Marcotte in Atlanta and Washington, DC

You can register for just the full-day session, or just the two-day conference—or save over $100 when you attend all three days.

Tickets for all 2012 shows are now on sale and are first-come, first-served. Every An Event Apart show in 2010 and 2011 has sold out in advance, often weeks beforehand. Don’t miss your chance to experience AEA; register today!

Join Jeffrey Zeldman (Designing With Web Standards), Elliot Jay Stocks (Sexy Web Design), Jeremy Keith (HTML5 For Web Designers), Luke Wroblewski (Web Form Design), Alexa Andrezejewski (founder, Foodspotting), Ethan Marcotte (Responsive Web Design), Eric Meyer (CSS: The Definitive Guide), Nicole Sullivan (Even Faster Websites), Aarron Walter (Designing For Emotion), Andy Clarke (Hardboiled Web Design), Kristina Halvorson (Content Strategy for the Web), Jared Spool (founder, User Interface Engineering), plus hundreds of your fellow passionate practitioners at the fabulous Palace Hotel December 12-14, 2011 for three days of design, code, and content.

An Event Apart San Francisco features 12 great speakers and sessions, on topics like the responsive designer’s workflow, the dimensions of good experience, and the transition from web to mobile. Following the two-day conference comes an intense, full-day learning session on mobile web design led by Luke Wroblewski. You can register for just An Event Apart or just the workshop, or save $100 when you sign up for all three days.

Save even more if you register before the earlybird period ends. The usual price for the three-day event is $1,290. But if you register by November 14, you’ll pay just $1,190 for the two-day conference plus the mobile design day.

Seats for this three-day special are limited and going fast, so don’t delay a moment longer. Register today!