June 10th, 7:00 p.m.
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos
200s, 304s, HTTP Compression, And You
Mark Phillip will cover YSlow-esque principles around caching, using Last-Modified and Expired headers, and efficient ways to publish APIs.”
Design Roundtable: Steal What Works: Examples of Good Design
Alex Jones will start a discussion that highlights five to ten examples of interfaces, crafty design touches or brilliant interactions found on the Web. We need samples, so if you have a minute and know of a good example, please e-mail Alex (alex [at] silverspider [dot] com) with a couple pieces of information:
- URL of the page that the example appears
- A description of the example, especially describing how it can be recreated
- Two or three bullet points as to why you like it.
Can’t make the meeting? That’s okay, you can still send a suggestion - we’ll post all of them on the Refresh Austin site after the meeting.
View the event on Upcoming.org
Tags: apis, caching, design, headers, interactions, interfaces, meeting
This week’s Refresh Roundup is a little late because I was in the Houston area over the weekend enjoying time with the family, especially my ridiculously cute niece.
That’s it for this week.
Tags: accessibility, barcamp, business, coworking, design, tips
- Lots of folks, including many Austin Refreshers, came out for the SXSW Mixer at Mohawk. Short recap here.
- On Tuesday, Grant Hutchins led a presentation titled “Grids in Depth” and David Humphreys led an Introduction to Rails and shared his 10 favorite things about the framework at our February Refresh Austin Meeting. Excellent presentations from both, as well as a great turnout!
- Julie Gomoll finally answered the questions, “When can we start coworking in Austin already?” Turns out we can start coworking in downtown Austin on July 1st. Launchpad Coworking’s space will be located at 800 Brazos Street. Be sure to head over to the Launchpad site to learn more!
- Justin Perkins has announced that he has a new site coming in a week. Or two. His site always takes a creative approach to blogging/bookmarking/lifestreaming/whatever, so it’s exciting to see what’s next.
- On a serious note, Alex Jones takes Pixish to task for fomenting an environment where “clients will view the talent pool as relatively equal, opting for a crap shoot instead of finding the right match for their needs”. As Alex notes in his blog post, this constitutes spec-work and should be guarded against. Derek Powazek did take the time to respond to some of the issues brought up, but only time will tell on this one. Many creatives in in the industry remain unconvinced.
- Christian Watson takes us on a whimisical Journey Through Web Design & Usability Domain Names. Sadly, it appears that the majority of semantically named web/dev/design domains are just parked.
- Do you googlebate? Ryan Joy sure does.
- GeekAustin announced that their May happy hour would be a special Wordpress edition. RSVP here if you enjoy socializing with geeks in a libacious environments.
That’s it for this week, folks!
Tags: coworking, design, geek austin, happy hour, meeting, ruby on rails, SXSW, sxswi
Syncopated Systems, an Austin-based computer engineering firm, this week announced the creation and sponsorship of a new annual award for the best W3C-compliant Web site developers in the greater Austin area.
By offering the Greater Austin Web Developer of the Year (”GAWDY”) award, Syncopated seeks to increase awareness of and compliance with industrial standards while promoting friendly competition among local Web site developers.
This competition will greatly also benefit potential clients by honoring those developers who maximize the reach of Web-based advertising by creating clean markup, which today comprise less than 10% of commercial developers.
The first annual award is tentatively scheduled to be given in late June 2008, pending the nomination of sufficient qualified candidates.
For full rules and to make nominations, see http://www.oddgods.com/webawards.
Tags: Austin, awards, design, development, markup, W3C, web development
We have an info-packed meeting on February 12, chock-full of design and development goodness. Grant Hutchins will cover the use of Grids for design, showing you the ins and outs of their usage and how they can help you on your next project. David Humphreys will present an Introduction to Ruby on Rails, the popular programming framework.
This will be a great meeting for folks interested in all aspects of the Web, and as always, the conversations will likely continue after the meeting at the closest spot with beer and food.
Update: David has posted the slides of his Rails presentation.
Tags: design, event, grids, meeting, ruby on rails, web design
Presenter: Ryan Joy
The timing seems right considering the following:
- Cameron Moll’s ebook, Mobile Web Design
- the iPhone & iPod Touch (especially w/ the newly attractive pricing!)
- Nokia and other phone manufacturers are quickly releasing competitive models to the iPhone.
Links
Tags: design, development, event, meeting, mobile
Presenter: Jacob Norwood
What is Graphic Design?
Graphic Design is collection of typography, illustrations, and photography organized to communicate a message, usually in a client/designer relationship.
Design History and Movements – Past 100 Years
- Pre Modern Design – 1600-1930’s
- Illustrative, Hand Made, Artist created
War Posters - Propaganda on Flickr
- Modern Design - 1930’s to Present
- Photographic, Clean, Strait lines, Grids, Simplistic
- German Modern Design
- Bauhaus Design
- an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933. the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.
- Post-Modern Design 1960-Present
- Broad Design aesthetic – Backlash to the modern design movement – No More Rules
Wikipedia on Postmodernism
Current Web Design Examples within Design Aesthetics
- Modern Design with Web 2.0
Design Techniques
The Grid
The use of a grid originated during the modern design period. The grid is used to position objects in a space symmetrically or asymmetrically in a visually pleasing way.
Typography
Typography is one of the most important and expressive mediums in design, and the most neglected.
Web Design
People like to separate web and print design. I think they are the same with different technical details.
Links from Meeting
Tags: design, event, meeting
We’ll talk about paper prototyping and other techniques for exploring and validating user experience. When the library kicks us out (7pm) we’ll adjourn to Billy’s across the road.
Tags: design, event, prototypes
