Workshops | @media 2010

Workshops

Four great full day workshops to choose from

June 8 Workshops

• Andy Clarke - Advanced CSS styling
• Remy Sharp - Browsers with Wings: HTML5 APIs

June 9 Workshops

• Christian Crumlish - Designing social interfaces
• Jeremy Keith - Get semantic with Microformats and HTML5

Get semantic with microformats and HTML5

Presenter: Jeremy Keith

Venue: London House, Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury

Date: Wednesday 9th June 2010, 9:00am to 5:00pm

Pricing: £299 conference attendees / £325 standalone

Register now!

When it comes to the web, beauty is more than skin deep. This workshop will take you beyond the surface of the screen and give you an appreciation for the underlying structure of semantic markup.

From simple elemental microformats that consist of nothing more than adding an attribute, right up to compound microformats that can be mashed up together, you’ll meet them all. Just as you can develop a nose for wine tasting, you can also develop a sense for spotting which content is just crying out to be microformatted. Once you’ve learned to see these patterns, you’ll never surf the web the same way again.

Then, you’ll get to grips with HTML5. Discover the design principles that are informing the latest version of the web’s lingua franca. You’ll find out why HTML5 is more of an evolution than a revolution. You’ll gain an understanding of the new semantics and get an insight into how new features should be used.

What will be covered?

• The importance of meaningful markup.
• The problems solved by microformats.
• Formatting contact details with hCard.
• Formatting events with hCalendar.
• The design principles of HTML5.
• New structural elements.
• The new outline algorithm.
• Strategies for using HTML5 today.

Who is this workshop for?

Web designers who have already had their brains rewired by the CSS Zen Garden will appreciate this next step into the world of extensible semantics. Front-end developers familiar with web standards will gain a deeper knowledge of the cutting-edge of semantic richness.

About Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the web consultancy firm Clearleft. He has written two books, DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax, but what he really wants to do is direct. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane. His loony bun is fine benny lava.

Advanced CSS styling

Presenter: Andy Clarke

Venue: London House, Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury

Date: Tuesday 8th June 2010, 9:00am to 5:00pm

Pricing: £299 conference attendees / £325 standalone

Register now!

Modern web browsers are now better capable of rendering advanced CSS than ever before. From highly targeted CSS selectors to new ways to work with layout, colour and typography, if you are a web designer or developer, working with CSS has never been more exciting.

‘Advanced CSS Styling’; is a unique one-day master class presented by Andy Clarke, designer and author of the best-selling Transcending CSS. Spend the day with Andy learning how to use the most up-to-date CSS techniques in your everyday work.

What will be covered?

In this very full day you will learn

• how to design balanced, inspired layouts using advanced CSS positioning techniques
• new ways to work with colour using RGBa
• how to use multiple background and border images
• how to work with text and box shadows
• all about CSS gradients, reflections and transitions
• the latest techniques for designing in a browser
• how to test your designs for web accessibility throughout your design process

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. We'll also be covering:

• 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 is appropriate

Web typography is one of the hottest topics in web design and development. As a self-confessed typography perfectionist, Andy will teach you:

• how to work with font embedding solutions including Typekit, Kernest and Cufon
• how to create striking, readable type with typographic hierarchies
• how to improve typography with kerning, leading and baseline shifts

About Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been called a lot of things since he started working on the web 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 “(triple talented) bastard”.

Andy took ten months of his life to write the best-selling Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design, but his passion is amazing web design. He loves designing for the web, writing about design, and teaching it at workshops and conferences all over 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 and best-practice use of technologies.

Browsers with Wings: HTML5 APIs

Presenter: Remy Sharp

Venue: London House, Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury

Date: Tuesday 8th June 2010, 9:00am to 5:00pm

Pricing: £299 conference attendees / £325 standalone

Register now!

HTML5 has gained a lot of attention over the last 12 months. With browsers increasingly supporting the features of the vast JavaScript APIs both in and around the official HTML5 spec, it's making the job of creating awesome applications purely using these web technologies very easy indeed.

This full day workshop will introduce you to HTML5 with a brief backstory, before diving into the APIs one by one. As well as going through code and showing practical demonstrations, where possible, we'll also talk about the alternatives for old browsers that don't support "awesome" out of the box.

What will be covered?

• Web forms - no more JavaScript
• Video & audio - move over Flash
• Canvas - bring on the Mario games
• Storage - like cookies, but tastes so much better
• Offline - forget the web
• Geolocation - finders keepers
• Web Workers - multithreading for the browser
• Web Sockets - pushing data was never so easy
• Mobile - HTML5 apps on the move

Who is this workshop for?

You're not expected to have played with HTML5 just yet, but you will need to have a reasonable understanding of HTML & JavaScript. A lot of the individual APIs are being used in popular web sites today both in desktop browsers and mobile, so rest assured that this applies to developers that are working on the web *today*.

About Remy Sharp

Remy Sharp is a developer, speaker, blogger, author of upcoming jQuery for Designers (Manning) and co-author of Introduction to HTML5 (New Riders). He also organises the Full Frontal JavaScript Conference and is one of the curators of HTML5 Doctor.

jQuery team member (developer relations, formally evangelism) and the developer on a fistful of JavaScript related apps, Remy loves his JavaScript and he is keen as mustard to share it with other developers.

Presenter: Christian Crumlish

Venue: London House, Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury

Date: Wednesday 9th June 2010, 9:00am to 5:00pm

Pricing: £299 conference attendees / £325 standalone

Register now!

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 foundational set of high-level practices that underpin the individual interaction, Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix-and-match the individual social patterns and best practices to create compelling social experiences. Workshop activities will involve concept modeling and user interface sketching to explore the application of social interaction patterns to specific scenarios.

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 will you 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

About 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.

Images:

The images are downsized due to limited space here. The original dimensions may differ.
Click on the image to open it on a new tab.