Teagan Attends An Event Apart in Boston
One of our summer interns, Teagan, decided it would be an awesome idea to further educate himself in front-end happenings of the web at An Event Apart in Boston a couple weeks ago. What a smart guy, right?
We checked in with Teagan to see if he gained any nuggets of wisdom (And oh he did):
I had a great time!
Some talks were over my head because they were more technical, but I got the overall gist: faster load times are highly desirable. I knew a couple of tricks like using fewer pictures and opting for CSS graphics and icon fonts whenever possible, but I did learn a couple things.
Here’s a CSS tip I learned:
Doubling the size of an image and dropping its save quality to 0, then resizing it with CSS to the size you had it before cuts file size in half and increases image sharpness and clarity. Hat tip to Luke W.
How were the other talks?
Zeldman’s 10 Commandments of Web Design was a motivational talk. Others were less to do with websites and more to do with client interactions, like Kevin Hoffman’s Designing Meetings to Work for Design and Kim Goodwin’s Silo Busting with Scenarios. Of course, Mike Monteiro was there in his usual fashion with What Clients Don’t Know and why it’s Your Fault. As I expected, most talked about designing for mobile. Handheld devices are taking over, so there were tips on how designers can prepare for this.
Another CSS fix I’m excited about
Eric Meyer talked a lot about flexbox and got me really excited to try it out, and Lea Verou flew through a number of mind-boggling CSS fixes. The most useful was how to make a drop shadow over the top and bottom of a scrollable vertical list that would appear when the list was scrolled in a way that some of it was off the top or bottom as a way to hint that there was more to see.
The Bluehouse team is glad you had fun, Teagan. Until the next conference!