Be the Black Sheep

It's human nature to follow the crowd, but in order to stand out, you sometimes need to stand-alone. Mike Kus believes that every client is unique, yet many websites are starting to look the same. In this fascinating 30 minute talk, Mike will share the secrets of how to extract an organisation's identity, and use it as the inspiration for crafting truly distinctive web design.

Typography is Code

Text is everywhere. We read more than ever, probably consuming more written content from glass than from paper. Designing a quality reading experience for dynamic text requires a mindset and workflow different from traditional print typography.

All digital text is processed by algorithms, so every aspect of how words and sentences are displayed can be shaped with code. This makes programming an essential and powerful skill for designers and typographers. It’s time to explore and embrace methods that will make digital reading interfaces better than printed paper.

In his talk, Frank will show details from his work and speculate about the typographic workflows of the future.

From Pages to Patterns

The process of building a pattern library or any kind of modular design system requires a different approach to delivering a set of finished pages. Even when the final deliverable is a pattern library, we often still have to design pages for approval. So, when everyone is so used to working with pages, it can be difficult to adopt a new way of thinking—particularly for those who are not designers and developers.
This talk will look at how we can help everyone in the team adopt pattern thinking. This includes anyone with a decision to make—not just designers and developers. The whole team can start developing a shared vocabulary and attempt to make the challenge of naming things a little easier.

Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind

Working with CSS is tricky enough as it is; working with legacy CSS can be nightmarish. In this talk, we’ll look at how we decide what to refactor and when; how we can refactor code whilst still shipping features; how to avoid regressions when adding new CSS; how we can avoid the dreaded refactoring tunnels; running new and legacy code in tandem; and a bunch of other neat little tips and tricks.

The Joy of Optimizing

Images are by far the greatest bottleneck to performance on the web, and with the average web page size now about 2.5MB large (images taking up 65% of that), we need to tame the beast. This talk will dive deep into image rendering and performance optimization techniques, and demonstrate how to implement them in your own work with practical examples to make your web projects noticeably faster.

Beyond Measure

Site analytics. The quantified self. Big data. We can track, measure, and store more than ever before. This is naturally exciting to designers and technologists who want to make better informed decisions. But more data doesn’t necessarily create more meaning, and might even make it harder to see what matters. Human experience does not reduce to an engineering problem and what we can’t count still counts in an increasingly quantified world.

Be Stubborn. Be Naive.

An idea is usually under attack as soon as it takes its first breath: excuses why it won’t work, warnings of how you’re wasting your time, fear that it'll fail–or even succeed. To move an idea from your brain into the world, it sometimes helps to be stubborn enough to ignore those who say your idea won’t succeed, and naive enough to believe it will. I’ll share some of my projects, from the silly to the serious, to show how stubbornness and naiveté helped make them each a reality.