Aarron Walter

South By Southwest, the coolest Web conference on the planet that takes place annually in Austin, TX, has let loose it’s panel picker. Rather than creating a schedule of discussion panels and presentations that may not interest conference goers, the SXSW organizers have devised a democratic way for people to vote on what they want to hear discussed.

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Moleskine, an exceptionally popular sketchbook/notebook manufacturer, recently sponsored an exhibition at the Art Directors Club in New York called Detour. The exhibition featured 70 Moleskine notebooks filled by various designers, architects, artists and writers providing a glimpse into the minds and process of many creative minds. Read on »

There’s a fair bit of tedium and redundancy that goes into the set up of a new site. Most web designers start with the same tasks like reseting all default margins, padding, and other values to a common baseline for cross-browser support, you define your layout, wrestle with type, maybe even set up a print style sheet. We often find ourselves repeating what we’ve already done many times over on other projects. Blueprint, a recently released CSS framework created by Norwegian student Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, seeks to eliminate this common tedium by providing a concise set of style sheets that make setup and design quick and easy.
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I recently had the wonderful opportunity to speak to the folks at Macquarium, an award wining interactive design firm located in downtown Atlanta, GA. They do amazing work, and are cool people to boot. The title of my talk was Findability: the Common Thread, and it explored how Findability touches each step of the project lifecycle. With an audience filled with diverse talents in Information Architecture, development, design, copywriting, photography, Usability, Accessibility and project management, my goal was to provide everyone a relevant perspective on the topic and how it relates to the work they do everyday. Findability is the common thread in which all members of a professional web team share responsibility, and can ultimately help drive more traffic to a site, help people find what they were looking for once they’ve arrived, and bring them back again. The net result of an effective Findability initiative is increased ROI (title: return on investment) for the client, and a broader dissemination of their message.

Here are the slides and audio from the talk, which are also archived in the resources section.

Slides | Podcast

I’m currently working on a book for New Riders titled Building Findable Web Sites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond that, as the title suggests, looks at Findability solutions from the developer’s perspective, providing code examples, and best practices. It will be released in February of 2008.

As a kid, I was a big fan of Sesame Street. Every show ran a little skit that showed a series of people doing different things, but one was doing something very different. A little song drove home the concept, singing, “one of these kids is doing his own thing, one of these kids is not like the others“. The intended lesson kids were to learn from this is about contrast. Contrast is a powerful, and essential tool in creating designs that communicate to viewers. It tells a viewer where to look, tells them what is most and least important, and creates visual interest. Andy Rutledge has recently written a great article called Contrast and Meaning at A List Apart extolling its virtues, and explaining how you can make effective use of it to build designs that communicate better.