This past Summer I worked on chairing the CSS Summit through Environments for Humans.
The CSS Summit was an all-day, one-track, online conference dedicated to everyone’s favorite web design technologywith seveal experts in the field including Stephanie Sullivan, Jason Cranford Teague, Nicole Sullivan, and other great speakers on CSS.
It was a big hit and I think one of the reasons it was more of a focused effort to get past the basics of CSS and dive into more advanced, focused material.
It’s no one’s fault really that CSS isn’t delved deeply at many conferences and there isn’t one reason why it happens. CSS doesn’t work in a vacuum. It is only one part of what makes a great Web site.
Also as a speaker, sometimes you don’t know your audience skillset and tend to cater to the basics so as not to risk losing people.
So, when Hugh from SXSW asked me if I would be interested in chaperoning part of SXSW, namely the CSS workshops, I jumped at the chance.
Looking through the CSS submissions in the panel picker, I picked out what I believe are some real gems.
Workig with the speakers of these panels to make it the best possible workshops, I believe we have a solid line up of CSS goodness:
- CSS Frameworks Shootout by Beau Smith.
- Joined by Nathan Smith, Joshua Clayton, Chris Eppstein, and Nicole Sullivan, the Smith moderates a discussion covering the different flavors of CSS frameworks as well as address the merits of SASS.
- CSS and Fonts: Fluid Web Typography by Jason Cranford Teague.
- Doing a solo workshop, Jason covers the latest news about Web typography and how the make the most of the new developmenets. (After having tech edited Jason’s book, Fluid Web Typography, I know he is perfect for this presentation.)
- CSS3 Design with HTML5 by Stephanie Sullivan, Zoe Gillenwater and myself.
- In this workshop, we intend to cover the latest in cross-browser CSS3 development (typically involving patching up IE until the next promised version) as well as see how web developers can use HTML5 for engaging user experiences.
It’s nice to see the rise in popularity and buzz of CSS3. Thanks in a large part to browser vendors implementing parts of the spec before its even finished, but I digress.
If you intend to come to SXSW Interactive this year and have a hand in CSS coding at your place of work, check out these panels Saturday afternoon.
And if you can’t make it to Austin this year and still want to learn more about CSS, I’ll be giving an online CSS3 workshop next week.
Really looking forward to these CSS talks and the concept of workshops at SXSW as well.
Hugh asked me to curate a workshop on Beautiful Web Design. I’m still working with the speakers on the talk descriptions but the lineup is:
Beauty in Web Design — Cennydd Bowles
Get Stoked on Web Typography — Samantha Warren
Simple Steps from Decent to Great Web Design — Matthew Smith
We’ll have more details soon, but the Beautiful Web Design workshop is slotted from 2–6pm on Friday, March 12th.
I’ll definitely check these out. Trying to get my employer to cover some expenses this year. If so, I’m Austin-bound in March!