Information Squid

Better late than never. Following will be my notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2007, held August 27th and 28th. It was the AEA lineup I was most interested in seeing, and conveniently they came to my city. I’ve since moved to Washington, DC, but I’m glad I was able to bring their ideas with me. Definitely worth the price – and I was saying that after the first two talks, so the value of the full conference had to be much higher.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s event wrapup, with various links

Links to individual posts:
“Secrets of the CSS Jedi” by Eric Meyer
“Writing the User Interface” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag” by Jason Santa Maria
“Search Analytics For Fun and Profit” by Lou Rosenfeld
“The Seven Lies of Information Architecture” by Liz Danzico
“Interface Design Juggling” by Dan Cederholm
“Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave.” by Jeremy Keith
“Best Practices For Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski
“Accessibility: Lost In Translation” by Derek Featherstone
“The State of CSS In an IE7 World” by Eric Meyer
“Selling Design” by Jeffrey Zeldman
“Dealing With the Both of You” by Jim Coudal

Via Leisa Reichart’s disambiguity, Andy Rutledge has a discussion of “quiet structure” on the new CNN site design, contrasted with the busyness of the new USA Today design.

He mentions simplicity (in header and structural elements) and consistency (in element and whitespace dimensions) as keys to making your content stand out from its presentation and having it be easy to actually read – creating the right kind of affordances for large quantities of content meant to be read rather than just skimmed. I read a lot online – here’s hoping more news (and blog, for that matter) sites will listen to Rutledge.

Many information architects come from a design background. Their deliverables are gorgeous, their blogs are pretty – and their presentations are Good PowerPoint (take a look at the IA Summit ones for examples). It’s a little intimidating for me, coming from a development background.

So I’m trying to learn – how to use designers’ tools and how to use them well.

Last week’s discovery was that InDesign is remarkably intuitive. Reading a book and playing with the software a bit was enough for me to feel confident I could create documents. Sure enough, when I mocked up a wireframe and compared it to the one by a designer colleague, all the bones were there. I still need to dissect a couple of good examples to learn nuances: “Oh, you made the shape outline and then put a text frame inside it instead of typing directly into the shape? That makes sense.” But it’s one more tool to have.