JeffCroft.com

My presentation

My solo presentation was entitled Typography, Beyond the Font and focused on everything but typefaces. The idea of the session was to get the idea that typography was all about picking a cool font out of people’s heads and make them start thinking about the finer details of traditional typography and how it can be applied to the web.

I was very pleased with how it went down. I felt comfortable on stage and think I got though a ton of practical, useful information in the hour I had allotted to me. I know I was talking a hundred miles an hour, and I did hear a couple people say that perhaps I went too fast — but I figure too much information is better than too little.

The only problem I had was a technical one. Apparently, there was a loose connection somewhere between my Mac and the projector, and my slides were not displaying quite right. I guess they had a purple tint. I wasn’t aware of it until after the session, which was kind of a bummer. I really wish the A/V guy that was on hand would have said something so we could have stopped and fixed it — but this was also the same guy who basically said, “tough luck” when I went to him looking for an adapter for his non-DVI projector. Anyway, most people seemed to think the less-than-perfect display wasn’t too serious an impediment to enjoying the presentation — hopefully they weren’t just being nice. If you were there, I apologize for the slides — and thanks for coming.

I understand both the slides and audio/video of the presentation will be available on the Webmaster Jam Session site, but especially because of the display problem, I wanted to be sure and post the slides here, as well. So, if you’re interested, you can grab the 3MB PDF here: Typography, Beyond the Font

Other highlight sessions

As I said, every session I saw was top notch — but I figured I’d take the time to point out a few that I thought were real highlights. Definitely check out the A/V of these when they’re available:

• The Dawning of the Age of Experience, Jared Spool — Jared is a riot to watch. He’s funny, full of personality, and incredibly effective at getting his point across. A must see.
• A Field Guide to Design Inspiration, Rob Weychert — Similar, but not the same as, the presentation Rob and Jason Santa Maria did at SXSW in March, this one was a really nice collection of personal examples and anecdotes about how to find and maintain inspiration.
• Content Strategy and Web Design, Keith Robinson — My co-worker Keith did a great job focusing on one of the most important and yet most overlooked aspects of our sites: content.
• Design for Developers, Jason Beaird — Jason was giving his first presentation ever, and he really did a nice job. He picked a great topic, covering the basics of graphic and web design, and tackled it from a logical, systematic angle that left-brained developer types could really understand. For us designers in the audience, it was probably a bit on the simple side, but I was looking around and saw a lot of apparent light bulbs going off in the heads of developers.
• Behind the Curtain: Application Interface Design, Garrett Dimon — Garrett showed off his design and development process for his upcoming ticket tracker application. Really good stuff.
• Web Design Roundtable, Dan Rubin, Jonathan Snook, Molly Holzschlag, Rob Jones, Keith Robinson, Garrett Dimon, James Craig, Nick Finck, Darrin Ward, Bryan Veloso, Chris Bernard, Jeff Croft — I think the roundtable went off pretty well. It was hard to tell from my on-stage perspective, but it seemed like there were a lot of good questions and good answers given, and the thing was well-moderated by J Cornellius (I’ve recently realized that the quality of the moderator is very directly related to the quality of the panel).
• Real World Accessibility, Derek Featherstone — I’ll be honest here. I hate talks about accessibility. Hate. Them. It’s an important topic, but the talks almost always bore me to death. That having been said, I’ve heard Derek speak a few times now, and I’m absolutely convinced that he is the only person in the world that can talk about accessibility without putting me to sleep. On the contrary, he’s actually very entertaining. But while his humor is great, Derek’s biggest asset at these conferences is that he’s sympathetic to the needs to designers and developer, and not simply an accessibility Nazi. He doesn’t shun exciting-but-potentially-inaccessible new technologies and design trends, but rather gets excited by their potential to enhance user experiences and dives in, helping to find ways to make use of them wile still providing the greatest accessibility possible. Derek is accessibility’s rockstar — and let’s face it, accessibility is not a very sexy discipline. If the accessibility community doesn’t put this guy in front of the pulpit at every conference of the year, they’re just plain stupid.

I missed, but heard really good things about Chris Bernard’s Kissing Cousins: Classic Design and Web Design, Michael Lopp’s Managing Web Design, and Doris Brown’s Psychology of Color. And with other sessions that I didn’t see by great speakers like Jonathan Snook, Stephanie Sullivan, Brian Oberkrich, James Craig, and more — I’m really looking forward to the podcasts.

The parties and social events

One might say the evening events at WJS crecendo’d from relative tame and mellow on Thursday night to your typical web conference gathering on Friday to, well, something else entirely on Saturday night. The get together in the hotel bar on Thursday was nice and the Blue Flavor/Microsoft party on Friday was a really good time — but let’s be honest, here: what everyone was talking about when the event was over was the closing party at Dallas’ Lizard Lounge.

The party was sponsored by Adobe, and piggybacked on top of an enormous beach party of sorts that was already going on. There were two levels of dance floors, a massive outdoor sand pit with pools, a giant outdoor stage with three DJs and a video wall the size of a house in the suburbs, and a rooftop deck that was — I thought — for the web nerds only (but it didn’t really work out that way, not that anyone was complaining). There were hundreds upon hundreds of attractive people wearing very little clothing, public makeout sessions the likes of which I haven’t seen since middle school, an open bar that never stopped flowing, music that made you feel like you were on ecstasy even if you weren’t (and I’m pretty sure some people were), and bikinis galore. There was Jager Bombs, Flap ‘N Snaps, and 151 for me. There was flashing, puking, grinding, and groping — although I don’t believe much of this was done by web nerds. In short: it was a blast. Definitely among the best parties I’ve been to, and absolutely the best web-related party of all time. As you might imagine, many of the Webmaster Jam Session attendees seemed a bit out of their element, but from what I could tell, everyone seemed to take it in stride, relax, and have a great time. Really, you have to see this party to believe it. Don’t miss photos tagged with <a href=”http://flickr.com/photos/tags/webjamsession/” on Flickr.

After The Lizard Lounge shut down, many of us did a little after-party back at the Adam’s Mark in a suite. It was mostly mellow and chill, but there were a few fiesty moments, including a Beastie Boys sing-along I got on video. I personally never went to bed, and I know many others didn’t, either.

Only one word of advice to CoffeeCup: If you’re going to have a party like that next year (and we hope you will), dear God don’t schedule our flights for 9am!! :)

In closing

Bottom line: you gotta go to the conference next year. Like I said, it was probably the best I’ve ever attended — between the quality of the sessions and the wilder-than-usual evenings, there’s something for everyone here. The presentations made SXSW look like amateur hour, and the closing party made SXSW look downright tame by comparison.