While many have described the new world of remix culture where “nothing is original,” few have provided practical advice for those of us who find ourselves living and making things in it. Join filmmaker Kirby Ferguson (creator of the video series EVERYTHING IS A REMIX) and artist Austin Kleon (author of NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT and STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST) as they show clips from Kirby’s work and discuss how one best goes about being a creator in the digital age.
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Everything Is a Remix, so Steal Like an Artist
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CSS for Grown Ups: Maturing Best Practices
In the early days of CSS the web industry cut its teeth on blogs and small personal sites. Much of the methodology still considered best-practise today originated from the experiences of developers working alone, often on a single small style sheet, with few of the constraints that come from working with large distributed teams on large continually changing web projects.
The mechanics of CSS are relatively simple. But creating large maintainable systems with it is still an unsolved problem. For larger sites, CSS is a difficult and complex component of the codebase to manage and maintain. It’s difficult to document patterns, and it’s difficult for developers unfamiliar with the code to contribute safely.
How can we do better? What are the CSS best practises that are letting us down and that we must shake off? How can we take a more precise, structured, engineering-driven approach to writing CSS to keep it bug-free, performant, and most importantly, maintainable?
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Teaching Touch: Tapworthy Touchscreen Design
Discover the rules of thumb for finger-friendly design. Touch gestures are sweeping away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices—and even from the next version of Windows. Find out why those familiar desktop widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn to craft touchscreen interfaces that effortlessly teach users new gesture vocabularies.
The challenge: gestures are invisible, without the visual cues offered by buttons and menus. As your touchscreen app sheds buttons, how do people figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to lead your audience by the hand (and fingers) with practical techniques that make invisible gestures obvious. Designer Josh Clark (author of O’Reilly books "Tapworthy" and "Best iPhone Apps") mines a variety of surprising sources for interface inspiration and design patterns. Along the way, discover the subtle power of animation, why you should be playing lots more video games, and why a toddler is your best beta tester.
Josh Clark, Principal, Global Moxie
I’m a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. I’m author of the O’Reilly books "Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps" and "Best iPhone Apps." My outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and training to help media companies, design agencies, and creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.
Before the interwebs swallowed me up, I worked on a slew of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. I shared my three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, I created the uberpopular "Couch-to-5K" (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (My motto for fitness is the same for user experience: no pain, no pain.)
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Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface
UX designer Amber Case will share insights from her research in cyborg anthropology and talk about what really makes us human.
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist currently working at Vertigo Software. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers. Her main focus is on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She formerly worked at global advertising agency. In 2010, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech.
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Drawing Back the Curtains on CSS Implementation
In this session, representatives from major browser vendors including Chrome, Microsoft, Opera and the W3C will pull back the curtain revealing some of the challenges with implementation and interoperability. The goal is to have designers and developers get a glimpse into how CSS has struggled and finally gained its footing as the presentation layer in everything we do for the Web.
Elika Etemad, Invited Expert, W3C Invited Experts. Elika J. Etemad (fantasai) is a W3C Invited Expert on the CSS Working Group and a longtime contributor to the Mozilla Project. She edits CSS specifications, does layout engine QA, and occasionally codes for Gecko. Within the CSSWG she specializes in internationalization, testing, and generally getting things done.
Molly Holzschlag, Developer Rel, Opera Software. Having achieved a modicum of balance after her midlife crisis, Molly decided to finally get a job. She is now a Web Evangelist focusing on developer relations for the upstart Norwegian browser company, Opera Software. Earlier in life, Molly avoided a regular job including those silly start-up ventures and chose instead to write a lot of books and articles and stuff on Web standards, and talk a lot about them, too. She now avoids the former, while the latter is an ongoing inevitability. To learn more about Molly and her work, you can check out her blog at molly.com or interact with her on Twitter @mollydotcom. Better yet, come have a chat F2F at SXSW!
Sylvain Galineau, Program Manager, Microsoft. Sylvain spent many years working on web application servers and now helps design Internet Explorer. He represents Microsoft on the CSS Working Group and will buy everyone a round when IE6 goes away. Everyone.
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Cure for the Common Font — A Web Designer’s Introduction to Typeface Selection
Now that web designers suddenly face the challenge (and delight) of choosing fonts from an ever-growing selection, we thought it’s a good time to recommend some basic principles for making wise type choices.
- Stephen Coles
- Jason Santa Maria
- Tiffany Wardle
- Frank Chimero
http://typographica.org/2011/on-typography/intro-to-typeface-selection/
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No Excuse: Web Designers Who Can’t Code
Some of the most important design decisions happen in code. In 2009, I gave a talk at the Build conference in Belfast with what I thought was a fairly uncontroversial premise: web designers should write code. Since then, the subject has sparked more than a few debates, including a particular heated pile-on when Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted that he was "shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse." In a recent interview, Jonathan Ive said "It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it." He’s talking about product design, but the principle is just as relevant to the Web (if not more so). "The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form…. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned…. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way." As our industry grows and roles get more specialized, it’s possible to become a "web designer" without more than a cursory understanding of the fundamental building materials of the Web: the code. Is this just the price of progress? Are the days of the web craftsman soon to be in the past? Or is a hybrid approach to web design and development something worth preserve?
- Jenn Lukas
- Ethan Marcotte
- Ryan Sims
- Wilson Miner
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