Principles Apart

I was nervous as hell before my talk at An Event Apart Seattle. I don’t normally get quite so nervous but it was a new talk and also …it’s An Event Apart! They set a very, very high bar.

Once I got on stage though, I just started geeking out. I was talking about design principles, a subject I find fascinating. I’m hoping that some of my enthusiasm for the subject helped make for a compelling presentation.

It was a whirlwind tour, starting with a long-zoom look at design principles in history before moving on to the web, where I took an up-close-and-personal look at CSS and quite a bit of HTML, before pulling back again to talk about our planet, our solar system and our galaxy. Yes, there was a space elevator.

I mentioned a range of people, organisations and projects that have documented their design principles, but rather than fill up the slides with lots of URLs, I gave just one URL at the start (and end) of the talk:

principles.adactio.com

That’s where I gathering today examples of documented design principles. By “documented” I mean “published on the web.” There are some really interesting principles from disciplines like urban design but as long as they are locked up in books that aren’t addressable on the network, I can’t link to them.

This is a fairly small-scale project so I figured a wiki might be overkill but if you know of any good documented design principles that should be added to the list, let me know

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%.

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.)

Sketchnotes from AEA Seattle | Krystal Higgins

I love Krystal’s sketchnotes from my talk at An Event Apart Seattle. Follows on nicely from Ethan’s too.

LukeW | An Event Apart: Evaluating Technology

Luke is a live-blogging machine. Here’s the notes he made during my talk at An Event Apart Seattle.

If it reads like a rambling hodge-podge of unconnected thoughts, I could say that you had to be there …but it kinda was a rambling hodge-podge of unconnected thoughts.

Ethan Marcotte AEA Boston June 18, 2012 on Vimeo

Ethan’s excellent talk from last year’s An Event Apart.

In this session Ethan reviews strategies for handling trickier elements that would make even the most seasoned designer quail: stuff like advertising, complex layouts, deep navigation patterns, third-party media, and, yes, actual, honest-to-goodness content.