Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Dan Rubin – Creativity, design and interaction with HTML5 and CSS3

Dan Rubin PortraitHTML5 and CSS3 are the newest stars of the web: the cornerstones of progressive enhancement, the future of online video, the easiest way to build web applications for desktop and mobile devices, and a brilliant foundation upon which we can add complex interaction and animation layers with javascript and Canvas; happily — thanks to much-improved browser support — we can now use them. In this session, Dan Rubin will show you who’s already taking advantage of these latest additions to our toolbox, what this means for interface designers, and how you can bring the same techniques to your projects.

Andy Clarke — Keynote: Hardboiled Web Design

Andy Clarke PortraitAndy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design is an uncompromising look at how to make the most from modern design tools and browsers, up-to-date techniques and processes. In this practical, design focussed talk, Andy will discuss the ‘how’ as well as the ‘why’ and will challenge your preconceptions to help you make better work for the web.

Rachel Andrew – Core CSS3

Rachel Andrew PortraitThis session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.

Elliot Jay Stocks – Progressive enhancement

Elliot Jay Stocks PortraitIn the summer of ‘07 in a flood-soaked Oxford, England, Elliot appeared on stage for the very first time. His presentation, ‘Progressive Enhancement & Intentional Degradation’, looked at how to reward modern browsers with the latest CSS tricks and punish IE by dropping certain site features. Over two years later, what has changed? We’re starting to see the ideology of progressive enhancement — especially with CSS3 — spread throughout the web design community, but more work needs to be done.

Kevin Yank – CSS frameworks

Kevin Yank PortraitWith the proliferation and widespread adoption of JavaScript frameworks, smart developers have wondered if a similar approach to smoothing over the rough spots of CSS might work. Thus, CSS frameworks like Blueprint, YUI Library CSS Tools, Boilerplate, and many others were born. In this session, we will survey the landscape of CSS frameworks and consider how each of them deals with the unique challenge of creating generalised, reusable CSS styles.

Jina Bolton – Creating sexy stylesheets

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 10.45am.

Jina Bolton PortraitBeing a CSS expert is about more than just memorizing selectors. It’s also about working to improve the maintainability and efficiency of your style sheets, planning for the future, and mastering your workflow. This session will look at pushing the limits of CSS to create stunning interfaces using clean, meaningful markup. We’ll also look at CSS 3 and at what the future of Web design could look like when CSS 3 finally becomes mainstream.

Jeff Croft – Elegant web typography

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 25 2.40pm.

Jeff Croft PortraitEven in our day of web videos and podcasts, text is still the king of content on the web. Great typographic sensitivity is one of the hallmarks of sites that exude a professional confidence. From type sizing and coloring to leading, kerning, and measures to proper usage of quotes, dashes, and bullets, to choosing appropriate typefaces, this session will demonstrate using CSS and other modern web technologies to display type on screen with elegance and impact.

Mathew Patterson – Delivering user experience to the inbox: designing for email

A presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008.

Matthew Patterson PortraitSo you’ve designed a fantastic website for your client, tested in all the major browsers and everything looks great. Now they want to send an email newsletter to all their customers, using the new design.

No problem right? Just need to test in Outlook 07, and 06. Yahoo and Hotmail too, of course. Oh, and Gmail, Lotus Notes, AOL…Of course, the design may not work that well for an email anyway, and isn’t there some kind of anti-spam laws?

Like it or not, HTML email is here to stay and the responsibility for doing it right belongs to web designers. Learn how to plan, design and build an email newsletter that will provide a great user experience to the recipients, and great value to your clients.

John Allsopp and Dan Cederholm – Microformats: More than Just Promise

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.

Microformats are much more than just a promising technology or passing fad — hear these three experts cover the whys and the hows of designing and developing with microformats.

Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits. John Allsopp, author of the forthcoming friends of Ed microformats book will cover a number of practical examples of quickly and cleanly adding microformats to existing code. Renowned designer and developer Dan Cederholm will look at how microformats provide excellent scaffolding for styling with CSS.

This session will really get you up to speed with this exciting, quickly spreading technology.

Aaron Gustafson & Andy Clarke – Transcendent Design with Javascript and CSS

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.

Traditionally, CSS has been the domain of designers while JavaScript was for programmers, but these technologies can and should work together to improve your visitors’ experiences. After all, you can do amazing things with CSS, but when you start to use CSS in concert with DOM Scripting, there’s almost no limit to what you can achieve.

MOD-ern web designer Andy Clarke and DOM/Ajax developer Aaron Gustafson will take your CSS skills and supercharge them with JavaScript magic, exploring how you can make CSS and JavaScript work together to make beautiful (and functional) results.

Cameron Moll & Tantek Çelik – Design and Coding at the Cutting Edge

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 7, 2007.

Hear microformats founder and custodian Tantek Çelik paint on the broad canvas, talking about motivations, use cases, examples, and benefits.

Cameron Moll says the web is a volatile medium that changes endlessly, but one thing remains constant: a demand for designers who are disciplined in graphic design theory, human computing principles, and communication techniques. Oh, and CSS, accessibility, and (soon) mobile devices, too. How does one stay abreast?

Hear one of the web’s most disciplined designers share his advice for mastering fundamental user interface principles, good vs. great design, communication-centric approaches, and mobile web development, all with the hope of producing meaningful interfaces that deliver a rewarding user experience.

Aaron Gustafson – Learning to love forms

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2007.

Aaron Gustafson PortraitForms. We all have to make ‘em, but few of us love ‘em. Aaron Gustafson believes that this is because we don’t understand them. In this session, we will 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. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including error, warning and formatting messages, styling and its implications, as well as best practices for manipulation with Javascript and Ajax.

Bert Bos – A new life for old standards

Bert Bos PortraitCSS level 2 became a standard in 1998. The last revision of HTML4 dates from 1999. That’s long time ago in Web years, but they aren’t forgotten: after several years of work, CSS is close to a revision and browser support is better than ever. It’s necessary, because CSS needs to grow: vertical text, columns, print support, complex layouts and much more is increasingly demanded. Likewise, there is a big effort to revise HTML. Interest is so high, the W3C is trying a new process, to let more people participate in the editing work. There are also new forms, standards for combining SVG and HTML and new work on the security of forms. Bert’s here to tell us: we haven’t seen the end of the Web page yet.

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Three days of talks, two of them in the engineering room. Web Directions you have broken my brain.

Cheryl Gledhill Product Manager, BlueChilli