This year's IDEA Conference (http://ideaconference.org/2009/Home) in
Toronto (September 15-16, 2009) will feature a pre-conference workshop
on Monday, September 14th at MaRS by EightShapes on Modular User
Experience Design & Deliverables.

http://eightshapes.com/2009/07/03/idea-2009-workshop-modular-user-exp...

Description: User experience design teams suffer from a decentralized,
blank canvas approach to creating and documenting a design solution
for each new project.  Screen designs are reinvented over and over
again, every designer seems to have their own unique personality for
communicating their design, and the consumers of your hard work
scramble to piece everything together.

Enter modular user experience design techniques, where you improve
consistency, accelerate production, and raise the credibility and
influence of your work.

In the morning, you’ll learn about components, each a chunk of a page,
and how you can create, vary, and recombine design elements to produce
a better, more usable solution. You will also get a glimpse of
experiences we’ve had creating and managing component and pattern
libraries for many UX teams, and take away useful techniques you can
apply to your work and team’s process.

In the afternoon, we’ll shift gears and explore better ways to produce
better design documentation. Using our own approach – EightShapes
Unify – as a backdrop, we’ll demonstrate techniques for creating
effective UX deliverables. From design strategy to research, page and
component wireframe designs to effective annotations to even
integrating comps and copy, you’ll leave with ample inspirations of
how to better communicate many parts of your design’s story and
collaborate with your fellow designer (even if you don’t use our
specific templates, which we give away for free).

Throughout the day, you’ll be engaged in a combination of informative
lecture, lively discussion, and fun exercises such as “Component
Discovery” (get out your scissors!) and “Deliverable Recipes” (yup,
we’re sketching deliverable page layouts!). By the end of this
workshop, you’ll be equipped to create and reuse design better and
communicate design solutions effectively through more consistent and
systematic documentation techniques.

To register: http://ideaconference.org/2009/Home

Mario Bourque & IDEA Conference planning team