Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Simon Pascal Klein – Setting standards-friendly web type

Simon Pascal Klein PortraitWeb typography has in the past two years seen a resurgence in interest and many would agree only rightly so, with most of the content on the web still textual. However the range of technical options available for setting type on the web is quite broad—not to mention the range of stylistic choices available—and often confusing. This session aims to demystify the current techniques available to set type on the web by comparing and contrasting the various options at hand while offering a set of good defaults and safe advice for not only making it accessible but also pleasurable to read.

Steve Souders — Even Faster Web Sites

Steve Souders PortraitWeb 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.

Remy Sharp – Browsers with wings: HTML5 APIs

Remy Sharp PortraitHTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky – plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer!

Steve Souders – Even faster web sites

Steve Souders PortraitWeb 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.

Michael ™ Smith – A jungle cruise through the wild regions of HTML5 and surrounding territories

Web Directions South 2008, Sydney Convention Centre, September 26 11.45am.

Michael(tm) Smith  PortraitYou’re invited to join a narrated exploration into the exotic regions of HTML5 and surrounding territories. Your journey will begin with a preparatory briefing about what to expect from HTML5 – what’s different, what’s new, what to look forward to, what to watch out for. During the cruise, we’ll make some short excursions into surrounding territories adjoining HTML5, and you’ll learn a bit about their history and relationship to HTML5.

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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I had an absolute blast, learnt so much, and met so many great people

Carmen Chung Software engineer, Valiant Finance