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September: TextMate-fu & Breaking eCommerce Sterotypes

August 31, 2010 By 1 Comment

Event Details

7:00 – 9:00p.m. Tuesday, September 14th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

RSVP on Facebook (it’s not required, you’re always welcome)

We have two great rubber-meets-the-road presentations. One focuses on Textmate, one of the most popular editors on the Mac with a big reputation for powerful customization; the other focuses on the user experience of effective e/commerce.

TextMate-fu

Presented by Steve Stedman

TextMate is the quintessential Mac app–simple, capable, magical. Beneath its deceptively quiet interface lies one insanely potent text editor. In this hour,… we’ll take a closer look at TextMate, its environment, and its bundled productivity-enhancers. Beyond that we’ll create our own magical incantations via snippets, macros, and commands. At talk’s-end, we’ll have some new fu and a deeper appreciation for this elegantly powerful IDE.

Breaking eCommerce Sterotypes

Presented by Adam McCombs and Robert Banh of McCombs Creative

eCommerce has gotten a bad reputation. From the cheesy, unusable and sometimes un-trustworthy, designers and developers need to put a stop to terrible eCommerce websites. Just because you are selling product doesn’t mean the website can’t be full of personality. Join us for a look at a few case studies of effective eCommcerce websites that keep the fun in eCommerce. We’ll take a look at best practices as well as some do’s and dont’s for your next eCommerce website.

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February Meeting – A little something for both sides of your brain

February 4, 2009 By 1 Comment

7:00 p.m. February 10th
Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

Let’s change everything! Personalize your Design Process
Presented by Sara Summers

Use your life and experiences to draw in creativity and devise your own design process for making something great and making an impact.

Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About jQuery but Were Afraid to Ask
Presented by Jon Loyens

jQuery is a lightweight, cross-browser, JavaScript library released by John Resig in 2006 at a BarCamp in NYC. Since it’s introduction, jQuery’s small footprint and elegant API has quickly made it a favorite among developers and designers alike. In this presentation we’ll cover:
- Why JavaScript libraries?
- Why jQuery?
- jQuery basics
- Selection
- Manipulation
- Effects
- Writing progressive JavaScript w/jQuery
- AJAX with jQuery

Presentation and Code: jQuery Presentation [PDF] & jQuery Code [ZIP]

Bonus! Books!
Plus, O’Reilly has provided us a few books that we’ll raffle off throughout the meeting.

View the event on upcoming.org or FaceBook

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January Meeting: Google Analytics & User Experience

December 31, 2008 By 2 Comments

Date: January 13th, 7pm
Location: Buffalo Billiards, 6th and Brazos

View the event details on Upcoming

Translating Google Analytics Data Into Marketing Metrics

Presented by Chad Brustin
Are you having difficulty making sense of all the data contained in your website report? In this presentation we will make the connection between website data and marketing goals. We will share a variety of goals to help you create a dashboard for monitoring your site and making ‘data driven’ updates. We will also look at a few good ‘off the shelf’ tools that can help you make better sense of the data including: goal creation, custom reports.

Presentation Slides: Translating Google Analytics Into Marketing Metrics

Kickstarting User Experience: Tools and Practices

Presented by Alex Jones
The term “user experience” is bandied about a lot these days, and while every aspect of Web sites and apps have an impact on the experience, it can be hard to plan ahead if you don’t know the tools that are available. We’ll cover the general concepts of the process I use when working on a new project and discuss alternate methods and tools throughout. As we wrap up the presentation, we’ll cover useful methods for integrating the process into development cycles and how to balance the needs of the user with those of the business.

Presentation Slides: Kickstarting UX

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June Meeting

June 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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

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Refresh Roundup: Tips, fave editors, BarCampAustin, and design carousels

February 28, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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.

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Refresh Roundup: Mixers, coworking, names, and ugly spec-work

February 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment
  • 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!

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New Austin Web Dev Awards

February 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

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.

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February 2008 Meeting: Grids in Depth & Intro to Rails

February 1, 2008 By 2 Comments

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.

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September 2007 Meeting: Mobile Web Design and Development

September 11, 2007 By Leave a Comment

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

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July 2007 Meeting: Web Design for Non-Designers

July 10, 2007 By Leave a Comment

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

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

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