Today was a great day of learning at the Web Directions North conference in Vancouver, BC. This 2-day event (excluding workshop days, which I did not attend) is being held at the Hyatt on Burrard St., one of the better hotel conference venues I've experienced.

The day kicked off with a keynote by Jeffrey Zeldman, one of the pioneers of web standards. He mumbled a bit and talked a little fast (something I noticed to varying degrees with all of the speakers today, Kimberley Elam being the exception.) Zeldman presented an historical overview of the accomplishments of the Web Standards Project, interspersed with some humor to soften us all up for the day ahead.

The first talk I attended was Josh Williams' Bedroom to the Boardroom, which traced the path of designers/developers from being employed, to being self-employed, to becoming completely independent and client-free. From a business perspective, I quite enjoyed the topic and found Williams to be not just a quality speaker, but also amply qualified, with ventures such as Blinksale and IconBuffet under the belt of his company, Firewheel Design. Williams often spoke about narrowing the focus of your business and finding a niche, to enable growth and spark profits. This was a good, interesting talk, with my only complaint being that he often ended sentences with a question mark, sounding less commanding that he could have (this is a common habit for many, and happens to be a pet peeve of mine.)

Next up was Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography presented by Kimberly Elam of the Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. Elam is on faculty there and that was obvious from her excellent speaking skills. First, she presented her Typographic Pledge:

• Do not squish or stretch type
• Do not outline type
• Do not vertically stack type
• Do not use prime marks and quotation marks inappropriately
• Do not use hyphens, en dashes or em dashes inappropriately
• Honor classic families of type

Content can be organized in five ways: location, alpha, time, categorically and hierarchically. (The handy acronym is LATCH.)

After discussing visual structure and grids, supported by case studies, Elam concluded by presenting some of the best practices of typography:

• Watch line length
• Use the benefits of HTML text (vs. images)
• Use caution with background colours and textures
• Don't overuse CAPS
• Beware of colour deficits (colour blindness) and employ proper contrast
• Use some photos, and in particular, couple those images with text (but remember that images must have meaning)

After a very good catered lunch, I attended Plays Well With Others: Simple Things To Make the Social Part of Your Service More Social, presented by Brian Oberkirch. This was a great talk covering identity, profiles and authentication in social networking applications, and referencing services that enable the concept of "loosely coupled, user controlled" social networking, such as openID, oAuth and microformats. Oberkirch highlighted the importance of:

• Educating about URL-based identity
• Privacy policies and workflow
• Ease of use
• Increasing the ability to share information between applications 

As developers, we need to:

• Reuse identities
• Reuse profiles and ensure portability
• Reuse contacts and ensure portability
• Gate access where needed
• Highlight privacy issues

This was a very good talk that I quite enjoyed.

The last talk I attended was What Makes Design Seem Intuitive with Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering. Spool is a good speaker, not too fast, and injected quite a bit of humor into his talk (ideal for that afternoon lull slot). Spool presented a graph that visualized the two extremes of users' tool and domain knowledge: at one end of the spectrum there is no understanding, while at the other there is very advanced understanding. The talk centered around how we should be aiming for the middle ground in that graph, where users have some knowledge but are also provided with clear visual cues to help them learn how to interact with a web page or application, without actually perceiving that they are being trained or educated.

I had to miss the last talk of the day due to an appointment, but I'm sure Gina Trapani's Better Gmail: How Google Opened Gmail's Web Interface to Any Developer Who Cares (And Why You Should) was a winner.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, when I will take in talks by Indi Young, Boris Mann, Eric Rodenbeck, Anil Dash, Daniel Burka and Matt Webb.