Sessions at An Event Apart Minneapolis 2011 on Monday 8th August

When “everyone is a designer,” what does it mean to be a web or UX designer? The rules of design engagement are changing. You may no longer be in control of the user’s visual experience. Succeeding in today’s web is more challenging than it has been in years. Yet challenges are opportunities, and today is the best time in over a decade to create websites and applications. Learn the skills and opportunities facing every designer today, from mobile and small screen strategy (and the difference between them) to the design principles of HTML5. Then put your best practices into practice by identifying collaborative and growth opportunities at your job.

Achieving a thorough grasp of typography can take a lifetime, but moving beyond the basics is within your reach right now. In this talk, we’ll learn how to look at typefaces with a discerning eye, different approaches to typographic planning, how typography impacts the act of reading, and how to choose and combine appropriate typefaces from an aesthetic and technical point of view. Through an understanding of our design tools and how they relate to the web as a medium, we can empower ourselves to use type in meaningful and powerful ways.

Great typography is all about sweating the little details. The development and uptake of CSS 3 is finally giving designers the ability to control those details on the web. This session will zoom in on the finer aspects which can be applied now to improve your web typography - one glyph at a time - from hyphenation and ligatures, to punctuation and numerals.

Mobile dances to a different beat. Learn how to transition what you know about designing for the Web to Mobile and pick up a bunch of new moves along the way that’ll help you rock the mobile Web.

As we journey through life we are moulded into various experiences and influenced by design around us. What makes us click “buy” on one website compared to another? What small design details can we add to truly enhance our design for positive benefits? How can design shape our everyday interactions without us realising? Sarah will serve up a large helping of practical UI advice for both mobile and the web, through her experiences as a User Interface Designer.

There’s been a lot of great discussion about responsive web design: merging media queries and flexible, grid-based layouts to create more adaptive, universal designs. But how does a responsive approach affect our design workflow? And when is responsive design right for your project? We’ll look at sites and strategies to try and answer these questions, and learn to become more responsive designers.