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.