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Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part III

Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part III

As part of our A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design conference—we asked AEA speakers from the past decade what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. If you missed Parts One or Two, have a look back.

Mat Marquis

I remember 2006 as the year I gave up.

Ten years ago, I worked in a mall—at a cellphone kiosk, shouting at passersby about “RAZR™ phones.” It was my fourth year there. I made a little above minimum wage. I drove to work in a friend’s unregistered, uninsured car, and I slept in it when I didn’t have enough gas money to get me home. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with four other people. We only managed to make rent one month, thanks to one of the roommates appearing on Judge Judy. He was guilty.

2006 was the year I started packing to leave, without knowing where—to start walking south until there was something else. Until there was anything else. Two months of aimless hitchhiking later, “anything else” would start with my first website. First the one, then a handful that would never see the light of day, then an internship “for college credit”—funny story there, too—then my first honest-to-God job with a desk. It wasn’t long after that first website that I stumbled into my first AEA, here in Boston.

There, I found out that there was a whole industry of people like me, who came from whatever background, all of them landing in the same place as I did—all of us making it up as we went along. I made sense there, at my first An Event Apart. I found out that I made sense here, doing this. And right there in the room, I could see the brass ring—I could see that big, terrifying stage, and I wanted to be there. I felt like I could be up there someday, not long after feeling like I couldn’t be anywhere. An Event Apart gave me the kind of goal I was once so sure I could never have.

Years later, it gave me that chance. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the words to express how much that meant to me.

Krystal Higgins

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” That’s a quote from Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, translated from French. It’s often quoted pessimistically, but I like to think of it as an optimistic reminder of the past’s impact on the present.

About ten years ago I was working at my first tech company, just a year out of college, feeling completely out of my depth. After all, I’d always planned to work in narrative animation, and tech was a much different world. My work at the new company involved creating setup wizards. At first, I struggled; what could I possibly know about setup wizards compared to an expert in the field? I assumed my past experience was moot, that I would have to learn to do this new job from scratch. But over time, I realized that designing setup wizards wasn’t too different from weaving a story. True, it’s a user-defined story, and nonlinear…but it’s still a task of taking the new user on a journey, from a beginning to an end. That realization unlocked a lot for me.

A decade later, so much has changed—jobs, friends, family, responsibilities, the ups and the downs. But storytelling and those early experiences with setup wizards have stayed with me, continuing to influence my work with onboarding.

Derek Powazek

Heather and I had just published issue 6 of JPG Magazine, our lovely little printed photography magazine. The theme was “OOPS!” Turns out, it was an appropriate theme for the era. Soon after, I would start a company with a friend to publish JPG and other community-created magazines. We would take money from the wrong people. We would make lot of mistakes, some very public.

Putting myself back in those decade-old shoes now is painful because I know what’s coming. By the end of 2006, it would all fall apart spectacularly. I’d lose JPG, lose the company, lose friends, lose a big chunk of my idealism. That failure sent me on a decade-long startup binge. Sometimes working for others, sometimes starting my own. Venture capital pitch decks and the constant hustle. It made me stubborn. I had to prove that I could make it work.

It took me almost a decade to break out the cycle, but I finally did. Last year, Heather and I left San Francisco. We now live on a 2-acre farm. We grow vegetables and raise chickens and goats. I build things out of wood. I still work for companies than end in dot-com, but I’ve regained some sense of balance. Now, how coworkers treat each other is more important than working on the next big thing. Keeping one hand in the soil and one hand in the digital makes them both better, and it keeps me balanced. It took me a decade, but I finally feel like myself again.

Mark Boulton

I’d just left my job as lead designer at the BBC to go freelance and accidentally form a little design studio. It was a year of feeling out of my depth, feeling like an imposter, and feeling incredibly excited, all in equal measure! It was a steep learning curve to go from the relatively safe walls of the BBC to the big, bad world to make my own living. And with it came a drastic change in tools, working environment, and how I spent my time. Gone were the days where I could spend all day deep-diving into a specific design problem with my head in Photoshop. 2006 was a baptism of fire into the real world of a commercial designer: managing projects, clients, cash flow, and politics.

Jen Simmons

I was working on an unbelievable number of artistic projects, as well as boosting my meager financial situation with some freelance web design. I designed the video projections for an opera about Nikola Tesla that premiered for his 150th birthday in Belgrade, Serbia, and then traveled to the BAM Next Wave Festival that fall; hundreds of tiny clips were triggered by custom software to play through four projectors onto seven screens. I distributed and eventually sold a short film that I’d directed the year before. I produced an ongoing video podcast about yoga and meditation. Took a performance class with Ralph Lemon. Taught classes, as an adjunct professor at Temple University, on Videoblogging and on Web Design Aesthetics.

Amidst all that, I taught myself CSS for layout and Drupal 5. Designed and built sites for an art curator, a university department, a small book publisher, and a non-profit media arts center. Spoke at Vloggercon on how to customize your site by hacking Blogger templates. Ran lighting for a weeklong music festival in the woods. And in December, started filming my next major project.

Basically, it was an insane year, but not a unique one. Most of those years went like that—mixing film, theater, teaching, and the web.

Cindy Li

I was working as a Senior Designer for AOL, working on prototypes, and at one point trying out podcasts. I started the year by working on a blog that wasn’t based on a WordPress template. I met two wonderful designers during SXSWi, Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele, who were my tutors for CSS. They helped me not pull all my hair out. After my coworker, Kevin Lawyver, heard about my budding CSS skills, he invited me to be part of the CSS Working Group to help represent AOL and provide a designer’s view.

At the same time, I was making a plan to leave AOL. I had been there for 8 years and had survived about sixteen layoffs. I knew it was time to leave, and I had my sights set on going to San Francisco. I’d always wanted to work on projects that I genuinely cared about—something more than just a paycheck.

But what I learned at AOL was the large role of politics in companies. It’s never just about the design. You have to figure out why some decisions are made against all the evidence and data to the contrary.

Kristina Halvorson

Ten years ago, I had no idea how hard it would be for me in 2016 to remember what I was doing then. However, after referring to my records, it seems that I was running a two-person business called Brain Traffic, working with clients who needed better copy for their websites. My business card said “interactive content strategist,” although trying to explain what that meant was never easy… especially because my own definition kept changing!

I worked at home, had a Hotmail email address, carried a Treo, and owned an 8-pound PC laptop. A few of my career goals were to get a real office, work with a Fortune 100 company, and attend—yes, attend—An Event Apart. I had a two-year-old son and a baby girl on the way. I had not yet opened a Twitter account.

The thing I remember most about 2006, work-wise, is that, while we were insanely busy with great projects, I was never really satisfied with the small amount of time and budget we were given to plan for or design content requirements. Typically, we were handed a document with a list of pages to write, a site map, and some wireframes, and told to get going. I read and re-read books by Gerry McGovern, Steve Krug, Ann Rockley, Jakob Nielsen, and Lou Rosenfeld. I wished constantly that someone would write a book about content strategy for websites so I’d feel like I knew what I was talking about.

Bruce Lawson

Like Rachel Andrew, I’d been invigorated by the @media 2005 conference, where I got to meet many of the people I’d been talking to in blog comments (remember those?) like Patrick Lauke, Gez Lemon, Jeremy Keith, and Joe Clark.

I’d been blogging and writing about web standards since 2003, and was beginning to work on making the Solicitors Regulation Authority website CSS-driven and accessible, after the nested-table hell I’d worked on since 2004.  But this community gathering made me realize that there were actually teams of people who cared about such things, and made me want to join such a team, rather than constantly fight to make a website less terrible. So I began looking around for other jobs, which eventually saw me move to Opera, where I am today.

Peter-Paul Koch

Ten years ago I was on top of the browsers. If you asked me, I could run down a list of quirks for Firefox, Safari, and Opera, though a full IE list would have strained my memory capacity. Nowadays it’s impossible to keep track of the differences among all browsers.

Ten years ago I had vaguely heard of the mobile space, and was aware that something called XHTML-MP existed, and that it was a dumbed-down subset of HTML. I also had my first speaking gig: a panel at the iconic @media conference in London. Nowadays I’m holding off on public speaking since most conferences don’t pay a fee, and I get tired of traveling for no good reason. (AEA does pay a speaker fee, by the way, and always has. Yay for them!)

Ten years ago, JavaScript libraries were just getting started. I already had my doubts, and expressed them in that first panel. Although tools can be very useful, they also lead to web developers not understanding browsers any more. And the very definition of a web developer is someone who understands browsers. Here the situation has worsened, if anything: picking and using the cool library/framework of the day takes far too much of our precious mental capacity.

Ten years ago, web development was simpler than it is today. That’s not to say we should pine for the Good Old Days—there’s plenty of excitement that comes with increased complexity—but we should still take care we don’t lose everything that makes the web the web. Simplicity, URLs, reach. That’s the core. The rest is…not exactly window dressing, but the web could survive without it in some form or shape.

Jason Santa Maria

Ten years ago I was hot off the heels of a redesign of A List Apart, just went out on my own to freelance, and starting to do some public speaking. All of these things were a mix of exciting and terrifying. I made lots of mistakes, but did some stuff right, and, most importantly, I learned tons from everything happening all around me. I had immersed myself in web design and the community through lots of blogging and events like SXSW. I made friends and found mentors during that time whom I often turn to now.

Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part II

Ten Years, Ten Speakers: Part II

As part of our A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design conference—we recently asked more of our favorite speakers from the past decade what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. Here are some more of their answers. If you missed Part I, have a look back.

Richard Rutter

I was a matter of months into the adventure that is Clearleft. We’d already moved into our first office and hired our first couple of employees, but we had no real idea that in ten years we’d be in our own four-story building with nearly thirty people working for us.

At the time we were working a lot for dotcom start-ups, which I seem to recall was great fun, albeit somewhat stressful as everything had to be done on a shoestring budget. Also we were feeling our way in how to combine design work with business and development processes—Agile hadn’t really entered the scene at that point.

Back then I was also blogging far more than now—something I’m trying to get back into. Short, to-the-point posts were a common thing back then, perhaps surpassed by even shorter tweets now, not necessarily in a good way. Looking at my 2006 archive, one post caught my eye in particular: “there’s a different approach to web page layout which is gradually getting some traction. The idea is that the layout is changed to best accommodate the window size.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

I became a copywriter at a small print-advertising agency. As the team’s resident eagle-eye, and lowest-paid staffer, I was responsible for proofing and copyediting every piece before it went out the door—including the little brochure-ware websites we were increasingly being asked to create. Only, I wasn’t actually proofing websites. I was proofing print-outs of websites, delivered to my desk on large-format paper each day by our traffic manager. And proof them I did: right down to marking up line breaks I didn’t like. I imagine our developer chuckling to himself, adding a few arbitrary <br/>s to the page, hitting print, and then immediately removing them.

Less than a year later, I’d left that gig to become a web writer at another agency—and I haven’t reviewed a printed website since.

Jaimee Newberry

I was a Partner and Director of Interactive at a boutique animation/interactive agency called eatdrink. A lot about what I was doing then, and with whom, makes me smile today. I loved my work and I loved my team, I learned so much about how to, and how not to, work with clients and personalities of all types.

If 2016-Jaimee could go back and share some insight with 2006-Jaimee, I would tell me this: “Speak up! Write and share more about what you’re doing and what you’re learning. You love to write—don’t suppress that. It will be a great tool of growth in the coming years for you and for others. Don’t hide quietly/shyly in the background all the time. Learn out loud.”

Dan Mall

I was busy speaking and writing about how to use Flash and web standards in harmony, as well as helping to open the Philly office of Happy Cog. Great year!

Brad Frost

I was a junior at James Madison University, where I took a Dreamweaver course and a Flash course as part of my Media Arts and Design major. The major was a combination of media studies and hands-on multimedia design training. I dove headfirst into it all, making obnoxious Flash sites and animations. My summer job in 2006 was designing my university’s English department website, which hilariously is still up.

The following year, two weeks before I graduated, our class was visited by two alumni who worked for AOL. They said “if you’re interested in this whole web design thing, you should read this book called Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.” I graduated and sat unemployed in my sister’s apartment reading Jeffrey’s book, realizing everything I’d learned was wrong. And, well, here we are.

Jeremy Keith

I was spending most of my time talking and writing about Ajax. It was the hot buzzword back then and everyone was going ker-razy for Ajax. My concern was with how people were using Ajax. Instead of treating it as an enhancement, I was seeing a lot of sites that made JavaScript and Ajax a prerequisite just for retrieving information. I ended up writing a book called Bulletproof Ajax wherein I described how Ajax and progressive enhancement make a perfect match. I even coined my own terrible buzzword—Hijax.

We don’t talk about Ajax that much these days but we do talk about React, Angular, Ember, and other JavaScript frameworks that are driven by Ajax. Me? I’m still banging on about progressive enhancement. I’ll probably still be banging on about it in another ten years. It’s an approach that has stood the test of time and keeps proving its worth again and again.

Ten years ago I was writing on my blog. Lots of other people were writing on their blogs back then too. That would soon change, though. Twitter and Facebook were picking up steam and soon they’d be luring bloggers away with enticing and seductive short-form convenience. I’ve stubbornly continued writing on my own site. I fully intend to keep on writing there for the next ten years too.

Aarron Walter

I was a college professor and freelance web designer obsessed with microformats, RSS, and PHP. UX wasn’t really a thing at the time—we were still thinking about information architecture (IA). I was building my first web app and making so many mistakes. My PHP was not exactly organized in a tidy MVC structure. It was server-side/client-side soup!

I remember seeing Todd Dominey speak at AEA at Turner Field in Atlanta that year. I was blown away by his candid explanation of how he built SlideShow Pro into a company. Nine years later, he joined my team at MailChimp. Life’s a funny circle.

Jonathan Snook

2006 was a transitional time for me. I had recently started freelancing and had my first taste of going to a web conference: SXSW Interactive. It was such a great experience to be able to meet people that I had only previously connected with online through forums and blogs. It connected me with a book publisher, which led me to write books. It also connected me with the conference organizers, which led me to start speaking. Those connections are ones I still cherish, and I am grateful for the opportunity to make new connections with people every day.

Veerle Pieters

I was running Duoh!, my design studio, just as I do now. Only, I believe 2006 was a turning point for me. Exciting times were about to come. My blog was becoming rather popular. I attended my first SXSWi conference, where I spoke on a panel and met most of my internet friends in real life for the first time. That was double excitement for sure.

In terms of workflow and tools I can’t say things have drastically changed for me, but that’s probably due to the fact that I’m mostly focused on pure design work and less on coding. I’m still using pretty much the same software tools for designing. Some things are just done more efficiently due to the development of the software. Other things are harder and take way more work such as designing a fully responsive site.

Kevin M. Hoffman

I was the director of electronic communications for a prestigious art and design college in Baltimore. I had a staff of one awesome person, and together we built big and small websites as needed. I remember an image optimization tool being indispensable, but I can’t remember its name for the life of me. I also deeply loved my “blackbook,” which was the black MacBook Pro at the time.

I had no idea what the next ten years would hold, but I certainly didn’t expect to be speaking at a conference as prestigious as An Event Apart. I remember attending it when I could afford it, going all the way back to AEA Atlanta at Turner Field in 2006.

Oh wait, our awesome ten-year-old son was born in 2006! Whoops, I probably should have led with that one.

 

Building a Remote Work Culture: An Interview with Jaimee Newberry

Building a Remote Work Culture: An Interview with Jaimee Newberry

Jaimee Newberry is a designer, consultant, coach, speaker, writer, and all-around awesome person. She contributed to the broadcast of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, helped lead mobile strategy and design for Zappos, and was Director of User Experience for Black Pixel. We recently talked with Jaimee about podcasts, tiny challenges, her new book, and her talk for the upcoming AEA DC and AEA Orlando: Special Edition.

It’s been two years since we did one of these. What have you been up to in the meantime?

Yes! I think we did this in late 2014. I’m excited to share a few of the most recent things.

The Unprofessional podcast wrapped in 2014. But this year co-host Daniel Steinberg and I knocked out Season 1 of the “tinychallenges” podcast. It’s also been quite an honor to be a guest on a handful of shows including Release Notes, Debug, and iOhYes.

In terms of professional coaching, I’ve coached more than 40 individuals and teams with culture, process refinement, career path/development, collaboration, and communication. This has been some of the most fulfilling work of my life, and I’m still going!

But the biggest and possibly freshest news is that in February 2016 I accepted a role as Chief Operations Officer for the premiere iOS+Mac+Android dev and training company, MartianCraft. We’re a 100% remote team—we are honored to serve some of the largest and sharpest teams in the world! I love this team and I’m excited to be a part of such an incredible company.

What sold you on joining MartianCraft, and what are you most looking forward to doing there?

Joining MartianCraft was not only about the ability to continue working 100% remotely from my home, and the understanding that I’m an independent mother with two young girls. It wasn’t only the amazing, talented, and kind individuals who work here, or the offer to accept a role that feels like, “Finally, at last, it fits!”

What sealed the deal for me was that working with MartianCraft never once made me feel my gender. I’ve worked in a lot of environments that felt like a “boys’ club.” But from our first conversation about the potential to work together, to agreeing to come aboard full time in the capacity of COO, at MartianCraft I’ve simply felt like an empowered human being. I’ve felt listened to and clearly understood, rather than dismissed or placed in a glass case. I’ve felt elevated, rather than shelved. I’ve felt supported and encouraged.

I’m most looking forward to strengthening, and sharing externally the amazing stuff this team does internally—from experimenting in our MartianCraft Labs, to refining the process of what it means to work and collaborate remotely, internally as a team, and with our clients. Kinks in remote culture definitely come up, and we actively work them out. We’ve got a lot of information to share!

I’ve been experimenting with quite a few other things, as well. I started an experimental YouTube vlog, I’ve been writing a good amount of Medium posts and #coffeewithjaimee sketches, while also trying/testing new apps, hanging out with my kids, and most recently putting some focus back on my physical health.

All this experimenting resulted in starting something more officially called #tinychallenges. The idea is to break things down really small, like two minutes or less per day, in order get out of our own way and DO MORE. Experiment, learn, mess up, try again. Put stuff out into the world. Every day is an opportunity to push ourselves and grow, even if only in the tiniest of ways. Over time, these #tinychallenges add up to life-changing things.

Tell us more about #tinychallenges!

I started experimenting my way through 2013 with small, random challenges after a severe case of burnout triggered by the loss of my dad in 2012. Eventually, I committed to doing a random monthly challenge for every month that had 31 days in it. Because of the momentum and fun, it quickly grew into something I did every single month. Every new month, a new challenge. I was never very consistent with how I tagged these projects in the early days. Sometimes it was #31days, #30days, sometimes #randomadventures; it varied depending on what I was doing.

My friend Brad Heintz, upon joining me for a one-month challenge, suggested unifying the name to something easier to follow and join. We landed on the name: “tinychallenges.”

Our Slack community continues to grow, a related podcast was born as well, and I’ve been invited to share my story all around the world, about how I used tinychallenges to eradicate excuses and build-up to writing the first draft of my first book, which is currently with an editor, and will hopefully be ready to share with the world by 2017! It’s my favorite talk to give!

A book? Congratulations! What’s the title and topic?

Thank you! I’m super excited! It’s called, They Call it a Comeback: The Essential Guide to Surviving Life Burnout. It’s the book my primary audience has been asking me for, for a couple years. I’ll reserve further details until the book announcement, hopefully this fall.

You have a talk in DC and Orlando called “The Art of the Sell.” What will attendees take away from it?

My goal is that designers and developers will take away some really practical skills that will tighten up the way they talk about their work, and how they communicate in their day-to-day interactions. In our line of work, we have to be salespeople. We sell our ideas internally to our teams and managers. We sell our work to prospective and existing clients. Selling is in every fiber of our work as designers and developers.

In the past, selling was a skill I fumbled through by wearing a lot of different hats over the past 18 years—from production artist to Chief Operations Officer and everything in-between. I did it wrong a lot. And, while I’m constantly realizing how much more there is to learn, I’m excited to share what I’ve learned so far. I believe my information will make life a bit more blissful for designers and developers in regard to the fine art of working with other human beings.


What has you most excited these days?

Three things that cover a broad range of my day-to-day activities, outside of being a mom:

  1. Helping teams/individuals with culture, process refinement, collaboration, and communication.
  2. Hammering out the sticky points in remote-employee culture through experimentation. I love this work and I’m honored that I get to do it not only with my team at MartianCraft, but that we get to help other incredible teams through coaching and training, as well.
  3. Finishing my first book.

Congratulations again on the book, Jaimee—we can’t wait to read it!

Jaimee Newberry will present “The Art of the Sell” as part of An Event Apart DC and An Event Apart Orlando: Special Edition, to be held at Disney’s Contemporary Resort October 3-5, 2016.  Don’t miss your chance to see this enlightening session and many others—register today!