An Event Apart Boston was a great experience. Regrettably, I had to miss two of the talks — the danger of going to a conference two blocks from your office. But what I did see was fantastic. I have an incurable case of speaker-envy. Whenever I’m at a conference, I get an insatiable urge to drop whatever I’m doing with my life and become an expert at whatever the speaker’s talking about. So, Steve Krug made me want to become a usability guru, Jason Santa Maria - a designer, Jeffrey Zeldman, a… well, a Jeffrey Zeldman.
Anyway, a few notes.
1. Eric Meyer, CSS guru, presented a mindblowing way to render a standard HTML table as a bar chart. This guy’s good. Eric’s #1 take-away from his talk was to remember that CSS does not care how HTML elements are “supposed to” behave. (Ever tried adding style="display:block" to a style tag)?
2. Cameron Moll, in talking about the creative process, presented my favorite quote of the event:
“Instinct… is largely memory in disguise. It works quite well when it is trained, and poorly otherwise” — Robert Bringhurst
In other words, all these people who seem to instinctively know the right way to design something, are actually subconsciously calling upon an enormous backlog of experience. This is why “basement-dwellers” often make lousy designers. You need to get out there and have visual experiences (art, books, movies) in order to create new ones.
3. Also via Cameron Moll, I learned how important typography is, and that I know nothing about it. I intend to fix this. I bought the excellent “A Type Primer” for this purpose. Expect a redesign soon.
4. Thanks to Eric Meyer, I learned about the “IE7 Script“, which basically makes IE6 act like a standards-compliant browser with one line of code. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s got Meyer’s seal of approval, so it must be good. Based on a show of hands, most of the other attendees didn’t know about it either.
5. Wisdom from Zeldman: When presenting multiple designs to a client, each design should convey (and be presented as) a different idea or approach, not simply an aesthetic tweak. This helps prevent clients from obsessing over individual details which, if changed, may water-down the overall idea.
Filed under Web Development
Niall Kennedy demonstrates a very clever trick for spying on a user’s browser history. You can’t actually retrieve the list (thankfully), but you can compare it to a known set of links. How? By exploiting the way CSS applies different styles to visited links! He recommends it as a way to selectively display social networking links which you have evidence the user actually uses, but the possibilities for creative 
A while back, when press coverage of the Hollywood writers’ strike was in full swing, a writer was asked why it takes a staff of so many writers, taking such a long time, for so much money, to come up with something as short as a late night monologue. His response was: “You’re paying for the jokes that aren’t on the show”. Writing comedy’s not easy. Trying really hard to come up with five perfect jokes is far less effective than brainstorming 100 and throwing out 95 of them.
