Institutional Knowledge

Once again I find myself trying to put into words the experience that is South by Southwest. SXSW is not training. SXSW is not a trade show. SXSW is, in the words of Zeldman, a zeitgeist of the what direction the Internet and web industry is headed. You don’t attend SXSW to learn anything in particular and yet you walk away with more knowledge and inspiration about topics that you either had no idea existed or you’d forgotten all about. Having now attended SXSW for the last two years, I can safely say that it’s an unpredictable event that brings together some of the best and brightest. Here are some of my impressions, inspirations, and thoughts from this years event.
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With the ATI project about to hit full swing, I sat in on a 30 minute power session as SXSW titled Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use. Here are some notes and thoughts I took away from the session.

Don’t be a tool. Use One

There are pleanty of free tools out there for evaluating your web site for accessibility. The best place to start is, if you have Firefox, installing the Web Developer Toolbar. The toolbar enables you to check validation as well as highligh missing alt tags, or headings (which are important to screen readers).

Doing the right thing, without your boss noticing

Use semantically meaningful markup. Using the right element for the right job will help create a richer context for the document. Also you can do simple things like provide hidden “Skip To…” links at beginning of documents in addition to hidden form labels and table heads.

There are tons of more web-based tools and wizards on Accessify such as Table and Form builers.

Perhaps one of the best sessions I attended at SXSW 2007 was Web Typography Sucks by Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton. In conjunction with the Grids are Good session and the world premiere of the documentary Helvetica, the Web Typography Sucks session re-enforced the idea that we as web developers/designers must not forget the understated role of typography and graphic design on the web.

With that in mind, Mark and Richard also reminded us that typography is more than just about using pretty fonts, but rather it’s about using the right characters. For example, using proper quotation marks rather than primes(tick marks) or when to use an em vs an en dash.

Probably the best anecdote from the session was about The Sun newspaper in England which is akin to People Magazine; basically celebrity fluff. Richard pointed out how The Sun was written so that an 8 year old could comprehend it. Despite of the low barrier of comprehension and less than Pulitzer Prize worthy content, all of the articles have correct character usage. Richard explained that everyone, from the writer, to the editor, and even the printing press operator care about the correct usage of typography.

This got me thinking: why don’t we care about typography? Working in Information Resources, our jobs revolve around communication. So why don’t we pay closer attention to typography which servers to facilitate good communication? Is this a by-product of the computer era? I’ll have another blog post about this later.

Richard and Mark continued with their presentation, highlighting the importance of vertical flow (something we desperately need to fix in the portal) and how typography influences grid design and how those grids were calculated.

There was also a call to developers to really take advantage of CSS and start defining font stacks properly. Case in point, by default in Dreamweaver the font stack looks like this:

p {font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}

What’s the problem with this you might ask.

1. Arial is not a suitable back-up for Verdana. Verdana is a much larger and wider font. Use Tahoma instead of Arial
2. IMO: Arial is the font for the cheap designer. Helvetica is a much more adaptable font, and in specific Helvetica Neue (pronounced: no-oy)

So, let’s rewrite the above CSS rule in two distinct flavors: for Verdana, and for Helvetica.

p {font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;}

p {font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;}

I don’t believe Helvetica or Helvetica Neue ship by default with Windows, so why specify it ahead of Arial when a super majority of your target audience is probably browsing on a Windows machine? Progressive Enhancements! It costs next to nothing in bandwidth to add an extra font to that font stack (which will be cached in most instances) so you might as well specify the nicest font possible so those who have it installed, or use a Mac, can enjoy a nice font family and those who don’t will still continue to see the world in Arial (those poor souls).

As soon as the audio of this session is posted, I’ll put up a link, but in the mean time you can browse the presentation slides and find other resources on Typograhy

Grids are Good and How to Design with them was by far the best session I’ve attended so far. I was disappointed that it was only 30 minutes long as Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh were great presenters and made grid theory very accessible. Here are some highlight points from their presentations.

• Humans like to infer intention / order
• The grid is the most vivid manifestation of the will to order in graphic design
• Constraints are the mother of design invention
• Alignment is critical to the success of the grid
• Add more spacing to the bottom of text.

I had a brief chance to talk with Mark Boulton yesterday, and he indicated that he’d be going into more grid theory tomorrow morning, so I’ll definitely be sitting in on that session. Now that we’ve been using Yahoo’s Grid-Font-Reset stylesheet in practically all of our projects, it’s made accessible and standards based grid layout more possible. While, I have yet to push the envelope w/ Yahoo Grids to create some of the calculated grid layouts that Mark or Khoi dream up, it helps me get into the mentality of thinking in grids.

Download the presentation slides

Here are some of my notes from Why we should ignore users

• Activity vs People centered design
  • People adapt to technology all the time, don’t make technology adapt to people
• Look for trends, not 1-off request
• def. Genius design: Hire better, do less user testing

The conclusion the panel somewhat seemed to agree upon was that users vary so much it’s difficult in some situations to design for them. Instead we should be focused on designing for an activity that the user will need to perform.