So I went, and RubyConf was pretty awesome. It was filled with people who love the language and what can be done with it. I really liked that the conference wasn’t just about Rails, it was about Ruby in general, so I got to learn about all sorts of things that are out of the scope of what I normally do with Rails. I learned about MacRuby, a project that aims to let people write apps for the Mac (and hopefully iOS, eventually) in Ruby. This opens the door to a lot more people who want to write Mac code because they don’t have to learn another programming language.

I was highly impressed with Daniel Jackoway, a young Stanford undergrad who had lots to say about his project Ruboto, which is Ruby for Android devices. He was very knowledgeable for someone his age. It was pretty inspiring to listen to his talk.

I also learned a lot about app security and best practices for keeping your apps safe from prying eyes, and how to write more future-proof, manageable code. It’s good to plan ahead when coding so that you don’t hate yourself later on when you come back and try to decipher what you wrote and how it works. I also learned about Ruby 1.9, the latest version of Ruby, what it supports and why it’s much better than the current version of Ruby in most cases.

I even ran into some cool people who write web applications that I use every day, like Chargify.

My favorite part, however was when a Japanese programmer, Shugo Maeda gave a talk. His English wasn’t very good, and Matsumoto had to translate a lot of what he was saying. Eventually he was done with his presentation and asked if there were any questions. A guy from the audience asked a question, but both Matsumoto and Shugo had a difficult time understanding just what he was asking. Eventually, someone got the bright idea to have him come up and write code that demonstrated his question. It was amazing to see how quickly everyone in the room was on the same page when he did that. The question was quickly answered after that. It was really amazing to see a real-life example in which it was clearly shown that we might not all speak the same language, but we all understood the same language, Ruby.

All in all, it was a really fun time, much new knowledge was gained, I got to put faces to usernames that I’d only seen online, and I learned so much about what is being done with Ruby outside of Rails. RubyConf 2010 was awesome.

Tickets: 225.216.0660, theparktheatre.com
$10 – AAF-BR and SME-GBR members
$25 – General Public

The social media revolution has changed the way we live our lives and conduct our business. Learn social media techniques that will improve your sales from a master marketer.

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. In so doing, he learned that the Internet offers up potential via these free tools for businesses and individuals alike to develop their own brand. Gary will touch on his core themes for best utilizing these tools, including why listening is more important than speaking, the importance of authenticity in business, and what it means to “scale your caring.” Learn more about Gary at garyvaynerchuk.com, or catch him on Twitter where he has over 840,000 followers!

Join Gary at a Wine and Cheese Reception before the event from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Cost to attend the reception is $250.
Information courtesy of AAFBR.

At the end of my talk, the students played a multimedia presentation that they had put together as a going away gift for Ms. Trammie. The presentation was put together very very well, and I think I was in the presence of some future business owners in the room.

Congratulations, students, on all your hard work. I wish you all the best!

Arriving in our hotel on Sunday night was such a relief. We had just driven 26+ hours from Baton Rouge to Boston. The conference was worth it.

Monday we got to hear some excellent presenters like Jared Spool, Kristina Halvorson, Jeremy Keith, Dan Cederholm, and Jason Santa Maria among others. Tuesday we were privy to the presentations of Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Mall, Simplescott, Heather Champ, and Andy Clarke. The knowledge flowed like a river. I would love to be able to share everything I learned but I’m afraid there’s just not enough space on the internet for that. (Heh, there actually may be.)

But some really key points I picked up on from the conference are:

• Doing it just like Amazon.com does it, is not necessarily the best solution for everyone.- You have to have to traffic to sustain the type of site that amazon has, and amazon has millions of pageviews a day. Searching for something obscure on amazon typically doesn’t wield helpful results, you need a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for.
• Content is not a feature.- Content generally gets overlooked and we as web developers have been trained to accept the “put-off” of content until the final stages of the site. When, ideally, the content should all already be assembled and ready to go before the structure and architecture of the site are completed.
• Be bold, use structure, and sketch ??????? ????????? ????? ?????? ????????? 2
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  - Jason Santa Maria talked about the marginalization of design not due to inability, but due to fear and lack of process. He strongly emphasized using a grid structure, the types of grids to use, and the power of sketching.

• Sketching is not about what kind of artist you are but about the flow of information and ideas. Once you exhaust all the normal and conventional ideas you’re forced to think outside of the norm.
• We need to plan for the future. The DISTANT future.- Jeremy Keith talked about planning for the future through our CSS and using fluid layouts, jquery, and javascript. Cool URI’s don’t ever change. It was really a talk about your legacy on the web, and how the argument could be made that not only are screens getting bigger, they’re getting much more varied. So when you’re coding a site, you need to allow it to adapt to the future.
• Web Designs should ultimately lead back to user interface and usability. If something isn’t producing a good number of clicks, find out why and fix it.
• Test, Retest, and Evolve -  Simplescott creative director for the Obama Campaign’s website showed us the entire process he went through while working on Obama’s site. The key point communicated was that through testing, and evolution eventually a final was approved, and through user testing they could see that it was an easily navigable site.
• The fold is dead. – Everyone has a mousewheel now. The day when we needed to worry about what fit on the very first part of the screen is over. People will scroll down, and they will see your content.
• Make lemonade out of lemons -  Heather Champ (Community Manager at Flickr) had a great story about how when their site crashed, they ran an impromptu creativity contest with just 2 circles as the original idea. The users of the site then went to all ends of the spectrum and created some really cool effects (rather than freaking out about flickr being down). It’s a testament to ingenuity and finding ways to turn a bad situation into a good one.
• Re-engineer your workflow. Make mockups in browsers not photoshop. – Andy Clarke dropped this bomb on us as the last presenter. Making mockups in browsers is so unconventional and yet, after he really explained the process it makes  sense. It can clearly communication subtle web behaviors like hovers, javascript, and more. And if the client wants a sitewide color change, one line of css fixes that rather than changing a whole mockup.

I walked away from An Event Apart with all my premonitions and expectations annihilated. It was the most inspiring moment of my career. I would personally like to thank @brianrodriguez for sending me, because it is truly something I won’t forget.

Logos express complex ideas and concepts with simplified illustrations and typefaces that communicate distinctively and effectively. They are one of the most difficult aspects of graphic design for this reason. Some logos are incredibly clever and effective while others are poorly made and fail to communicate. Read More

That being said when I went to this collaboration of designers and artists I was somewhat blown away. They spoke about their processes they went through in order to win the Addy Awards (awards given by the federation for excellence in creative design, marketing and advertising) and it made an impact as to how I view what I do.

One of the speakers (whose name is Greg Milneck) was the winner of an Addy for his work on some local commercials. Now when he spoke about his process it seemed at first that “Oh he’s talking about filmmaking, so this doesn’t really apply to me.” Yet, when I took time to listen and examine what he was saying it all made sense and really fit well into the process of my job.

Pre-production, pre-production, pre-production. Those were the three most important steps in his process. And if you think about it, those should be the 3 most important steps in pretty much any design process. Regardless of whether it’s print design, commercials, or web design, having pre-production as the primary priority in your process is pretty logical. He went on to say that regardless of budget “more time spent on pre-production will allow you to spend less time on the actual production and post-production saving you money in the long run.” That’s why it’s so important. For him, it was to avoid going to a set and having 30 cast and crew not knowing exactly what to do. But for people like me and my coworkers, it’s more about having the site functionality and content laid out in front of you like a blue-print. If it isn’t, the client will make mid-design changes, or even post-approval design changes which cause more time to be spent going back and repeating work.

He had others that he put less emphasis on, but the one that stood out to me as a web designer was “Cooperation between pre- and post-production crew.” Now in terms of web design, this struck a very resonant chord with me. More often than not, I’ve run into an issue in the closing processes of deploying a site because I didn’t inform the designer of the limitations of HTML/CSS. With an increase in collaboration between developer and designer, these hiccups and tiny setbacks that frustrate us all and run minutes/hours off the clock could easily be avoided.

This is why i think even though the speaker was talking about commercial making, the logic and process applies to all walks of life.

My purpose with this post is really just to share with you my experience at the luncheon and how it affected me. If you have any other steps in your design process or workflow that you find is imperative I would love to hear about it. Leave a comment or email me directly.

On the way to our parents this past week, we decided to document the amount of food we made and compare it to the amount of packaged waste we had. The prepping and cooking were the hardest parts. But the culmination of thought and preparation when the meal hit the table made it all the more special. The results are pretty awesome. As seen here:

Feast and packaging pre-recycle.

So, after a long day of chopping, cooking, eating, and cleaning up, I felt really good about the small amount of waste, which was all recyclable, and the money we saved by buying local and organic. Next year I am going to attempt a NO WASTE Thanksgiving. Despite the traditional waste-ridden thanksgiving, you can easily accomplish an eco-friendly thanksgiving by attempting to reduce waste and save money in the process. Or not…

For a sustainable Thanksgiving reference:

http://coolfoodscampaign.org/thanksgiving/ten-cool-thanksgiving-tips/

Jeffrey Zeldman. Photo by Adrian Q.

I, of course, complimented him on his lecture and told him how much I was enjoying the conference (and the free beer). After the pleasantries, I wanted to ask him a few questions that couldn’t possibly be better answered by anyone else in the industry. I asked him how to overcome that feeling of “average-ness” that new designers often experience. To which he concisely replied, “Almost everyone goes through that. Just keep working hard.” I then asked him my #1 most important question, “How do you get your clients to listen to you?” His answer was perfectly on point:

“Always bring it back to the user.”

I won’t go into what he said after that, but that statement alone was profound enough for it to change my entire perspective on web design. When Zeldman told me to bring it back to the user, he wasn’t just giving me a method for convincing clients that my design motives were legitimate. He was also swiftly pointing out one of my own flaws as a designer: I had been designing for my clients, instead of for their users. After I realized that, I’d swear I saw a heavenly light shining down on him and could faintly hear the hymn of angels.

Since then, I’ve changed. My designs are almost exclusively centered around the user’s experience, instead of purely aesthetics. It’s better to let the appearance of the site come more as a function of the interface design, instead of just “making sure it looks pretty.” Besides, simple is beautiful.

I’ll never forget what Jeffrey Zeldman said to me that night. And I truly hope it’s something other designers (and clients) can take to heart as well.

P.S. – Happy Birthday to my brother, Spencer.