Sessions
@media is all about web design best practices, and is well known for informative, inspiring, educational sessions. This year, presentations will go more in-depth than ever before, tackling the issues affecting the modern, cutting-edge web designer.
- 1 Web, Acid2 and CSS3 (New!)
- Advancing Web Accessibility
- Beyond Ajax
- The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
- Bulletproof Ajax (New!)
- Designing for International Users: Practical Tips
- Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details
- Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
- For Example… (New!)
- High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation (New!)
- High Performance Web Pages (New!)
- Hot Topics Panel
- How to be a Creative Sponge
- Interface Design Juggling
- Microformats, Building Blocks, and You
- The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu
- Royale With Cheese
- When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem (New!)
1 Web, Acid2 and CSS3
When CSS1 was published ten years ago, there were plenty of sceptics. The CSS community worked tirelessly against browser-specific tags and text in images. Today, all major browsers support CSS, some more than others. The Acid2 test has been developed to ensure that browsers improve support for standards and become more interoperable in the future. Has it worked? The new features of CSS3, with special emphasis on paged media and printing, will be discussed.
1 Web, Acid2 and CSS3 will be presented by Håkon Wium Lie
Advancing Web Accessibility
This session looks beyond the debates; it provides best practices for making the Web work better for people with disabilities and for everyone. Find out how recent developments in W3C WAI’s WCAG 2.0 impacts your Web projects now, and provides flexibility for the future. For example, scripting was once frowned upon from an accessibility point of view, but is now a key aspect of accessibility advancements. Shawn will highlight changes, clarify new concepts, demo techniques, and provide tips to give you a jump-start on this new wave of Web accessibility.
Advancing Web Accessibility will be presented by Shawn Lawton Henry
Beyond Ajax
Having trouble separating hype from reality? Where is the Web really headed? In this keynote presentation, Jesse James Garrett looks at the deeper trends driving the latest innovations in Web development and considers the broader implications for the skillsets Web teams will need to invest in to successfully leverage emerging Web techniques and technologies.
Beyond Ajax will be presented by Jesse James Garrett
The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
The Web was meant to be interoperable, but as every web designer and developer knows, interoperability is the very thing we lack. As we build standards-based, flexible, accessible, well-designed sites, we find it’s the browser that gives us most of our headaches. In this session, you’ll learn to take better control not through hacks and filters, but through an understanding of why browsers work the way they do. You’ll learn the differences in layout engines, see visual models of the DOM and learn about the process of developing a Web browser. Finally, you’ll see how their flaws and features play into our daily work, and how we can all make our lives easier by advocating for better software and implementation.
The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All will be presented by Molly E. Holzschlag
Bulletproof Ajax
Ajax need not be a technological barrier to entry. By implementing Ajax using the principle of progressive enhancement, you can ensure access for everyone. With a little forethought and planning, you can provide a rich Ajax-enhanced experience for the majority of your users, whilst making sure that the minority aren’t left behind.
Bulletproof Ajax will be presented by Jeremy Keith
Designing for International Users: Practical Tips
If you are a designer, developer or author working on a website that may be translated or adapted for users in other countries or languages, you need to ensure that you don’t build in substantial barriers to localization. If you think that the translation vendor or the localization team can take care of things for you when the time comes, you really need to hear this talk. Moving forward from Molly Holzschlag’s popular introduction to internationalization last year, Richard uses examples to examine some of the specific things that must be designed into a site, rather than treated as an afterthought.
Designing for International Users: Practical Tips will be presented by Richard Ishida
Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details
The Devil is in the details, and you should be too. Design is a subjective art, but there are some simple methods that you can use to improve your work substantially. Learn how to love the details by improving the legibility of your content, selecting better fonts, creating better layouts, choosing alluring colours, and becoming immersed in the finer points of design. This talk will help you look at the details of a design with a discerning eye to make your work stand out in a crowd of clones.
Diabolical Design: The Devil is in the Details will be presented by Jason Santa Maria
Five Simple Steps to Better Typography
Given that the web is ‘95% Typography’, why is most typography on the web so poor? For so long now, designers and developers have taken little time to learn the subtlety of good typographic design. But don’t worry, it’s not a black art; you just need to follow a few rules. This presentation will take you through Five Simple Steps to improve your typography; type anatomy; types of typeface; choosing typefaces; size, space and weight; and basic typesetting.
Five Simple Steps to Better Typography will be presented by Mark Boulton
For Example…
The groundbreaking (not to mention award winning) sites Last.fm and lawrence.com will be the subjects of two mini case-study presentations. As great examples of best-practices at work in the real world, the people who helped build the successful sites will talk about why certain decisions were made, how innovations were implemented and how problems were overcome, covering topics including information architecture, internationalisation, and usability.
For Example… will be presented by Hannah Donovan and Simon Willison
High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation
Two thoroughly clued-up and experienced web pros become devil’s advocates. At what point should we stick solidly to web standards, accessibility, and other “best practices” at the expense of design or business goals? The first of two mini-presentations will argue that design always wins, no matter how implemented. The second will argue that implementation always wins, sacrificing design wherever necessary. Who will be the last man standing? Can either side inflict a fatal shot?
High-Noon Shoot-Out: Design vs. Implementation will be presented by Drew McLellan and Simon Collison
High Performance Web Pages
If you like fast web pages you’ll love this presentation. It turns out that 80% of total loading time is based on front-end choices, so that’s where this talk will focus. (Did you know @import slows sites down?) That gem and many more best practices backed my data will show you how to increase the speed of your site by 25-50% by the time you leave the session.
High Performance Web Pages will be presented by Nate Koechley
Hot Topics Panel
A favourite of past @media conferences, the very final session will feature a handful of @media speakers discussing questions posed by conference attendees.
How to be a Creative Sponge
How do you ‘design’ something? How do you get from words to a ‘design’? Aimed at non-designers, and designers needing a creative unblocking, Jon Hicks demonstrates how to soak up influence and inspiration from a wide variety of sources, and how to use it to interpret and answer a creative brief.
How to be a Creative Sponge will be presented by Jon Hicks
Interface Design Juggling
Keeping all the right pieces in play when designing for the web can be a balancing act. This session will focus on being an independent interface designer in a complex world of endless choices. Learn how streamlined process and smart approaches can make for compelling, adaptable designs with XHTML and CSS. You’ll soon be juggling the following with ease:
- Balanced interface design: what works and what works better.
- Reducing complexity: CSS wireframing, smart typography.
- Embracing microformats: how designers can benefit from semantic markup.
- Self-efficiency: tools and best-practices for independent-minded designers.
Interface Design Juggling will be presented by Dan Cederholm
Microformats, Building Blocks, and You
Taking microformats another step forward, Tantek Çelic, the foremost authority on the subject, will explain how to both use microformats to make your site more indexable, parsable, and reusable, and how to get it built into other services and also how to use microformats to build other sites and services into your site.
Microformats, Building Blocks, and You will be presented by Tantek Çelik
The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu
Your HTML and CSS abilities may well be up to scratch but do you really have the JavaScript powers you need to survive in this modern era of Ajax and Web 2.0? This presentation will introduce a whole raft of advanced but incredibly useful JavaScript tips, tricks and techniques to add to your scripting arsenal. From discussing some of the inner secrets of JavaScript itself, through to libraries and toolkits and on to the secret methods of debugging and testing, you’ll leave with some nifty tricks up your sleeve.
The Mysteries Of JavaScript-Fu will be presented by Dan Webb
Royale With Cheese
When we look around the web at designs from across the globe, what do we see? Do we see a rich diversity of design culture, where different regions bring their own unique flavors to the web? Do we see a multi-cultural melting pot of design influences and inspiration? Or do we see a dull uniformity where design has become increasingly globalized?
Designer Andy Clarke discusses his findings from five months of discussing these issues with web and other visual designers from across the world. He will share his own thoughts about the future of web design might be in an increasingly globalized industry.
Royale With Cheese will be presented by Andy Clarke
When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem
Everyone at this conference will have a working knowledge of Web accessibility. At this point, it would be hard to surprise you with the facts. But that’s just what this session sets out to do. We’ll explore the question of what the Web designer or developer definitely does not have to worry about in making sites accessible - and what the designer or developer should not have to worry about in an ideal world. Get ready for an entertainingly scathing indictment of browsers, screen readers, and so-called authoring tools. In a working environment where we always seem to be given one more thing to worry about, this session will give you a whole set of things to stop worrying about.
When Web Accessibility Is Not Your Problem will be presented by Joe Clark
