The event here just wrapped up, and as the intercom blares from the loudspeaker above me informing me that the alarm on the 2nd, 3rd, & 4th floors have been triggered and trained hotel staff are currently investigating and that I should stand by, I’d like to write a summary of my experiences with the event, presenters, and anything else that tickles my typist fancy.

Everything but the Nerdery

This Place is a Fucking Palace

Jesus, what a fancy hotel to host a website convention. The Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco is, at first glance, a very classy establishment, old-world with its ornamentation, presentation, and stuffiness. This provided a simple contrast for conference attendees: those in hoodies, graphic t’s, jeans, holding a Mac, looking the least bit uncomfortable: these are my colleagues. The rest of the guests in the hotel were overly dressed, pulling expensive roller-luggage, speaking prettier languages than comparatively caustic-sounding English, and otherwise looking self-important (hey, much like this post!). Upon later reflection, the hotel was an obvious choice: the Palace has the infrastructure to handle a 500-person meeting where Motel 6 does not.

San Francisco is Uglier than Portland

Mother always said that everything in moderation is best. This is true of Portland and why I feel it is vastly more successful at being a clean, friendly, livable, accessible, approachable city. San Francisco is very much like Portland, but with everything taken to an extreme. Put another way, San Francisco is Portland actualized: Bums that are actually hungry, buildings that are actually tall, hills that are actually mountains, scary looking people that will actually steal your wallet, apartments that are actually unaffordable, weather that is actually pretty crappy, China town that actually has Chinese, and a web design community that actually gives you free booze.

Oh Yeah, Did I Mention Free Booze?

Open bars are a ridiculous invention. I’ve never attended such an event, and it was a bit inundating. Literally. Ok, that was a terrible joke, but I did take it too far, consuming four-too-many dry & dirty martinis plus an assortment of other libations throughout the evening. I suffered today as a result. Thank you MediaTemple for paying for my drinks, despite the badmouthing you received about uptime when I inquired to others as to what you actually do. Really, I adore you if for no other reason than Grey Goose is delicious, and I’ll be looking towards you when my mad ideas come to fruition. Or BoxCar, because they’re local. I hope you understand, MediaTemple.

The Conference

Day One

There was a clear contrast between the two types of presentations and their content: technical, and creative. Jason, Heather, and Liz’s presentations were the most thought-provoking presentations, giving their ideas and specific mechanics for arriving at destinations where there is not a right answer—creating story through design, building community through personal voice, and building frameworks of interaction. These are ideas that you can read a book on, create a successful site that makes you millions, fosters community, has a clear tone, and tells your visitors an excellent narrative, but that you could still use the advice of others: this is a creative process, this is art where you don’t design the best painting of your life and retire.

Those creative presentations were in stark contrast to the technical presentations—these were not the IE6 of knowledge of which there is no max-width. Perhaps this is why I was left rather disappointed with Eric Meyer’s presentation, even despite him bearing my namesake. He provided knowledge and analysis of CSS frameworks that was in the same quantity superfluous for the average designer and self-congratulatory in his overly-analytical approach to inform us of three things:

1. CSS Frameworks exist.
2. You shouldn’t use off-the-shelf frameworks.
3. The perfect <h1> size is 2.33em if you average all available frameworks, and 2.0 if you want Eric’s personal and arbitrary interpretation of the former average.

This presentation seemed to pander to the lowest of all denominators in the crowd while adding enough technical detail to lose them. On the third point of his presentation, there was no discussion of what is the correct heading for your composition, what’s right for balance on your page, in proximity to navigation, logos, etcetera. In entirely irrelevant terms, Eric told us the size of headings to use. This was the most pointless of all thirty-minute-long points made the entire conference.

Then I got drunk (I mentioned the open bar, right?).

Day Two

The second day was similarly excellent despite being more technical in nature. Interaction design, information architecture, and overall British zanyness was illustrated by Jeremy first thing in the morning, thankfully waking the crowd (and me) from our (okay, maybe just my) alcohol-based stupor. The rest of the day covered reset stylesheets, some great accessibility information and analysis, microformat discussion, and workflow strategy that was completely irrelevant to my development team of one.

Doggy Bag

Of everything I’m taking away from the conference outside of marginally neat schwag and a more poisoned liver, the most important is designerly inspiration. The overarching message I got out of the event was that I need to design more humane, focused, patient (and ultimately more socially and professionally responsible) websites. Websites that care and are specific and set a mood, sends a message, that makes the internet a better place. If not me, then who?

Hank William on Jakob Nielsen’s failure with useit.com’s unusable, illegible site:

Unfortunately, I have to say, Jakob has perhaps the worst site design I have ever seen. It is as if, while he is handing out the Oscars, he is wearing a plaid polyester suit.

I have to agree. I’ve found Jakob’s site in dire need of some of his own usability magic—the font is too big, the leading too tight, the yellow color too brash, and the margins too small, or in some cases nonexistent. It makes his site useless for long reading because of the visual noise of his type and color choices. It’s 2008—one would think Nielsen could find time to take his own advice and put “line-height: 160%” into his stylesheet to make a free, fast, and huge usability improvement to his site.

This site (kylemeyer.com) parallels Nielsen’s site in a couple ways:

1. This site, too, is devoid of images used for the design
2. We both use yellow as an accent color

Despite these, this site is much more legible because of the reduced contrasts in design and sensible default type. These are not design concerns—proper type is a finite proposition. Type can be legible, or not. Surely he doesn’t mean his site to be an example of poor usability, but it appears that this is the case.

What a plague of retardation. Starbucks is one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world; they’re on every street corner, sometimes twice. Despite their immense popularity and growth and influence, they insist on using Italian names for sizes of every drink they sell, including milkshakes and tea, assuming that the average person will feel camaraderie with the brand or some such positive feeling or association. If not, then why continue the practice? Don’t want to rock the boat?

The inconsistency is what makes it worse—”latte” is now the defacto name for espresso with steamed milk, despite it being the word for just milk in Italian. When someone orders a “grande latte”, they are certainly not getting what they are ordering, and are in fact speaking a new language that only applies to ordering Starbucks drinks: I will coin this Starbuckslish.

Dear Starbucks employees,

It’s midnight. A young man walks in rather disheveled, red-eyed, still in business casual. He orders a “medium coffee.” Under no crazy random happenstance should you ever say, “you mean grande coffee?” That young man is me. I am still at the office working. I am running regular expressions over pasted in PDF jibberish to try and save myself some tagging busywork, to salvage sleep. I am hating life—don’t make me hate Starbucks more.

With love,
Kyle Meyer