Liveblogging An Event Apart 2019

I was at An Event Apart in San Francisco last week. It was the last one of the year, and also my last conference of the year.

I managed to do a bit of liveblogging during the event. Combined with the liveblogging I did during the other two Events Apart that I attended this year—Seattle and Chicago—that makes a grand total of seventeen liveblogged presentations!

1. Slow Design for an Anxious World by Jeffrey Zeldman
2. Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World by Margot Bloomstein
3. Designing for Personalities by Sarah Parmenter
4. Generation Style by Eric Meyer
5. Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS by Rachel Andrew
6. Designing Intrinsic Layouts by Jen Simmons
7. How to Think Like a Front-End Developer by Chris Coyier
8. From Ideation to Iteration: Design Thinking for Work and for Life by Una Kravets
9. Move Fast and Don’t Break Things by Scott Jehl
10. Mobile Planet by Luke Wroblewski
11. Unsolved Problems by Beth Dean
12. Making Research Count by Cyd Harrell
13. Voice User Interface Design by Cheryl Platz
14. Web Forms: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t! by Jason Grigsby
15. The Weight of the WWWorld is Up to Us by Patty Toland
16. The Mythology of Design Systems by Mina Markham
17. The Technical Side of Design Systems by Brad Frost

For my part, I gave my talk on Going Offline. Time to retire that talk now.

Here’s what I wrote when I first gave the talk back in March at An Event Apart Seattle:

I was quite nervous about this talk. It’s very different from my usual fare. Usually I have some big sweeping arc of history, and lots of pretentious ideas joined together into some kind of narrative arc. But this talk needed to be more straightforward and practical. I wasn’t sure how well I would manage that brief.

I’m happy with how it turned out. I had quite a few people come up to me to say how much they appreciated how I was explaining the code. That was very nice to hear—I really wanted this talk to be approachable for everyone, even though it included plenty of JavaScript.

The dates for next year’s Events Apart have been announced, and I’ll be speaking at three of them:

• Seattle, May 11-13, 2020
• Boston, June 29-July 1, 2020
• Minneapolis, August 17-19, 2020

The question is, do I attempt to deliver another practical code-based talk or do I go back to giving a high-level talk about ideas and principles? Or, if I really want to challenge myself, can I combine the two into one talk without making a Frankenstein’s monster?

Come and see me at An Event Apart in 2020 to find out.

The Way of the Web | Jeremy Keith | Hooked On Code

Here are Torre’s notes on my talk at An Event Apart Seattle. (She’s been liveblogging all the talks.)

Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte

2010 was quite a year:

And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.

Nothing’s been quite the same since.

I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.

An Event Apart Human-Centered Design - Web Design & UX Conference

I’ll be speaking at this online version of An Event Apart on July 20th, giving a brand new talk called Design Principles For The Web—’twould be lovely to see you then!

Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.

I’m speaking at Web Day Out 2026 - Manuel Matuzovic

The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.

Can’t wait!

Anchoring insights: Key learnings from Research by the Sea | Clearleft

This was a day of big conversations, but also one of connection, curiosity, and optimism.

Seeing it all laid out like this really drives home just how much was packed into Research By The Sea.

Throughout the day, speakers shared personal reflections, bold ideas, and practical insights, touching on themes of community, resilience, ethics, and the evolving role of technology.

Some talks brought hard truths about the impact of AI, the complexity of organisational change, and the ethical dilemmas researchers face. Others offered hope and direction, reminding us of the power of community, the importance of accessibility, and the need to listen to nature, to each other, and to the wider world.