Workshops—November 11~12th | Web Directions East

Web Directions East 2009 presents four full-day workshops by international experts in CSS, JavaScript, user experience and web site performance. Each workshop is limited to 30 participants, and will be presented in English with simultaneous Japanese interpretation. Book now to enjoy eight hours learning from and talking with these web leaders.

“Advanced CSS Styling” Nov 11th (Wednesday) 9:30~17:30

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been called a lot of things since he started working on the web at Stuff and Nonsense ten years ago. His ego likes words like ‘ambassador for CSS’, ‘industry prophet’ and ‘inspiring’, but actually he is most proud that Jeffrey Zeldman once called him a bastard. Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project and a former invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. He took ten months out of his life to write the best-selling book Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design, but Andy's passion is amazing web design. He loves making designs for the web, writing about design and teaching it at workshops and conferences all of the world.Now he is pulling all of those passions together to create For A Beautiful Web, a unique series of web design master-classes that cover topics including visual design, best-practice use of technologies such as CSS, as well as geeky stuff like Microformats.

Who is this workshop for?

Web designers, print designers who wants to know what makes the web special, or technical people keen to learn more about how visual designers think and work will all take a wealth of learning from this very full day.

What you will learn

• How to design balanced, inspired layouts using advanced CSS positioning techniques
• New ways to work with colour using RGBa
• Using multiple background and border images
• How to use text and box shadows
• About CSS gradients, reflections and transitions

Of course the browser landscape is varied and each browser supports different CSS properties. You will learn how to design around, rather than hack around these natural differences to create experiences that are enjoyable for everyone, no matter which browser they use. You will learn:

• How to improve a browser's CSS support using Javascript
• Modernizr and how it will help you to design around browser support
• When using Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS is appropriate

“JavaScript: The Good Parts” Nov 11th (Wednesday) 9:30~17:30

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford is a product of the US public school system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!. He is the world’s foremost living authority on JavaScript.

Who is this workshop for?

Web designers and developers, those using or making Javascript libraries, those wanting to deepen their understanding and improve their Javascript abilities.

What you will learn

JavaScript is a language with more than its share of bad parts. It went from non-existence to global adoption in an alarmingly short period of time. It never had an interval in the lab when it could be tried out and polished. It went straight into Netscape Navigator 2 just as it was, and it was very rough. When Java applets failed, JavaScript became the Language of the Web by default.

But JavaScript’s popularity is almost completely independent of its qualities as a programming language. JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent toy. My intention in this workshop is to expose the goodness in JavaScript, an outstanding dynamic programming language. I believe that the elegant subset I have carved out is vastly superior to the language as a whole, being more reliable, readable, and maintainable.

This course is a survey of the JavaScript Programming Language. Topics will include values, syntax, dynamic objects, prototypal inheritance, augmentation, lambdas, closures, and JSON.

“Designing Social Interfaces” Nov 12th (Thursday) 9:30~17:30

Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social interactive spaces online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s Design Council. He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and is currently working on an upcoming book, Designing Social Interfaces, with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, and Web 2.0 Expo. Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton. He lives in Oakland with his wife Briggs, his cat Fraidy, and his electric ukulele, Evangeline.

Who is this workshop for?

Designers, developers, architects and product specialists all need to work together to create compelling social experiences online and this workshop will be relevant to anyone who has to plan, design, build, or bring to market social websites and applications.

What you will learn

By the end of this very full day you will be able to

• understand, visualize, and communicate clearly about the social design landscape
• apply a set of core social design principles to a wide variety of contexts
• create models for the representation of people and social objects in your app
• add social features intelligently (and incrementally) to an existing site
• design reputation features to enable the type of community (competitive? collaborative? somewhere in between?) you want
• enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project
• embrace openness and leverage the existing open social infrastructure of the web
• introduce representations of presence into an experience so that your users can find and relate to each other
• tie your virtual experiences to the real world in space and time by connecting to maps, geolocation, and calendaring tools
• figure out an enterprise social media strategy for your client, boss, or startup

Designing social websites and applications or adding a social dimension to an existing project entails its own unique challenges way beyond those involved in creating experiences for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Any of the following sound familiar?

• I’m a designer being asked to add “social” to my site!
• I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
• We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we’re not sure how to get people to come join the fun.
• I have a great idea for a social utility but I don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
• People come and read my content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
• I’m worried I’m missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.

In this full-day workshop, we’ll address these challenges and more. You’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.

Starting with a base of interaction best practices, Christian will teach what social patterns to use and when to use them, to create compelling social experiences. The workshop will include concept modeling and user interface sketching.

“Introduction to Website Performance” Nov 12th (Thursday) 9:30~17:30

Nicole Sullivan

Users love fast websites, but they expect all of the functionality of a desktop application. In this workshop, Nicole will explain the latest techniques, research, and best practices from companies like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and AOL. You will learn practical techniques that you can implement at your own company which cause dramatic improvement in response times.

Who is this workshop for?

Whether you are a designer, a developer, a project manager, producer, or wear several of these hats, this workshop will address your needs in improving the performance of your online properties.

What you will learn

• Optimizing Images
• Focus on the front-end
• Overview of profiling tools
• Performance impact on revenue and sales

The workshop will include live debugging and guided deep dives.

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