AEA Atlanta: A Look Back
It has been a few days since I have been back from An Event Apart in Atlanta and I have finally had a chance to put down some thoughts I had on the event. I had planned on liveblogging the event, but connection problems prevented that. There are other accounts of the day that you can read if you want to know how it went down.
I decided to head over to Atlanta early so I could get a good night sleep and be well rested for Monday. First thing I run into is about a 1 hour delay in traffic on I-20 east near the Alabama/Georgia state line. This led to a 12 mile detour around the backroads to get past the hold-up and be on my way. Atlanta should be only a 2 - 2.5 hour drive from Birmingham. The drive over ended up being about 3.5 hours or so.
I arrived at the 755 Club monday morning and met Chris Harrison, a fellow Godbit reader and forum member. I was also sharing a table with Amber Rhea of The CSS Weblog and a few others. There were some early morning thunderstorms that rolled through the area had apparently knocked out parts of the network at Turner Field, so we never got the WiFi that we were supposed to have. In hindsight, it was probably a blessing in disguise. I have sat through panels at SXSW and not even paid attention because of friends pinging me on IM and e-mail popping up every 5-10 minutes. Not having those distractions really helped me to focus on the speaker and his material.
Eric covered lots of ground on CSS, talking about the changes in IE7 and how they would affect designers and developers. He also talked about some of the process he went through in coding out the new A List Apart design that was handed to him from Jason. Towards the end of the day Eric wrapped up the event talking about em-based designs and the One True Layout method.
Jason talked during the morning about some of his process in redesigning A List Apart (as well as An Event Apart and A Book Apart), including his logo redesign and the decisions me made about the layout of the new site.
Todd decided to talk about the “Off Hour Entrepreneur”, basically discussing his experiences from creating, selling and supporting Slide Show Pro (an excellent component, btw). He seemed to grab everyone’s attention when he admitted that he made more in the first year of sales of SSP than he did at his full time job.
Jeffrey’s presentations were probably my favorite of the day. He is a great public speaker and a great story teller, and seems to combine those two to really get his message across. He talked mostly about selling the brand and writing better copy for the web. These are two areas where I am really wanting to improve, so I feel I got the most out of it.
All in all, AEA was a great event. I skipped SXSW to attend this, and feel it was the right decision. While there are always great panels and presentations at SXSW, it is really hard to get anything out of them when a 1 hour panel (cut to 45 minutes to allow for Q & A) is split between 3 or 4 people, each with their own idea of what they want to talk about. I usually only leave with a few nuggets of wisdom, and some notes on things I would like to explore further and never get the chance to do.
If you have a chance to attend one, I would definitely recommend it.
