Secrets of the CSS Jedi

Eric Meyer

How much time do you spend either desperately fighting or blindly accepting browser defaults? More than you might think. Truly understanding both sides of this struggle is critical for anyone who wants to be a CSS Master. Explore in depth how CSS really works, and learn how this knowledge can make your work easier.

Design to Scale

Doug Bowman

How do we design when we expect 100 users? How about 10,000? Or, gulp … ten million? Can we design for audiences that vary in size, interest, and diversity? How do we build in flexibility to scale upward and outward, welcoming throngs of new users as the web grows? Looking at examples of scale and design from the real world, we’ll draw parallels with web design, spotting lessons to be learned.

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Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag

Jason Santa Maria

Rethinking an existing brand can be a designer’s most exciting (and most perilous) challenge. Happy Cog’s Jason Santa Maria should know, having recently redesigned AIGA and A List Apart. Learn how color, typography, and visual metaphors can change the way people experience even the most familiar sites.

Interface Cosmetology

Jina Bolton

So you already know everything there is to know about CSS, JavaScript, information architecture, usability, and accessibility. But you feel like you’re missing something … that “flair.” You know, that great look and style that will turn heads. Learn to use grids, typography, abstraction, ornamentation, and photography to create aesthetically pleasing, sexy interfaces.

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Writing the User Interface

Jeffrey Zeldman

Drop-shadows don’t fill shopping carts. Aside from a few buttons and arrows, nearly all of the work of a user interface is performed by words. Yet most designers don’t question the text their clients dump on them, and most budgets don’t cover editing and writing. Learn how word choice can drastically improve design, branding, and usability—and how to edit web content effectively, even if you’re not a writer.

Standards in the Enterprise

Kimberly Blessing

Standards neither happen magically nor maintain themselves in any environment. But in the enterprise arena, extra work is needed to make standards efforts successful. Getting the code written is only the first step! Learn how you can realize standards in the enterprise … and manage that success for the long-term.

Lunch

Co-sponsored by Adobe

Why I hate online captioning

Joe Clark

There’s a lot of video online. Making it accessible is a form of multimedia accessibility, not web accessibility per se. You’d think we’d have a lot to learn from decades of captioning and audio description on TV and in film, but nooo: lousy fonts, out-of-frame captions, marathon line lengths, incompatible file formats that make tag soup look like HTML Strict. And, worst of all, transferring the ability to create video from corporations to individuals has also induced us to expect individuals to make their own video accessible. Why is the accessibility of online video just as bad now as it ever was?

The State of CSS In an IE7 World

Eric Meyer

After five quiet (and increasingly frustrating) years, the 800-pound gorilla is awake once more. We know that Internet Explorer 7 fixed a lot of bugs and added new support, but with IE6 still hanging around like an annoying party crasher, has anything really changed? We’ll take a look at where we are and where we’re going in an IE7 world.

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Content Strategy to the Rescue!

Erin Kissane

Advice on “better content” is usually advice on better copywriting and mechanics: edit carefully, chunk your text, use frequent headings. But you wouldn’t design a comp without creative direction or build a web app without specifications, so why treat content differently? Learn what content strategy looks like, what it can do for you (no matter what your job title is), and how to kick-start great content processes.

Learning to Love Forms

Aaron Gustafson

Forms. We all have to make ’em, but few of us love ’em. This may be because we don’t understand them. Explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling.

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Why Good Content Must Suck

Jared Spool

How do users find what they are looking for on your site? Turns out that content has to pull the user to it: the stronger the pull, the more likely the user will find it. Find out how the quality of links affects whether users click on them; how longer pages actually help users get where they are going faster; the three types of graphics; how users follow a scent; and four ways your design could be blocking their smell.

Selling Design

Jeffrey Zeldman

It takes talent, knowledge, and experience to design great websites. But what’s the use if your client (or boss) consistently kills your best work? Great design requires great clients, and they are made, not born. Learn to identify receptive clients and bosses and develop an inclusive, collaborative process that builds the level of trust needed to sell great work.