The final speaker at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Jeff Veen, author of The Art and Science of Web Design, who is also one of the founders of TypeKit, which is bringing richer typography to the web.

Jeff’s session, “How the Web Works,” was described as follows:

Quite frankly, you know that a session for An Event Apart will be awesome when the speaker’s blog is unstoppablerobotninja.com and his Twitter handle is simply @beep. Ethan Marcotte, who strikes me as the web equivalent of a Zen master, spoke to us about “A Dao of Flexibility.” He recently wrote a ground-breaking article for A List Apart, Responsive Web Design, so I suspected this would be a pretty profound session.

One of the most invigorating presentations at An Event Apart Minneapolis was given by Kristina, author of Content Strategy for the Web. Her session, “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design,” was summarized as follows:

Erin Malone, co-author of Designing Social Interfaces, spoke at An Event Apart Minneapolis on the topic of “Patterns, Components, and Code, Oh My!” The session description was as follows:

Jeremy Keith, expert on JavaScript and HTML5, spoke to An Event Apart Minneapolis about “Paranormal Interactivity.” The session description describes this as:

Interaction is the secret sauce of the web. Understanding interaction is key to understanding the web as its own medium—it’s not print, it’s not television, and it’s certainly not the desktop. Find out how to wield HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to craft experiences that are native to the web.

The second day of An Event Apart began with Jeffrey Zeldman introducing Eric Meyer. Jeffrey pointed out that there was much one could say of Eric, but perhaps the simplest is to say that he has been documenting CSS since 1996, and browser makers have come to him to ask how to implement CSS in their browsers.

The final speaker of the first day at An Event Apart Minneapolis was Greg Rewis from Adobe. Yes, Adobe was a sponsor of An Event Apart, so this was a promo for Adobe in general and Dreamweaver CS5 in specific, but Greg made clear that he not only promotes Dreamweaver, he uses it quite a bit, just like many of us do. I had the delight of chatting with Greg for a while after the first day finished: he’s quite a character and does a great job explaining the things Adobe has done to make the lives of working designers and developers easier.

One of the key people from whom I learned how to do standards-based markup and CSS is Dan Cederholm, through his books Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design. He has a real knack for taking the complex and challenging and transforming into something seemingly simple and doable. So the opportunity to hear him talk about CSS3 at An Event Apart Minneapolis was a real treat.

One of the most charming presentations at An Event Apart Minneapolis was from Aarron Walter, who talked to us about learning to love humans, something we have all struggled with from time to time, I’m sure. Aarron is also the author of Building Findable Websites, which I am reading and enjoying right now.

Really, the only flaw in the presentation is that Aarron is apparently originally from Iowa. I tried not to hold that against him, as I’m a Minnesotan. I jest of course, I suppose because I’m human.

On Monday afternoon of An Event Apart Minneapolis, the first presentation was given by Luke Wroblewski, with a simple but revolutionary message for us: Web products should be designed for mobile first. Below is a summary of my notes: unless I specify otherwise, these brilliant thoughts are his.

In short, even if you’re not planning on releasing a mobile version, design web products for mobile first.