After a really great day-long workshop on CSS by Andy Clarke on Monday, I’m sitting in the Hyatt in Vancouver today for day 1 of Web Directions North conference.

8:45 AM - Arrived at the Hyatt after a treacherous commute downtown. Vancouver has been absolutely crippled this week by about 10 cm of flaky “white stuff” (as one newspaper here called it) that has fallen from the sky and blanketed the city. Being from Ottawa, I told them it was called “snow” and that you can basically walk and drive right through it, but just go a bit slower than usual. Panic has caused a lot of people to do just the opposite and drive twice as fast as they do on dry roads.

9 AM - Opening keynote by the legendary Jeffrey Zeldman, who I’ve seen attending other conferences but never heard speak before. I’d been enjoying his dry and cynical sense of humour on Twitter for a few months already so I knew he’d be entertaining. He provided a nice recap of his decade-long efforts to champion web standards by bringing together the web developer community to influence the major browsers to get their sh*t together. ‘Twas a nice trip down memory lane to remember the time when CSS was in its infancy, font tags were rampant, Netscape 4 was the de facto browser and IE was the underdog. He touched on the IE8 controversy too, which I’m sure will come up a few more times over the next 2 days.

10:30 AM - One Starbucks house blend consumed and feeling more awake. Saw a talk by Josh Williams, the “serial entrepreneur” behind Firewheel Design, Blinksale and IconBuffet who shared his experiences maturing as a designer — from working at an agency to freelancing to building up his own small firm to building an application to completely abandoning client work and funding his own projects using the success of things like IconBuffet and Blinksale. As much as it was about his own career path, Josh offered some great advice that I think applies to all designers: find a niche, identify your natural aptitudes as a designer and seek out opportunities that fit with those aptitudes. Have a path planned out for your career, but know that “Happy Accidents” (as Josh described them) will inevitably de-rail your plan and send you in another direction. Embrace these transitions.

11:45 AM - Kimberly Elan’s presentation on the “Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography”. Kimberly, a professor at Ringling College in Sarasota, Florida, talked about typography on the web and how mis-using it can have disastrous results. She shared the “typography pledge” she requires her students to take — kind of a Hippocratic oath for designers — to not squish letters, to not stack letters, to properly hyphenate, to not outline type, and to not commit a few other blasphemous mistakes when dealing with type. Using a couple of examples of terrible sites she showed how respecting some basic typography and design rules can vastly improve the usability and clarity of a page. One nugget she shared when referring to successful sites like Pentagram and TED was the concept of designing in such a way that there is “repetition, rhythm and anticipation”. This makes for intuitive design.
12:45 PM - Lunch… mmmm — roast beef.
1:45 PM - Ottawa boy Jonathan Snook gave a presentation on Ajax frameworks. Jonathan is one smart guy that knows Javascript really well. If you’ve seen his blog, you know it’s a great resource of code tidbits and tips. To demonstrate his superior knowledge of JS, Jonathan gave a brief overview and comparison of some of the most popular frameworks: Prototype, jQuery, YUI, ExtJS (which I’d never seen… but is damn cool), Dojo and Mootools… to name a few.

2:45 PM - Continuing on the same thread that Kimberly introduced before lunch, Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering, tells us what makes a design “intuitive” (while pointing out that designs can’t be intuitive, but it’s the people that intuit something from a design). Using several great real-world examples where seemingly simple design choices can easily confuse users, Jared effectively demonstrated that “intuitiveness” only becomes an issue when users have to learn how to use your interface. To really make a design intuitive, it should effectively eliminate the gap between the user’s current knowledge (what they already know about whatever task they have to complete) and the required target knowledge (what they need to know to complete the task). Unfortunately I had to miss Brian Oberkirch’s presentation at the same time… awww nuts!

4:15 PM - Closing presentation from Gina Trapani of Lifehacker on getting the most out of Gmail. Little did I know, Gina put together the Better Gmail Firefox extension from the cream of the crop Gmail GreaseMonkey user scripts. I’ve been using Better Gmail for awhile but had no idea where it came from. For anybody using Firefox that has no idea what GreaseMonkey is… just go get it. Adds a lot of neat features and extra functionality to Gmail.

5:00 PM - End of day 1… back for day 2 tomorrow!