AEA Boston: Day Two in Review
27 Mar 2007 
in mid-afternoon 
Matt Winckler
Day Two of An Event Apart Boston: my quick summaries and reviews of the presentations. (Read about Day One).
- Cameron Moll: “Good vs. Great Design”
- Be problem-focused, not solution-focused. The result of great design is meaning. Great design yields meaningful communication. 9/10: Good mix of overarching vision/strategy as well as tactical techniques for use in the trenches.
- Ethan Marcotte: “Web Standards Stole My Truck”
- “It’s not a question of whether to adopt web standards anymore; it’s a question of when.” It’s not always painless, but it’s worth it, even if non-validating sites may look the same as valid ones. A quantifiable number can be attached to the cost of maintaining invalid code. 7/10: A little too much effort at being cute and funny, while not always succeeding. Some good examples and principles.
- Molly Holzschlag: “Building Better Browsers”
- “It is a grave assumption to believe anything about developing a web browser is easy, cheap, or fast.” Agile, iterative development is vital. Specifications are in a constant state of flux. Specifications vs. Use: “It seems easy. It seems logical! But you get people involved, and it’s no longer easy or logical.” 8/10: Generated some (probably due) pity for browser makers, and better understanding of what’s involved in developing a web browser. A good history lesson of how we got to where we are - and an evaluation of where we’re at.
- Eric Meyer: “The State of CSS in an IE7 World”
- The 800-pound gorilla is awake. And it is moving. Fast. Don’t get stomped. IE7 is a glorious improvement over IE6. Child selectors. Attribute selectors. There’s a lot of fabulous new stuff supported in IE7, and a lot of bugs fixed. But what about IE6? This about IE6. 10/10: Entertaining and extremely applicable. Could I have found the information elsewhere? Sure. But this was a great summary.
- Jeffrey Zeldman: “Selling Design”
- Choose clients that are not idiots. Respect flows both ways. Build trust. Build the relationship before you show the design. Our job is to convey the meaning of design. Sell ideas, not pixels. 10/10: Zeldman was far and away the most engaging speaker at the conference. Even in my current most-emphatically-bureaucratic-and-non-freelancing world, this talk was full of gems.
Random closing thought: as I’m sitting here with the full speaker panel up front critiquing attendee-submitted sites, it’s kinda weird looking at this post’s preview in WordPress, seeing the WordPress logo, and then looking up at the man who designed that logo. Kinda cool, actually.
Non-random closing thought: I still don’t like travel, but this conference was definitely worthwhile. There were a lot of good points, and much to take away. It was entertaining to actually see and hear the people that I’m usually reading.
And in case you weren’t paying attention just now, I still don’t like travel. My flight departs tomorrow at 0745 local time. I figure I need to be there at least 90 minutes ahead of that to be safe, and since I have no idea whether the subway will be running normally or what, I’d better be walking out of the hotel at least a full two hours ahead of time. That would make it 0145 Pacific. I have no idea what my body is currently adjusted to, if anything. I didn’t really get any jet lag on the way over here, but friends have told me it’s worst going east-to-west than vice versa. We’ll see tomorrow.
Pseudo-random closing thought: I now know that my blog theme really stinks. And on top of that, one of the sites critiqued by the panel was for a Baptist church, and it makes the work I’ve been doing to redesign the current (hideous) Grace URC website look pretty sad. I’d hate to start from scratch, but yeesh. It’s understandable when you look back at a site design after four or five years and say “yeesh. What was I thinking?.” It’s something entirely different when you look at a site design after four or five weeks and say the same thing. It’s the price of rapid knowledge enhancement, I suppose.
Matt, regarding changing three time zones….we have been to Hawaii twice with the three time zone change (thanks to daylight savings), and we have come to look forward to the day going over as an extra long bonus day…by the time we have spent 9 hours of travel, we still arrive at 1:00 in the afternoon and have our sweet time to relax, get to the condo, explore, grocery shop, have a nice dinner out, and still get to bed before 9. We love it. And the next morning we are awake three hours before the rest of Hawaii, and can do some sightseeing before everyone else wakes up! Coming home is not bad…we have it timed so that we can get home and just fall into bed.
Sorry you hate to travel. But I hope you have a relaxing trip home today.
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