Aarron Walter

I’ve now been home a few days and have successfully recovered from what was the whirl-wind of South By Southwest. Each day of the conference was filled with compelling panel discussions followed by party after party where it was easy to meet an endless number of talented people shaping the future of the web in their own way. Everyone at the conference, even the most notable rock stars of the industry, seemed to welcome conversation with anyone.

Not all of the panels were worthwhile, though. Some were focused on practical information you can use, while others were just frivolous jabbering that seemed a bit like a bad high school reunion where only the panel participants were alumni. For me the highlights were as follows:

• Mark Boulton and Khoi Vinh’s talk entitled “Grids are Good, and How to Design With Them“: A quick dissection of the modularity of a grid system and its application to web design, culminating in a brilliant, hypothetical re-design of Yahoo!
• Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert’s talk entitled “After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration“: Not the typical advice for cultivating creativity. Rob and Jason are both skilled speakers, and were well prepared with an arsenal of personal examples that truly were inspiring. The point that resonated with me the most was to not confuse Influence with Inspiration. It’s the difference between doing what someone else has already done (being controlled by an idea), and channeling the creative energy of an experience (using an idea as a point of departure).
• Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes talk entitled “Making Your Short Attention-Span Pay Big Dividends“. Although I came in late after fleeing a talk that was not what I had hoped, this panel was a favorite of mine. Dawes shared some humorous, yet inspirational examples of how he let a simple idea germinate in a short period of time, and in return was able to build brilliant work that evolved into more and more brilliant ideas.
• “Browser Wars Retrospective: Past, Present, and Future Battlefields“: This panel was filled with brilliant minds who brought us many of the key pieces and ideas that have made the web possible. I have to admit I did not always understand what was being debated, but I was humbled to hear the likes of Brendon Eich (inventor of JavaScript and now CTO of Mozilla Foundation), Chris Wilson (worked on Mosaic and most of the Internet Explorer releases), and Charles McCathieNevile (Now with Opera, long time W3C luminary) sharing their ideas for the future of the web.

I recommend subscribing to the SXSW podasts as all of the great discussions were recorded and will be release free to the public.

Aside from the great panels, I met some great people worth mentioning. I finally met Jonathan and Mark in the flesh and was able to say thanks for their recent Skype guest lectures to my classes. I spent a good bit of time hanging out with Jason Beaird, who is an exceptionally cool guy and whose book, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, sold out in record time! It was fun chatting about JavaScript with PPK. I did some bowling on team SitePoint Orange (see the post on the SitePoint blog), and although we lost in the first round, we had a blast. Andrea, Matt, Jason, Ove, and Lucas, you are the best!

I hope to be back at SXSW again next year to do it all again, but next time I will sleep more often!

The guys over at Mail Chimp have posted some info about how I use an Ajax mailing list sign up system on the home page of client sites to triple the number of sign ups we get. It’s been amazingly successful for my clients, so much so I wrote about how to do it at SitePoint. I recently began using the Mail Chimp API to send all sign ups directly to my managed lists on their server, which makes launching campaigns pretty simple later on.

Thanks, Mail Chimp crew, for sharing the info with all who are interested.

I’ve just recently completed a new project, with which I am happy, for daniel*richards, a wholesale representative of stationary and gifts based in Atlanta and Chicago. I would call it a small brand site with big heart. The design is simple and centralized, using a color coded division design pattern, and collapsible panels that make flipping though the information snappy. There’s plenty of rich color that reflects their products and they way they display them in their showrooms. I used Bauhaus as the base typeface as its efficient, un-modulated strokes with strong geometric forms is both functional and elegant, just like the products daniel*richards.

There’s some fancy technology under the hood too. JavaScript makes the collapsible panels tick, and and Ajax loads the content into the panels, allowing the four key pages to be accessed in one area. When JavaScript is disabled, the site gracefully degrades by enabling the hyperlinks on the accordion bars, which navigate to the individual pages rather than loading them with Ajax. Although the site is valid XHTML Strict, the presence of a link tag inside of noscript causes a validation error that I was willing to accept since this one line of code made the graceful degradation, and consistent user experience with or without JavaScript possible. The mailing list sign up on the home page also uses Ajax to make joining fast and effortless.

I learned a valuable lesson working on this project. The original design was considerably darker, with green as the base color for the home and utility pages. A darker green background to the page made the design a little heavy. The client noted this and made some suggestions to rethink the design after I had built it out. I was hesitant since the site was already built, and my instincts tell me to protect my designs like they are my children. After considering the suggestions further, I realized that there was some real validity in the criticisms, and I proceeded to make some changes to find common ground. The result was a superior design that I may have missed had I let my ego get the best of me. I do believe there is a time to defend your design, but if you find yourself being defensive, then your ego is probably leading you down the wrong path, and that means you are no longer working with your client.

Check out the finished site, or learn more about it in my portfolio.

CSSMania.com just added the site I built for photographer Stephen Grote to their gallery. To learn more about this project and it’s plethora of features see the description in my portfolio. Thanks to the CSS Maniacs for the recognition.

[Update 1.11.07] A few other CSS galleries have taken notice of my work as well:

CSS Mania: AarronWalter.com | HawthorneHouseInc.com
Screenalicious: AarronWalter.com
CSS Collection: AarronWalter.com | StephenGrote.com | HawthorneHouseInc.com

I’ll be speaking about blogging tomorrow to Valerie Boyd’s Critical Writing: The Art of the Review course in the School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. The talk will explore the history, significance, legal implications, and process of blogging. We’ll have a hands on session with WordPress and discuss it’s features. The presentation slides can be downloaded in PDF format [3.5mb]. The presentation notes are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

After much thought and toil on a new design with some fancy new features, StephenGrote.com version 2 is finally in the wild. The main goals of the project were to professionally present to potential clients, Stephen’s students, and passers by Stephen’s photographic portfolio and the many useful, photography resources from the courses he teaches. Version 2 of this site was a realign as well as a redesign, focusing in on our goals and addressing some user experience issues.

Our statistics from Mint and Google Analytics showed that 93% of visitor were viewing the site at 1024 x 768 or higher, but the layout was designed for 800 x 600. Presenting the content in a wider layout, therefore, was top on our list of goals for the redesign. The previous design also had a large photo in the header of every page to introduce viewers to Stephen’s work as they browsed the site. The problem with this approach is it pushed content closer or below the fold, often interfering with the user experience. Now the heading is kept to the essential information and the portfolio exclusively showcases Stephen’s photos.

We had some loading issues in the news section where many RSS feeds from various news sources are parsed and presented, thus making for a slow page load. The solution I arrived at was to use Ajax to load in each RSS headline box independently so the user can begin reading content as it appears rather than waiting 5-10 seconds for all feeds to load. I’m writing an article about how I built this RSS aggregator to be published on DMXZone.com hopefully some time before Christmas.

The home page was also an important area to restructure. To make it clear to users what photos and resources have just been added to the various sections of the site, the page automatically grabs a selection of the most recent items and displays them prominently. There are many other subtle improvements throughout the site that make it more usable and move it closer to our business and communication goals.

Behind the scenes to all of the site is an extensive, custom built CMS where Stephen can manage all of the site’s content including page and section creation, photo management, WYSIWYG text editing for all pages, RSS feed management, contact message archives, and much more.

It’s a site that I have put a lot of time into, and has given me the opportunity to stretch my technical skills. It’s a great resource if you are or hope to be a photographer.

The Interactive Media Design department of The Art Institute of Atlanta (where I teach) is hosting a panel discussion event this evening consisting of some very bright people in the Web Design industry who will be discussing trends, technology, design, process, business, User Science, and more. If you are in the Atlanta, Georgia area, feel free to stop by this evening at 6PM. Get more information and even ask a question for the panel of experts here.

The panel of experts will include Jason Williams of Moxie Interactive, Kevin O’Conner and Sam McKeveny of User Insight, Ben Friedman of Iconologic, Jen Gordon of Creative H2O, Jason Anderson, Jeremy Brown of BellSouth, and Ryan Manchee of Eye Wonder

The irony of teaching and doing Interactive Design professionally is you have little time to be your own client. Over the past couple of months I have been sneaking time where I can find it to breathe new life into AarronWalter.com. At long last and just 2 days before I leave the country for 3 months, the new site is live.

It’s my goal to keep the topic of conversation on this blog focused on Interactive Design issues and valuable to readers. I will, however, be writing quite a bit this summer about my travels and adventures in Berlin, Germany as I teach three courses there on a quarter abroad program. Keep your eyes on the “Look” and “Locate” buttons above to see photos I am taking and see where I am located.
Some new things you will find here are a resources section with, you guessed it, Interactive Design resources. The links page in resources updates automagically as I make bookmarks in my browser, so look for fresh content daily. I have attempted to give some insight into the design and development process I took on this site. You can follow my thought process from sketchbook to comp. I always enjoy seeing designers like Cameron Moll and Jason Santa-Maria sharing their design process with their readers. There is a lot to be learned from seeing how other designers operate.
Be sure to cruise through the teaching section to see some of the great work my students have created. They are a talented group! I have some new work in my portfolio as well.

So here it is, the new site. I’d appreciate you dropping me an email if your eagle eye catches something I have overlooked.

PS: This blog is syndicated via RSS.