An Event Apart comes to Austin

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I’ve know for more than a month about AEA coming to Austin. Though for the price of the single-day session I was not sure I found the value over other upcoming events like SXSWi coming in March 2007. I first tried to get my employer to pony up for the cost. No luck. I didn’t press this too far. So come November 1 I put up my own card and paid my way to attend AEA Austin.

So Monday, November 6, I was in attendance at An Event Apart Austin. I was so glad to be there. I was not sold out like previous events but it was probably 80% full. Then again the Alamo Drafthouse is a large venue to fill.

Highlights

  • Seeing Eric Meyer code CSS in his head in front of a couple hundred people. This occurred twice. During his two sessions “Hardcore CSS” and “One True Layout”. What a treat to see a true master at work.
  • Jason Santa Maria gave a wonderful presentation on the redesign of ALA. It was very revealing to see the ideas start in his sketchbook and evolve into the final state of the site.
  • Molly E. Holzschla presented a very provocative session on “From the Content Out”.
  • And last but not least the ever wonderful Mr. Jeffrey Seldman who presented on multiple topics including “Selling Design” and “Writing the User Interface” which was a nice overview of content type used for presentation.

My Thoughts

Overall I did like the one-day session. Though rather expensive for the single day. These are the true masters of our profession. They set the bar for Web Design that we attempt to follow.

Thank you Jeff, Eric, Jason and Molly for the great time at AEA Austin.

Also there was an after party hosted by Knowbility at the Belmont. The pics from myself and other are hosted on Flickr Flickr group AEA Austin.

Better printed page links

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This is in a word…FANTASTIC!

I was hunting around for some print style sheet tweaks for a client. Seems they have a very wide horizontal table that of course when printed cuts off the right side. No Duh! so I’m surfing around checking various leads on Google or whatever search engine and I come across this article

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/improvingprint

I’m sure you’ve all printed a web page that contains links. You get the link text that is shown on the web page but not the actual URL. Since this is a printed document you can’t really hover over the link text to see the URL href or anything. So basically you’re screwed! The first iteration of a solution was to move the links inline. Well as is mentioned in the article it makes the text you are printed very unreadable.

So the solution is to put footnotes next to the link text that reference the URL at the bottom of the printed page.

I’m totally blown away. Thanks Aaron