A List Apart issue #238 is up:

• Evangelizing Outside the Box: Web Standards and Large Companies, by Peter-Paul Koch
• Who Needs Headlines?, by Shaun Crowley

The first is an article about front-end programmers at large companies do know about and use web standards, but don’t talk about it or engage in the “standards movement”. The second is a great primer on how to write better headlines when you are a developer and not a trained writer.

Also of note (and cited in the first article), last month Jeffery Zeldman from A List Apart wrote a interesting blog post about the “hidden profession” of web design”.

Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. The first conference was in Boston in March. The second event will be in Seattle next month.

Yesterday, they annouced the third of four events for 2007: An Event Apart Chicago will be held August 27–28 at the Chicago Marriott Downtown. Tickets are $795 through July 27, regularly $895. The last two events sold out before the early registration deadline, so if you want to go I wouldn’t wait too long.

I attended An Event Apart Boston and it was quality content with a great atmosphere. The speakers covered web standards, CSS, design principles, accessibility, best practices, and even working with clients. To me, the Chicago schedule looks even better. (Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

Today is the last day to participate in A List Apart’s first annual Web Design Survey.

In their words: “People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?”

The survey ends tomorrow, May 22nd, and took me about 10 minutes to complete. Selected participants, chosen by random drawing, will win a free ticket to one of their events; a 30GB iPod, a jump drive, or a t-shirt. You can fill it out anonymously too, but then you can’t win stuff.

I love this idea. Full Code Press is a competition between web development teams to build a complete website for a charitable organization in 24 hours. They’ll have complete freedom as to the platform: HTML, Ruby on Rails, LAMP, or whatever else they like. Each team is made up of seven web members, and all of the teams compete at the same location on the same day. At the end of 24 hours, a team of judges will select the winner.

The first event will be held in Australia on August 18-19, 2007 between Australia and New Zealand. In May 2008 early February 2008, they will be hosting a worldwide challenge, open to teams from all countries, to be held in Wellington, New Zealand.

Interested teams and interested charities can get more information and sign up on their website. If you can’t attend, they plan to make it possible for you to follow the event online via blogs, interviews, Twitter and YouTube.

Personally, I’d love to see this event spread to other countries. Developers often get requests to do pro bono work for charities, but developers are usually either booked with paying clients or looking for more paying work. The charities can’t offer cash, but through contests like this they can offer something that developers covet even more—bragging rights.

The BBC has an article covering a recent speech by Jakob Nielsen bemoaning how the rush to make “Web 2.0″ websites is distracting web firms from the basics of good design. Shiny features have trumped usability. One interesting stat in the article: 10% of a website’s users are contributors while 90% are non-contributing readers. Nielsen uses that stat to say that developers should take it easy on tools which few will use and which hurt usability for the majority.

Surprisingly, the BBC article never mentions where Nielsen was giving his talk. I believe it was at the Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week 2007 conference last week in London, the third of four week-long conferences. (Wouldn’t that make it “Usability Weeks”???) If you are interested in learning more about putting design and usabilty first, they’ll be hosting a fourth Usability Week 2007 in San Francisco from June 18-23 and tickets are still available.

(Hat tip to Slashdot for the link.)

Adobe is putting on a multi-city tour called CS3: The Creative License Conference to demo some of their latest CS3 software offerings (Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign) as well as to give design and workflow tutorials and tips.

The tour will take place from mid-May through June in eight cities: Chicago, Austin, San Jose, Toronto, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. The first six cities are one-day events while the LA and NYC conferences are two-days long and definitely offer the best value of the bunch.

A List Apart has a good article by Andy Rutledge on Contrast and Meaning in graphic design. He goes over the fundamentals of how to visually convey meaning to communicate clearly (and give a better user experience) using contrast.

Obviously, bigger text should have more importance than smaller text. But Rutledge goes beyond that and talks about size, position, color, texture, shape and orientation as areas where contrast can be used effectively. In easy to follow steps, he evolves an example from basic web site copy to a page with hierarchy and meaning.

I think it’s worth a read for all web application developers, even if graphic design isn’t your primary focus. Contrast and meaning play a role in the features you add and in how you use links, buttons, Ajax, forms, feedback… and the list goes on.