Apologies for the quiet, here. We’ve been enjoying family time in San Francisco, leading up to the final Event Apart show of the year in the beautiful Palace Hotel.
[tags]aneventapart, aeasf07, sanfrancisco[/tags]
Make it work!
Apologies for the quiet, here. We’ve been enjoying family time in San Francisco, leading up to the final Event Apart show of the year in the beautiful Palace Hotel.
[tags]aneventapart, aeasf07, sanfrancisco[/tags]
There’s something new at Apple’s online store: web standards and accessibility.
Apple.com has never lacked for panache. It has always looked more stylish, more elegant, more beautifully designed than most business sites. The site’s combination of utility, seduction, and understated beauty is practically unique—in keeping with the company’s primary point of product differentiation.
But while its beauty and usability have always run ahead of the pack, its underlying source code has not always kept pace. Now the online Apple Store’s inside is as beautiful as its exterior—and as far ahead of the mainstream in web development as a company like Apple needs to be.
One day, all sites will be built like this. View Source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be.
And next time your boss, client, or IT director annoyingly proclaims that you can’t have great looks and good markup, point them at store.apple.com. Who knows? They might buy you an iPhone or MacBook as a token of thanks.
Opinions are no longer being solicited, but you can read the 101 comments that were shared before we closed the iron door.
[tags]apple, css, markup, accessibility, webstandards, jinabolton, aneventapart, aeasf07[/tags]
$100 savings on our final Event Apart conference of the year end Saturday, September 15. If you’re planning to attend An Event Apart San Francisco, reserve your seat before the price goes up.
Zeldman.com readers can save an additional $50 by entering discount code AEAZELD in the appropriate field during checkout, reducing the cost of the two-day event to $745.
What does that get you? Two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration (not to mention parties, meals, snacks, and swag) with these visionary industry leaders:
And of course your hosts, Eric Meyer, master of CSS, and blogger no. 27, Jeffrey Zeldman (hey, that’s me!).
Seating is extremely limited, first come, first served. Don’t let the sun go down on you.
Comments off.
[tags]aneventapart, sanfrancisco, aeasanfrancisco07[/tags]
The sights, sounds, and sense of An Event Apart Chicago 2007. Thank you, Chicago. You rocked. (Literally.) An Event Apart San Francisco is our next and final show of the year.
One track continues to rule. It rules because you don’t have to decide where to go and what to miss. But it also rules because the conversations in the hallways and pubs can be centered around the same sessions. There’s no “ah, I missed that one because I saw ______ instead”. There’s a complete shared experience between all attendees, and that’s a very good thing.
[tags]aeachicago07, aneventapart, aneventapartchicago, chicago, design, web, webdesign, conference, conferences, ux, userexperience, dancederholm, simplebits, lizdanzico, jimcoudal, derekfeatherstone, lousrosenfeld, jeremykeith, lukewroblewski, jasonsantamaria, ericmeyer, zeldman, jeffreyzeldman[/tags]
As the last tickets for An Event Apart Chicago get gobbled up, we announce our final Event Apart show of 2007: An Event Apart San Francisco, October 4–5, Sheraton Palace Hotel. You won’t want to miss this line-up:
Joe Clark served on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group and now volunteers with the PDF/Universal Access Committee. He emerges from self-imposed retirement to share his wisdom on the subject of Building Accessible Websites.
Jared Spool has led the usability agenda since 1978, before the term “usability” was even associated with computers. He is one of the world’s most effective and knowledgeable communicators on the subject.
Between coding usable forms and accessible Ajax, Aaron Gustafson tech-edits A List Apart and writes for Digital Web , ALA, and MSDN. Print credits include AdvancED DOM Scripting and Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Ed..
Developer, standards evangelist, and technical strategist Kimberly Blessing co-leads The Web Standards Project and directs PayPal’s Web Development Platform Team, driving the creation and adoption of standards.
Interactive designer and artist Jina Bolton is an web interface developer at Apple and co-author of The Art & Science of CSS. She has consulted for the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Mass.gov, and others.
An influential designer at the forefront of forward-thinking web design, Doug Bowman is Visual Design Lead at Google, where he tries to change the world, a few million users at a time.
Erin Kissane edits A List Apart and is editorial director for Happy Cog. She has written copy, advised on brand and content strategy, and provided editorial oversight for clients from startups to Global 1000 companies.
Jason Santa Maria has been recognized for designing stylish web interfaces that balance usability with effective content presentation. His work has won dozens of awards.
And, of course, your hosts:
Eric Meyer is the world’s best-recognized and most-read CSS expert, author of CSS: The Definitive Guide, Eric Meyer on CSS and a half-dozen other best-sellers. He has consulted for Apple, Wells Fargo, and America On-Line, among others, and co-founded An Event Apart with your humble narrator in November 2005.
You can read about me here.
Topics at An Event Apart San Francisco will include standards in the enterprise, creating designs that adapt to multiple display types and languages, the art and science of web forms, how to handle design and redesign, the importance of copy and editing, usability, and more.
The two-day event, including meals, swag, and parties, costs $795 (regularly $895) while earlybird savings are in effect through September 7th, 2007. Seating is limited: first come, first served. Hope to see some of you there!
[tags]aneventapart, sanfrancisco, design, development, standards, bestpractices, webstandards, webdesign, webdevelopment, aeasf07[/tags]
As law, “Speed Limit 55 MPH” is enforceable. “Don’t drive too fast” is not. Although heeded by too few U.S. web teams, W3C accessibility standards are the law in many nations. That’s one reason the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has been under pressure to increase the specificity and clarity—and thus the enforceability—of its guidelines.
Because organizations must be able to state positively whether or not they have complied with a legally mandated guideline, the Working Group has introduced the notion of “testability” in its new WCAG 2.0 documents. In place of vague guidlines like, “Ensure sufficient contrast between foreground and background,” WCAG 2.0 provides technical specifications that can be measured by machines.
The trouble is, some criteria are inherently untestable, argues former working group invited expert Gian Sampson-Wild in Issue No. 240 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Rather than admit the problem and rethink testability, says Sampson-Wild, WCAG 2.0 jettisons needed guidelines that cannot be defined in a testable manner. In so doing, she claims, WCAG 2.0 hurts the very people it is intended to help.
Read Testability Costs Too Much and decide for yourself. Then share your comments with the W3C. The deadline for comments is 29 June 2007. That’s right, three days from now. So please read, think, and decide.
Also in this issue, new A List Apart author Sharon Lee discusses using linear and non-linear narrative and other techniques of engagement to create a rich, sensory experience that immerses people in your website, encouraging deeper involvement with your message and brand.
The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being.
Find out more in Human-to-Human Design.
Issue No. 240 also brings back Joe Clark’s absolutely essential 22 August 2005 piece, Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility:
Contrary to popular opinion—and also contrary to quasi-judicial claims in some places—PDF documents can be no less accessible than HTML. … This article will explain how PDF does and does not support accessibility.
All this, plus the painfully brilliant and hilariously insightful illustrations of ALA artist and rock star Kevin Cornell. And ALA T-Shirts on sale cheap. What more, we ask, could you ask?
Comments off. (Comment at ALA.)
[tags]alistapart, accessibility, design, wcag, wcag2, pdf[/tags]
Tickets are now available for An Event Apart Chicago 2007, August 27–28, at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. It’s two days of web standards, best practices, and creative inspiration with…
Plus your hosts:
On the agenda:
Learn how to use data you didn’t even realize you were collecting, to find out what your users really want. Discover how different forms, fields, and labels make or break interactions. How color, typography, and visual metaphors influence perception of your site and brand. How to make personal projects more successful and daily work-for-hire more fulfilling.
Your Conference Pass includes admission to all sessions at the two-day Chicago conference, snacks and lunch on both days, access to all social events, and a bag of swag. If you register by July 27, it’s yours for $795 ($100 off the standard pricing). Frequent Apartniks (those who’ve attended a previous Event Apart event) save an additional $100. More information is available at aneventapart.com.
[tags]aneventapart, an event apart, chicago, aeachicago07[/tags]
Nothing delights web designers more than a friendly discussion on women in design and technology. One version of this perennial crowd-pleaser runs, “Where are all the women?” AKA “Why don’t more women participate in design/technology?” The discussion may then fault men for making design or technology seem “hard” or “unattractive”—as if women avoid doing things that are hard, a proposition that’s as ludicrous as it is sexist.
A more accurate variation on this theme acknowledges that there are truckloads of busy, competent women in design (or technology), and asks why women’s achievements in these fields go grotesquely under-reported and under-recognized. That is a fair and important question but we are not here to answer it. Nor are we here to address the creepy predatory behavior to which prominent women in our field are often subjected.
We are here because a postcard from the Art Directors Club alerted me to “The Woman Vanguard,” an ADC [Art Directors Club] Young Guns Live workshop and presentation moderated by the wonderful Debbie Millman, sponsored by Adobe, and apparently featuring the work and thoughts of some leading young female art directors.
That sounded good to me and might to some of you, too, so I decided to learn more by visiting the Art Directors Club’s website and potentially sharing what I learned. And there, hope shattered.
I would link to a page about this event if I could find one on the site. But there are, as near as I can determine, no “pages” on the site. It’s all Flash text (pixellated 1997 style) in squat little iframes. You are always, essentially, on the home page. If you’re lucky enough to stumble onto what you came looking for, you won’t be able to bookmark it or share it. I could spend an hour discussing what’s wrong with this site, but so could anyone reading this. You all know this. Why don’t the site’s creators?
The Art Directors Club’s site was designed by R/GA, an agency run and founded by visionaries. I respect them immensely as art directors and filmmakers. Respect doesn’t cover it. I am in awe of their founder and of their years of achievement in their realms of expertise. But they have no business designing websites, if this is the best they can do on behalf of a leading organization whose purpose is to recognize and promote visual culture.
Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don’t know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.
Every time I think I can stop talking about these obvious, simple truths, some crazy bad 90s style train wreck hits me headlong and makes me weep anew.
[tags]ux, ia, webdesign, design, userexperience, usability, adc, artdirectorsclub[/tags]
In Issue No. 235 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:
by Wilson Miner
Grids, grids, all God’s children got grids. Even a one-column layout with no artwork uses a grid (just not a very interesting one). Web designers have spent the last year or so discussing the application of sophisticated grid systems to multi-column layouts. Wilson Miner shows how to apply the same principles of proportion and balance to the type within those columns by borrowing another technique from our print brethren: the baseline grid.
by Martin Kliehm
“Web 2.0 applications often have accessibility and usability problems because of the limitations of (X)HTML. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites.”
[tags]alistapart, accessible, webapps, accessibility, design, webdesign, layout, grids, baselinegrid[/tags]
An Event Apart Boston 2007 was the best attended show since Mr Meyer and I founded our design conference scarcely sixteen months ago. Attendees came from as far away as Singapore and India. They hailed from Bulgaria (2), Canada (12), Estonia (1), Finland (2), India (1), Ireland (1), Latvia (1), Singapore (1), Sweden (1), the UK (3), and the US (510).
In all, 546 web artisans descended on Boston for our two-day event. The engagement and commitment of this audience were electric. Rather than waste pixels on my impressions of the show, I submit these third-party posts and artifacts:
[tags]aneventapart, aeaboston07, aeaboston2007[/tags]
They say agile developers don’t have time for user-centered design. They say web standards and accessibility don’t matter to real-world sites. They say usability is a luxury, good graphic design doesn’t matter, and writing is just something you dump into a template. They are the message board grumblers, the mini-pundits and rainmakers on other people’s parades.
Their view of what matters on the web might be right. But nobody bothered to tell the five hundred-plus designers and developers who have signed up for An Event Apart Boston. The show has now sold out, and the waiting list is a yard long.
The surprisingly robust interest in this event is surely because of our extraordinary speakers. I also see it as evidence that, whatever the nay-sayers may take comfort in believing, the fact is that many people who make websites actually love their users. They love them enough to constantly work at perfecting their craft. They want their markup to support their content, their content to meet their users’ needs, and their design to facilitate that fulfillment.
That’s what your work is about. And mine, too. It’s what motivates every issue of A List Apart, even if not every issue hits the mark. And, now more than ever, it is what we hope to bring to the stage during two days of design and code in Boston’s beautiful Back Bay. To all who are coming, thank you, and let’s rock.
[tags]aneventapart, boston, design, webdesign[/tags]
Registration is now open for An Event Apart Boston 2007. Enjoy two amazing days of design and code plus meals, a party, and a bag of swag for a mere $795 (reg. $895) while early bird savings last. Attend for as little as $745 with a discount code exclusively for zeldman.com readers.
On An Event Apart’s website, you’ll now find a detailed schedule describing the presentations with which our superstar speakers hope to entertain and enlighten you. From “Web Standards Stole My Truck!” to “Redesigning Your Way out of a Paper Bag,” it’s two stimulating days of best practices and fresh ideas in design, usability, accessibility, markup and code.
Check out that schedule. I’ll wait.
Lest you be overwhelmed by learning too much too soon, we’ll help you unwind (and do a little networking) at the Opening Night Party sponsored by Media Temple. You might even win a prize, courtesy of Adobe, New Riders, or Media Temple.
Our Boston Events page also includes notes to help you book your hotel room at a specially negotiated discount price.
Located in beautiful and historic Back Bay, the Boston Marriott Copley Place provides in-room, high-speed internet access; laptop safes and coolers; 27-inch color TV with cable movies; luxurious bedding and linens, and more. Best of all, it’s the site of the conference. You can walk out of your room and into the show!
During the early bird period, the price for this two-day event is $795. But you can nab an extra $50 off with this discount code exclusively for zeldman.com readers:
AEAZELD
Just enter AEAZELD in An Event Apart’s shopping cart to enjoy those savings immediately. During our early bird period, you’ll pay just $745 for the two days and everything that comes with them.
After February 26, 2007, when the early bird savings ends, the price goes up to $895, and you’ll pay $845 with the discount. Still pretty good for two days with some of the sharpest minds and greatest talents in web design. But why pay more? Book An Event Apart Boston as soon as you can.
An Event Apart Boston will be the best conference Eric Meyer and I have yet put together. It will also be this year’s only East Coast Event Apart. Don’t miss it.
Join Eric and me, along with Steve Krug, Andrew Kirkpatrick, Molly Holzschlag, Cameron Moll, Dan Cederholm, Ethan Marcotte, and Jason Santa Maria, for what we modestly believe may be the most exciting and enlightening show in modern web design.
Hurry! Seating is limited and early bird savings end Feb. 26, 2007.
[tags]aneventapart, boston, aneventapartboston07[/tags]
It’s the last gasp of 2006, a year whose sweetness will long be remembered. A List Apart celebrates twelve months of international peace and brotherhood with its final issue of the year.
…In which Marc van den Dobbelsteen asks the musical question, how can we manage web layouts that must accommodate devices with viewports as small as 240 pixels and as big as 1680? The old answer, liquid layout, doesn’t cut it:
If you create a liquid layout optimized for a maximum width of 1024 pixels—limiting maximum line-lengths for your text to maintain readability—gaps will appear on a wider screens, and your carefully balanced layout will break. On a tiny-screened PDA, your text and images will be compressed into a crowded content sandwich. No designer wants that. If vector-based layouts were technically possible on a wide range of browsers, we could use a single generic layout that looked exactly the same on all screen sizes. Since that’s more fictional than feasible, we have to find another way.
That other way is to define layout and appearance for a series of screen-width ranges, then match these layouts with the user’s viewport size. (You can even change layouts automagically as the user’s viewport size changes.) Learn how in “Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique.”
Then dive into Mike Brittain’s Making Compact Forms More Accessible for a smart way to solve the usability and accessibility challenges posed by today’s complex, tightly spaced forms.
Forms pose a series of usability and accessibility challenges, many of which are made more complex when you need to build a form to fit into a small space. Tightly spaced forms can look great on paper, but they often ignore accessibility issues altogether. … In this article, we’ll create a compact form that provides a high degree of accessibility, despite its reduced size.
This issue was produced by Erin Lynch and edited by Erin Kissane. Thanks and praise to technical editor Ethan Marcotte, who pulled flaming swords out of the rock. Kevin Cornell, The Web’s Leading Illustrator™, crafted the delicate visual poems that accompany our articles. Doctor Santa Maria art directed.
A list Apart T-shirts are still available and make an excellent holiday gift. A List Apart is a founding member of The Deck, the premier advertising network for reaching web and design professionals. Skiddle-dee doo-dee idle dum!
[tags]alistapart, accessibility, design, development, usability, forms, layouts, adaptive[/tags]
Trent Lucier writes:
If you’ve browsed the web design section of any bookstore lately, you’ve seen him staring at you. The blue hat. The mustache. The blinding neon background. He’s Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher of the influential web development magazine, ‘A List Apart’ and author of the book Designing With Web Standards (DWWS). The first edition of the DWWS was published in 2003, and now 2006 brings us an updated 2nd edition. In a market flooded with XHTML, CSS, and web standards books, is DWWS 2nd Ed. still relevant?
I love it that they think I have a moustache.
[tags]links, sixapart, menatrott, hoboken, afterschool, simplebits, dancederholm, design, web2.0, accessibility, airbag[/tags]