Refresh

Refresh Toledo

Friday, May 29th, 2009 by Keith Instone

Great to see a local Refresh group:

Refresh Toledo is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in the Toledo, Ohio area. Promoting design, technology, usability, and web standards, Refresh Toledo is a part of the Refresh movement.

Looking forward to collaborating with them on user experience topics.

See refreshtoledo.org for more information about this group - and refreshingcities.org for groups in other areas.

Writing for the web (Detroit, MI, USA)

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 by Keith Instone
April 21, 2009
6:30 pmto8:30 pm

How is writing for the web different from writing for other media? How can you craft your words to grab the attention of your readers? What do you need to know to create engaging content that people will want to read?

Join Refresh Detroit on Wednesday, April 21, 2009 for a panel discussion featuring local experts offering ideas to the many different writers who create content for the web.

See refresh-detroit.org for more information.

Web Design Day (Pittsburgh, PA, US)

Saturday, April 4th, 2009 by Conference Editor
April 4, 2009

Pittsburgh Web Design Day is a one-day, local web design conference to highlight local talent as well as those with strong ties to Pittsburgh who have gone on to be leaders in our industry. Web Design Day is designed to be an affordable Pittsburgh-based event.

See webdesignday.com for more information (but it is sold out, and starting in an hour, so we really just add it here to help you see what you missed).

Big (D)esign conference (Dallas, TX, USA)

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 by Conference Editor
May 30, 2009

The Big Design Conference is an intense day of learning within the scope of Strategy, Social Media, User Experience, and Code Development. Experts from across the country will gather to present theories, research, experiences, and best practices to students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge.

The Big Design Conference is a joint venture of the Dallas/Fort Worth Usability Professionals’ Association, Refresh Dallas, and the Dallas/Fort Worth Interaction Design Association.

See bigdesignconference.com for more information.

Refresh Pittsburgh Meet-up (Pittsburgh, PA)

Friday, November 7th, 2008 by Michele Marut
November 13, 2008
7:00 pm

This month’s meet-up will be hosted by our friends at AlphaLab. AlphaLab is located at AlphaLab is located at 2325 East Carson Street in the historic Southside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Click here for a map and directions.

AlphaLab is a catalyst for launching the next generation of software, entertainment technology and Internet-related companies. Created by Innovation Works, one of the nation’s most active seed-stage investors, AlphaLab provides funding, hands-on business assistance, access to a network of entrepreneurs and expert advisors, and free office space as part of an intensive 20-week program in Pittsburgh. AlphaLab helps companies rapidly develop their technology, gain user feedback from early product releases, develop go-to-market strategies, and move toward successful commercial launch.

Presentations

Val Head is a Senior Designer/Developer at New Perspective and is also the brains behind the FlashPitt conference. She’ll be presenting “Observations on Client Relationships and How We Deal with Them”. She’s also provided us with one of the most colorful topic descriptions: The relationship between the designer, or developer, and client can be complicated. They can make you want to dance in the streets, or stab yourself in the eye. Val will talk about some common relationship patterns and how we to make the best of them.

You can read more about Val at her blog thisisportable.com.

Next, we’re really happy to be joined by Samantha Warren. Samantha is a web designer and typophile at Viget Labs, an all inclusive web agency outside of Washington, DC. In addition to being a board member of the Art Directors Club of Washington, DC she also teaches part time at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts DC campus. In her spare time she updates her blog BadAssIdeas.com.

Samantha will present “Typography is the Foundation of Good Web Design”. She will illustrate how typographic legibility, hierarchy, and expression contribute to the success of a design through a step by step web-site redesign.

You can find out more about Samantha and the cool work she does at her blog BadAssIdeas.com as well as the Viget Inspire blog.

Please RSVP!!

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. It’s especially important for this meet-up as I need to get a headcount to AlphaLab a day in advance

Refresh Pittsburgh October Meetup! (Pittsburgh, PA)

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 by Michele Marut
October 8, 2008
7:00 pmto9:00 pm

Wednesday, October 8th

7:00pm.

 Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 440. Take the gold elevator up to the fourth floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door - if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.

A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

Presentations

We have three presentation on tap for this one:

Michael Fulk is a an interactive developer at Wall to Wall and also does freelance work as Future Designs. He’ll be presenting “Bending the Pipes” - which will give us a crash course on making mashups, feeds and recombining web content with Yahoo Pipes and Dapper.

Next, Olivia Blonde is a web designer at the University of Pittsburgh and previous worked at the Carnegie Libraries where she was responsible for the redesign of the Carnegie Library website. She’ll present “Design Process in a Nutshell”. Each designer - or design group - develops a method for solving problems, then evolves that method over time. While no one person or group may view a problem from the same perspective, general similarities often appear in their approach. Olivia’s presentation will take us from requirements to concepts to design and to handoff.

Finally, Isaac Gierard, a new media developer at Elliance with be showing off a recent project of his, a “CSS Combiner”. Isaac will give a brief introduction to a recently developed open source CSS preprocessor for combining multiple CSS files into on and it’s benefits for website performance.

Also, we’ll be giving away one free pass to the Flashpitt conference taking place the following Friday!

Please RSVP!!

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. I’ll make sure to bring the usual cookies and coffee too.

Refresh Pittsburgh Meet-up (Pittsburgh, PA)

Thursday, July 10th, 2008 by Michele Marut
July 16, 2008
7:00 pmto9:00 pm

Hi everyone! I’m happy to announce the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up is scheduled for Wednesday, July 16th at 7:00pm. This month’s meeting will be downtown at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

Did you catch that? Let’s make sure you read that again: This month’s meeting is at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh - no Treehouse this month!

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 440. Take the gold elevator up to the fourth floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door - if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.

A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

Presentations

We have a really cool lineup for this month’s meeting. Here is what you can expect:

Nathan Swartz of clicknathan and is one of those freelance web designer-types living and breathing in Pittsburgh, PA. When not indenting <p> tags or cursing IE6, he likes long walks through the city with his son and wife or enjoying summer afternoons at the Harris Grill in Shadyside. On Wednesday night, Nathan will be sharing some of the lesson’s he’s learned from being a full-time freelancer in “How to Work from Your Underwear: Some Freelancing Tips for Web Designers“. You can find out more about Nathan at his blog or a recent feature on freelance switch.

Jonathan Brodsky graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2005 with a degree in design. He now spends his days working on web development, and nights as a musician and artist. Jon will be showing tools for programmers to improvise live music and visuals using text editors and code as their instruments. This practice, generally referred to as “livecoding”, is about exposing the audience to the mechanics of a computer based performance. He’ll also give a demo of a livecoding tool that he is developing in javascript and openGL. Read more about Jon at his website.

Finally, Geoff Barnes is currently the Senior Information Architect at Elliance, Inc., a Pittsburgh-based e-marketing agency. From 2005-2007, Geoff was the UI Engineer for Collaborative Fusion, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy to state and federal emergency management authorities. Geoff has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Oregon. In 1999, Geoff co-founded San Francisco web firm Trendmedia, Inc., and came to Pittsburgh in 2001 to help create the Media Arts BFA at Robert Morris University, where he served as a full-time faculty member until 2005.

Geoff will present “What Purpose IA?”. What is the purpose of a marketing website? While marketing websites are more application-inclusive than ever, the fundamental marketing task of persuasion is still the purpose nexus of any marketing-driven website. The site’s IA needs to go beyond content organization, and embody the persuasive goals driving the project. The difference between creating systematic order and creating a systematically ordered, compelling argument is often the difference between a me-too site and a persuasion machine. Learn how to protect your client’s marketing objectives with purpose-driven discovery and IA.

Please RSVP!!

We think we have a great lineup for the next meeting and we’re really looking forward to it.

As usual, please RSVP to info@refreshpittsburgh.org so that we have a good idea of our headcount. I’ll make sure to bring the usual cookies and coffee too.

Features of Adobe Acrobat (Ann Arbor, MI, USA)

Friday, June 6th, 2008 by Dan Cooney
June 18, 2008
6:30 pmto8:00 pm

The next Refresh Detroit <http://www.refresh-detroit.org> meeting will be 6:30pm, Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at Ann Arbor SPARK in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. We are fortunate to have Adobe representative Doug Halliday lead the presentation.

Doug will highlight features in Acrobat, including creating PDFs, sharing, forms and usability. He’ll also discuss the new features in the upcoming Acrobat 9 version, due for release in mid-summer 2008. Adobe expert Greg Pisocky will join our meeting remotely to explain the accessibility features in Acrobat.

Location
Ann Arbor SPARK <http://tinyurl.com/6jt8nf>
330 East Liberty Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Doug Halliday is Business Development Manager, Manufacturing, at Adobe Systems Inc. In this capacity, he is responsible for driving customer awareness of Adobe solutions in manufacturing, developing partner relationships and formulating strategies with key customers, particularly in the automotive and heavy equipment sectors.

Greg Pisocky is a Business Development Manager in Adobe Systems’ Corporate Product Management Group. As an accessibility specialist, he advises Adobe’s customers on techniques for developing accessible content for those with disabilities.

For more information, visit the Refresh Detroit website
<http://www.refresh-detroit.org> .

3 Presentations with a Monkey (Ann Arbor, MI, USA)

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 by Dan Cooney
May 21, 2008
6:30 pmto8:30 pm

May’s Refresh Detroit meeting will be on the 21st, from 6:30 to 8:30 at the downtown Ann Arbor District library in Ann Arbor. Map to the location.

SPONSORED BY YAHOO SEARCH MONKEY DEVELOPER PREVIEW

TOPIC: There will be a few quick presentations by members of our great group, and general discussion on the latest news, challenges, projects, and ideas that the group members have encountered in their web related occupations/hobbies/activities.

The event like always is free to anyone who is interested.

The current speakers will be:

Nick DeNardis
Designer of the Wayne State University Library and Information Science website. He will discuss the latest release of the website, their goals, process and challenges.

Brian Kerr
Information architecture, user experience, and django development guru. Exact topic details to come…

Paul Tarjan - Yahoo! SearchMonkey
The fine folks at Yahoo! are sponsoring this event and promise to bring lots of swag as well as give a short presentation on their new open source semantic web search in your own applications and websites. This new product they are releasing is called “Search Monkey” and you can read more at:

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000523.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/24/yahoo-open-search-platform-launches-into-private-beta/
http://searchengineland.com/080424-113600.php

Refresh Pittsburgh Meeting (Pittsburgh, PA)

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 by Michele Marut
April 1, 2008
7:00 pmto8:00 pm

With the Easter holiday arriving a bit early this year, it’s resulting in scheduling the next Refresh Pittsburgh meeting one week later than usual. Our next meeting will at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, April 1st at the Creative Treehouse in Bellevue.

To start the evening, Pat Collins will present “CakePHP: Rapid application development with PHP”.

Why learn a new programming language when you can use your existing PHP skills to become a better coder and increase your productivity?

Let Pat show you how to build a blog application in no time, and how you can help!

Then, Val Head will be presenting “A, B, C, D-esign!”

Val’s presentation will be a discussion of the basic building blocks of design as they apply to designing fo the web. She’ll show examples of concepts like colour, typography and hierarchy and talk about how these fit in to a web page design.

As usual, if you would like to show off a recent project or pose a few questions to our group, please let us know and we’ll fit you in.

We’ll make sure to provide a good supply of coffee and cookies and other sweets to get you through the night.

Please RSVP to let us know if you will be joining us. We need to make sure we have enough seats and most importantly, coffee and cookies!

And by all means, please forward this invitation to anyone you like.

For detailed information: http://www.refreshpittsburgh.org/