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SXSW stuff: book giveaway, my panel, more

Next Thursday, I’m flying out to Austin for my first SXSW. I’m excited and a little overwhelmed. But let’s start with the exciting stuff.

Meeting you

I’m excited to meet you guys! Please come up and introduce yourselves. Hooray for new friends! To find me, follow me on Twitter. I haven’t yet figured out which app to use for planning my schedule. (That’s one of the overwhelming things. More on that later.)

Book giveaway

I’m going to have a few copies of my book, Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS, to give away. Want one? Find me and tell me why you want to learn about flexible design. iPad is an acceptable one word answer. Then presto, the book (if I haven’t given them all away yet) is yours!

I’ll probably also have flyers with a discount code for buying Flexible Web Design. Hopefully.

My panel

I’m presenting in the CSS3 Design with HTML5 workshop at 3:30 on Saturday in Ballroom F, with Christopher Schmitt and Stephanie Sullivan. Come check it out. As long as you’re not going to heckle me and post mean things on Twitter, that is.

Halp! I’m a noob!

Ok, now the overwhelming stuff. I have no idea how this SXSW thing works. If anyone has any essential tips, or links to articles with tips, I will love you forever. Some of the questions that are going through my mind:

  • How many business cards should I take with me?
  • Which of the myriad scheduling apps should I use?
  • What are the best iPhone apps to help me through? (Note: I don’t have an iPhone, just an iPod Touch. Don’t hate me.)
  • Which are the best events and parties to go to for schmoozing?
  • Which are the best parties to go to for having fun? (Note: I don’t drink. But I still like to have fun.)
  • What do women typically wear during the day? What about to parties at night?
  • Where can I eat good food for cheap?
  • Does Austin have any good bakeries, and if so, how can I get my hands on some delicious cookies? (This is always my first question when traveling. I always try to find the nearest bakery to my hotel. Sadly, most cities do not have bakeries up to my standards. At least, not cookie bakeries.)

Ok, that’s enough for now. Again, come meet me, see my panel, hang out.

More debate on designers writing HTML and CSS

The debate of whether web designers should know how to write HTML/CSS has started up again, sparked by Elliot Jay Stocks’ tweet: “Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.”

Of course, 140 characters couldn’t capture his whole opinion on the subject, so he wrote a blog post followup. I strongly recommend reading it. I really agree with it.

Also, he later tweeted: “My new opinion, based on insight from commenters: You DON’T need to know how to write HTML/CSS. But in many scenarios it can be useful.”

I agree with this too, for the reasons explained well by Mark Boulton. A web designer doesn’t necessarily need to know how to write actual HTML and CSS. But she does need to know about the limitations imposed by browsers, the strengths and weaknesses of the medium. Writing HTML/CSS can make understanding and designing around these limitations a lot easier. But you can come to this understanding without learning HTML/CSS first.

Basically, my opinion is still the same as it was when I wrote Should web designers build their own pages? back in June 2008. Check that article out for my full opinion—including my very own architect analogy! (Seemingly a must whenever debating this topic.)

70+ essential resources for creating liquid and elastic layouts

I often get asked for my recommendations of resources to learn how to create liquid/fluid and elastic layouts. My first answer is, of course, my own book Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS. Hey, is it so bad to be proud of your work? It’s the only book out there entirely devoted to designing and building flexible web sites, and the dozens of layout techniques it covers can also be applied to fixed-width design. But I’ll shut up about my book now; if you’re not the book-buying type, here are over 70 online resources to get you started creating attractive and robust flexible web pages.

Design inspiration

It’s always helpful to look at existing liquid and elastic sites to get inspiration for how to design your own. I’ve pulled together several sources of flexible design inspiration in a couple former blog posts on my site:

Templates

Even if you don’t read my book, you can download the example and exercise files from the book’s companion site. They essentially give you several liquid and elastic layout templates or starter pages that you can use to build your own liquid and elastic sites.

Here are some other layout templates:

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