Markup & Style Society Talk

On March 13th I had the pleasure of speaking at the Markup & Style Society in Boston. Since then I’ve been traveling and extremely busy…but I’m finally getting around to posting my slide deck and writeup now.

The Society, if you’re not familiar, is run by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte, two Boston-area web designers I’ve admired for a long time. So I was extremely honored when they asked me to speak. Here are some write-ups of the event: (Ethan, Dan, Filament Group)

For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well.

Ethan started the show with an excellent talk about liquid layouts. Dan followed with an equally great talk on em-based grids. Scott Jehl then talked about progressive enhancement. Funny thing, several people I spoke with said that they learned more from these three talks about building state-of-the-art web sites than they did at SXSW…

Here is my slide deck:

The event was hosted by the fine folks at the Filament Group, who among other things created the baby-name choosing-site Nymbler. (My wife and I used this site when we picked out our kid’s name). Anyway, the Filament Group has started a blog called The Lab), where they archive some of the interesting work they’re doing. I wish more design shops would expose their thinking in this way…it really helps to get an idea of how their designers think and shows indirectly what values they have.

The event was also sponsored in part by Adobe, who gave away two copies of CS3! This suggests to me that these meetups are not simply gatherings in which to drink beer and maybe talk a bit about design…but they are part of the fabric of the design community…since designers often work on their own there isn’t a common space to gather regularly. The Society, and our newly-formed North Shore Meetup group, in my mind, are fulfilling the needs of the Third Place in this way.

Several folks have posted pictures of the event. Here is an action shot of me by Jennifer Bergman. Thanks, Jen!

If you have any questions about the slides or any of the quotes in them, drop me a line.