Japandriods – Post-Nothing – I noticed that these guys were on  a lot of different list for 2009. I felt an instant connection with this album. That’s not always true of albums I love, but it was with these guys. They have a very raw sound. Sometimes it feels like the songs are barely staying together… they may fall apart at any time. I find myself singing these songs in the shower. That means they ROCK!

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion – I have to admit that I’ve known about Animal Collective for quite some time, but I’ve never really listened to them. This album got a lot of press this year so I decided to check it out. At first I didn’t like it at all. I felt like there was just so much going on sonically that I couldn’t process it, but the more I’ve listened the more I’ve connected with it. There are some tunes on this album that are incredible. Songs like “Bluish” and “Brother Sport” are just so good. One of the dudes on Sound Opinions (can’t remember which one) called this album the “Pet Sounds of this generation”. That is high praise. Check it out.

M.Ward – Hold Time – This last one may be my favorite. I’ve known of M. Ward for a while mainly through She & Him (he’s the him), but I had never listened to any of his solo stuff. I know, that makes me a total indy poser. Anyway, this was one of those albums that just brought a smile to my face. The guitar licks are awesome. The lyrics are thoughtful and Ward’s voice is killer. I don’t think there is a bad song on this album. It’s solid. I’m glad I own it.

People love a good, authentic, heart-felt story!

As the holidays are upon us, I’ve been thinking about the many mealtime story sessions in my past. You’ve all had them. Pawpaw’s at the end of the table talking about that bike he coveted when he was a boy. Uncle Joe is sipping a glass of wine and rambling on about the pranks he and his buddies used to play on each other in the park behind his childhood home. You can see that bike. You can feel the chill in the air at the park. Hours can pass by as stories are traded. Smiles are shared. Joy is experienced. Stories are golden.

The businesses that are truly great tell a good story. As you come in contact with them you think to yourself, “I want to be a part of that story”. Or, “I want that to be part of MY story”. As a consumer you can also quickly identify posers, or people that aren’t telling a good story. Maybe it’s too “in your face”. Maybe it smacks of inauthentic marketing hype. Or, maybe the delivery is all wrong. Whatever it is… it’s just not good.

So, as you and I think about starting new ventures, let’s first start by thinking about the story. Put on your tacky Christmas sweater that everyone silently hates and TELL IT! Write a story first. Not a business plan; not a marketing plan. Those will come, but start with a story. I’m working on mine. Are you?

Here are a few examples of people/businesses that I’ve stumbled upon lately that are telling a great story.

• Saddleback Leather
• 37signals (known about these guys for a long time)
• ISO50

Jeffery Zeldman is the king of web standards. He, and a few others, have done so much to make life on the world wide web more enjoyable for designers and developers. This video gives you the chance to hear from him in person.

Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards is a must read if you do work on the web. Also, he, and Eric Meyer put on an excellent conference in four cities every year called An Event Apart.

The music of The Hold Steady is straight forward. I almost want to call it simple, but that has negative connotations that wouldn’t apply here. The music just rocks. It doesn’t leave you guessing. You feel like you know what the next chord is going to be, and that’s a good thing. In an indie scene that can sometimes be quite obscure and inaccessible this is a breath of fresh air.

The music and the lyrics often seem to be at odds, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. The music feels like big arena anthem rock while the lyrics have a depth that you would expect in hear in some small, smokey, dimly-lit club. The music feels upbeat while the lyrics are dealing with sad and tragic situations. In the song, Sequestered in Memphis, the main character is being questioned by the authorities after something awful has happened to a girl he had a one-night rendezvous with. “In bar light she looked all right, in daylight she looked desperate. That’s alright I was desperate too”.

During the Sound Opinions interview Craig Finn, the lead singer, discusses his love for reading. It’s obvious in listening to his lyrics that there is a literary depth that is not often present in music today. It makes for great song writing. This is a great band and album.

One of the simple things about An Event Apart that I love is that it’s a “single track” conference. You don’t ever find yourself consulting some elaborate matrix of speakers and rooms in some caffeine-induced sleep-deprived craze only to realize that you have to run, no sprint, half a mile because you’re on the wrong side of the building. Inevitably during multi-track conferences you pick wrong and miss that one talk that all the cool kids are blogging about. An Event Apart makes it simple. Because of the single track nature of the conference you might worry that you won’t resonate with some of the speakers. Seeing as the crowd is pretty evenly split between designers and developers how could they possibly meet everybody’s needs? Somehow they do. During one talk you may find yourself poring over CSS or javascript snippets. In another talk you could be listening to Miles Davis or staring at a beautiful spread from Wired magazine. It’s all wonderful and somehow none of the speakers seem to disappoint.

Another great thing about An Event Apart is the food. At last year’s event in Chicago as well as this year the food was exceptional. No box lunches with crappy sandwiches and stale chips here. It’s like eating a nice meal at a nice restaurant. The other thing about food that I really appreciate is that they supply both breakfast and lunch, and both are great. How they have such great food, great speakers, and keep the price extremely reasonable is beyond me.

So, now for the part of this post were I fail miserably to cover all of the wonderful moments and one-liners from all of the speakers.

Zeldman (@zeldman) provided the bookends for the conference opening with his talk on “Understanding Web Design” and his closing “A Critique Apart” (he critiqued audience members websites). Zeldman is always very entertaining. He has a great sense of humor and really gets the crowd going. The main thrust of his opening talk was what he calls “Empathetic Web Design”, basically design that begins, and ends, with the user. This was something that really resonated with me and also seeped into a lot of other talks during the conference. “Being able to put yourself in the user’s shoes is more important than standards compliance.” It was great stuff.

Eric Meyer (@meyerweb) delivered wonderful (and timely for me) talks on CSS frameworks, reset stylesheets, and debug stylesheets. I got a lot of helpful tips from his talks that will directly influence future development decisions I make.

Jason Santa Maria (@jasonsantamaria) gave a brilliant talk titled “Storytelling By Design”. This was one of those talks that as a developer I was initially skeptical of but still came away feeling very inspired. He also walked through some of the thoughts behind his recent blog redesign which I found very enlightening.

Luke Wroblewski’s talk on “Web Application Hierarchy” was great and packed full of advice for people building web applications. Luke has done lots of research on web form design and layout. In fact he wrote a book on it. The great thing about Luke’s recommendations is that he backs them up with eye-tracking studies that prove them out. He recommends laying out pages so that users can process information “straight down”. He mentioned simple (you might think obvious) things like not hiding required elements. He talked about putting things into simple hierarchies that give users page “anchors” to which they can return.

Heather Champ’s (@hchamp) talk on “Shepherding Passionate Communities” was very interesting. She had lots of great (and scary) stories from Flickr. This was one of those talks that was on the edge of my interests but I still found lots of good nuggets. She talked about leading your users by example which really got me thinking about the products I currently work on and how I might “lead by example”.

Liz Danzico (@bobulate) used jazz as her illustration for talking about “The Framework Age”. This talk was one of my faves. It really challenged me to think differently about the web applications I build. How can we provide frameworks that allow our users to “improvise”? I also thought her talk had some interesting implications when thinking about managing software development teams as well. She also had a great line, “Be exquisite in your simplicity”.

Dan Cederholm (@simplebits) gave a great A-Z talk on bulletproof web design. It was filled with lots of great tips that I can hopefully apply to some upcoming work (as soon as I can toss IE 6).

Jeremy Keith’s (@adactio) talk on “Patterns in the Process” had lots of great stuff. I was especially interested in the section on user testing. I have felt a desire to get in front of users sooner with a lot of the work that I do. Jeremy’s talk reinforced this for me. He talked about his company Clearleft’s product Silverback which helps folks conduct quick and simple user testing on a Mac.

Derek Featherstone (@feather) gave a talk titled “Accessibility Beyond Compliance”. I have heard Derek speak a couple of times now. Every time I leave feeling touched and very convicted. Derek does a wonderful job of showing you how problematic the web can be for people with disabilities. However, he goes on to show you how often very simple things like making sure the “focus” makes sense can go long way.

Mr. Microformats, Tantek Çelik’s (@t) talk was good as well. He walked through a mock “startup” scenario and how at each step in the company’s growth and development microformats might play a part. It was really cool to see how simple semantic structures can enable new levels of tooling and instrumentation on the web. All of which often provide superior user experiences.

Kelly Goto delivered a very challenging talk on agile development. This talk really got me thinking. She talked about the difficulties for small teams trying to focus on multiple things and how it’s desirable to be singularly focused. She is a huge proponent of Scrum development. After her talk I think I should probably look into that a bit more.

Probably the highlight of the entire conference (for me anyway) was Jeff Veen (@veen). He was just incredibly inspiring. His talk was titled “Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps”. Jeff was on the team at Adaptive Path responsible for Measure Map which was purchased by Google (team and product). His team was responsible for Google Analytics. His talk covered some of the challenges faced by modern web applications related to data visualization. He talked about letting the user know what is “actionable” and “not making them think” as Steve Krug would say. At the same time he talked about “Enabling the user to find their own story”. His talk seemed to really resonate with Liz Danzico’s “improv” talk.

Check out some photos from the event (I’ll probably upload some later) on the Flickr Group.

If you love the web, design, css hackery, and brilliant people you should attend one of these. In fact there is still one more An Event Apart this year in Chicago. Enjoy.