March 30th, 2008

Markup & Style Society Talk

On March 13th I had the pleasure of speaking at the Markup & Style Society in Boston. Since then I’ve been traveling and extremely busy…but I’m finally getting around to posting my slide deck and writeup now.

The Society, if you’re not familiar, is run by Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte, two Boston-area web designers I’ve admired for a long time. So I was extremely honored when they asked me to speak. Here are some write-ups of the event: (Ethan, Dan, Filament Group)

For my talk, I picked something I’ve never talked about before: web craftsmanship. I chose this topic because I’ve been thinking a lot more about it since going out on my own last August. I also consider both Dan and Ethan craftsmen, obsessed with doing quality work vs. gaining notoriety or getting rich. So I thought it would be a good fit for the audience as well.

Ethan started the show with an excellent talk about liquid layouts. Dan followed with an equally great talk on em-based grids. Scott Jehl then talked about progressive enhancement. Funny thing, several people I spoke with said that they learned more from these three talks about building state-of-the-art web sites than they did at SXSW…

Here is my slide deck:

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The event was hosted by the fine folks at the Filament Group, who among other things created the baby-name choosing-site Nymbler. (My wife and I used this site when we picked out our kid’s name). Anyway, the Filament Group has started a blog called The Lab), where they archive some of the interesting work they’re doing. I wish more design shops would expose their thinking in this way…it really helps to get an idea of how their designers think and shows indirectly what values they have.

The event was also sponsored in part by Adobe, who gave away two copies of CS3! This suggests to me that these meetups are not simply gatherings in which to drink beer and maybe talk a bit about design…but they are part of the fabric of the design community…since designers often work on their own there isn’t a common space to gather regularly. The Society, and our newly-formed North Shore Meetup group, in my mind, are fulfilling the needs of the Third Place in this way.

Several folks have posted pictures of the event. Here is an action shot of me by Jennifer Bergman. Thanks, Jen!

If you have any questions about the slides or any of the quotes in them, drop me a line.

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Comments ( 15 Responses so far )

1. Eric Meyer on March 30th, 2008 (Comment) #

Damn! I can’t look at these because I’m doing a keynote on that exact topic (seriously, with the word “craftsman” and everything) in a few weeks, and I don’t want to be tempted into ripping off your stuff. But I wanna. Curse you, Bokardo!

2. Marc Amos on March 30th, 2008 (Comment) #

MS&S meet ups are better than Christmas.

3. Wolf on March 30th, 2008 (Comment) #

Heh… I gave a presentation about the exact same thing yesterday. Webdesign is a craft.

(For those who understand Dutch http://tinyurl.com/2bcbde )

4. Angelo on March 30th, 2008 (Comment) #

Thanks for the slides. Much appreciated. M&S isn’t Christmas? Who knew?

5. Josh on March 31st, 2008 (Comment) #

@Eric, I’m sure you’ve got plenty to add to my very short (20 min) talk…

6. Joel on March 31st, 2008 (Comment) #

I can’t believe I couldn’t make it to this. /sobs

7. Nate Klaiber on March 31st, 2008 (Comment) #

Excellent slides filled with great information and excellent quotes. I couldn’t agree more with what you have said in your presentation. I think you could extend this to any line of work and the principles would still be the same in regards to being a true craftsman.

8. Amitabh Handa on March 31st, 2008 (Comment) #

Sorry I missed the event, and your presentation; I was in India when the limited signup happened, and mostly offline. This really captures what I’ve been struggling with myself, which is how to balance the need for fine-tuned craftmanship vs. the sometimes diametrically opposing needs of a just-get-it done business owner. Looking forward to next time.

9. patrick h. lauke on March 31st, 2008 (Comment) #

loving the craftsmanship analogy. i likened it to being an artisan a while ago http://www.splintered.co.uk/news/99/ and juxtaposed it to a mass production model (lovingly hand-crafting individual pages versus using a CMS or similar tool).

10. Raymond Jankovic on April 1st, 2008 (Comment) #

Great presentation. I really like the crafts parallel, as I present quite similar views and attitiude towards web desing. Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend the presentation personally, and probably missed a lot of interesting points.

11. Chris Pallé on April 1st, 2008 (Comment) #

Hey Josh,
I actually got pretty vocal about this last year on the IxDA list, ALA, and then brought it to my own site: http://www.chrispalle.com/2007/07/03/craft-of-the-human-experience/

Interestingly, the person I upset at ALA came over and had some dialog there. C. Wodtke and I talked about doing a project around it last Oct., but got too busy.

Maybe it’s a topic for ambientsociability.com ?

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12. Fred Epner on April 4th, 2008 (Comment) #

I just did a video interview for work and i grabbed the raw footage (kinda long), but i was just comparing the work satisfaction of a classic craftsman to what i do (developer [php]).

http://www.betterinteractive.com/video.php

13. Eric Meyer on April 17th, 2008 (Comment) #

Okay, I gave the keynote on Monday and just now came back to check out your slides. Since we both avoided the dreaded bullet-pointing, it’s hard to judge from the slides, but I think we’re probably pretty close in our thinking.

If nothing else, we should make sure to get together when I’m in Boston in June for AEA Boston and chew the fat over a pint, or words to that effect.

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Markup & Style Society Talk

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