Jamie Kosoy - @jkosoy -Designing Interaction using Flash

Programming Philosophy

1. Everyone gets a say.
   • Strategist, Producer, Designer, Developer.
   • Understand each other, speak the same language.
2. Never say it's too hard.
3. Build fast.
4. Build ugly.
   • Prototyping and designing at the same time.
5. Trust each other.
   • Producer acts as intermediary between Client and Team members.
6. Drink lots of whiskey.
7. Mise en place.--Everything in place.
   • Have documents organized and ready to go.
8. Always start from scratch.
   • Helps you get better and faster.
9. Strive for excellence, not perfection.
10. Think simple.

Andrew Maier - @andrewmaier - Polishing Interfaces: Visual Design

• Application interfaces often have no overarching design
• Application interfaces leave a lasting impression
• Polished interfaces make good use of motifs
• Polished interfaces follow conventions

1. Establish a theme/style
2. Wireframe your elements
3. Begin adding layer styles
   • 1-pixel highlights
   • Gradient overlay
   • Inner shadows

Scott Jehl - @scottjehl - Rich UI Design: An Access-Oriented Approach

Download the Presentation from the Filament Group website

• Should test pages on screen readers
  • Jaws is most popular, 40 min trial available
  • NVDA is open-source
• All or nothing is a bad approach to accessibility
• Consider Universal Access in all stage of development
• Instead of asking for browser, run tests to determine browser's capabilities. Available at filimentgroup
• If browser fails tests, serve "basic" version with "Safe CSS"
  • No floats
  • No dark text on light backgrounds
  • No background images
  • No positioning
• If browser passes test:
  • Add class "enhanced" to html element
  • Dynamically load CSS and JavaScript
  • Cookie the results
  • Provide link to low-bandwidth version (which will change cookie and remove enhanced class)
• If building widgets not included in jqueryui themeroller:
  • Replicate behavior before you extend
  • Proxy back to native control
  • Follow conventions and user expectations
  • Consider the mouse optional
  • Use WAI-ARIA

Jeff Croft - @jcroft - Beautiful Layouts Through Beautiful Type

This presentation was eerily similar to my Typography for the Web presentation, so here are notes on the other things that I found interesting during the talk.

• Absolute vs. Relative font-positioning: because page-zoom is now in most modern browsers, we can choose which one we want to use per situation. There's always a balance between accessibility, ease of use, etc.
• Be careful of contrast! Pure black on pure white is usually too high contrast
• Tufte's idea is that we should use the smallest effective differences for hierarchy. We don't have to make huge differences in type to indicate hierarchy.
• Links need to stand out, but shouldn't distract the reader.
• WP-Typography is a WordPress plugin that does hyphenation, gets rid of orphans, replaces with smart quotes and dashes, and wraps initial quotes for individual styling.

Jina Bolton - @jina - Mastering CSS Layouts

• Mastering CSS is really about mastering your workflow. Have a system for starting each project.
  • Idea: Keep content images and layout images in separate folders
• Comment your CSS!
  • Reference colors at the beginning
  • Use CSS Flags to organize sections
  • Make a "table of contents" so other team members know where to find things
• Balance readability and optimization
• Avoid using floats so that you don't have to define widths for your elements; let elements use normal flow
• On outermost containers, set line-height: 0--then assign actual line-heights to your individual elements. This helps avoid gap-issues
• Sometimes using a "safe hack" is better than creating another stylesheet for something.