Hints and Suggestions: The Design of Web Design

The web is fundamentally different from other platforms, built around a radical political vision for resilience, adaptability, and user control. With that vision under threat, the Cascade takes on an almost absurd task – styling unknown content, with unknown collaborators, on an infinite and unknowable canvas, across browsers, languages, writing modes, and device interfaces.

This is a dive into the origins of the web, and CSS in particular – the design constraints, the range of strange proposals, and how we got where we are. By the end, we have a better understanding of the cascade, and see the ‘CSS is Awesome’ meme in a new light.

Color in CSS Or: How I Learned to Disrespect Tennis

Everybody’s talking about container queries, nesting, scroll-driven animation, and view transitions. In all the excitement for these new modules, one topic is a bit overlooked: color in CSS. Manuel Matuzović summarises all the new things we can do in CSS with color to create flexible, scalable, accessible, and user-friendly design systems.

Oh, and he talks about squash…

Thinking in Systems to Design Your Personal Design Principles

As design practitioners we often use design principles to help give definition and act as an anchor point to the decisions we make about products and services.

What if you took a bird’s eye view of your values, the system that makes up your career, and the goals that you have as a practitioner and used those to create your own design principles?

In our complex landscape, I’ve often felt that our processes and methods fall short of guiding us as practitioners, despite designers being capable of so much more. I’ll share why I think creating personal design principles is an important exercise and how a systems mindset is crucial, and using my own journey as an example, and hopefully provide tools that inspire your own creation of personal design principles.

Stormy Seas, Shape-shifting Creatures and Picture Books

In this talk, award-winning author illustrator, Paddy Donnelly, shares his experiences on breaking into the picture book world and how his childhood in Ireland has inspired his stories. Paddy is a self-taught author/ illustrator, coming from a background in web and UX design. He’ll talk about how he transitioned from the world of digital design and established a career writing and illustrating for children. He now has over 20 picture books under his belt, including Fox & Son Tailers, The Vanishing Lake, Here Be Dragons, Hom and Wolves in Helicopters, with many having been translated into multiple languages.

Paddy grew up on the rugged cliffs of the Irish coastline, looking out on the stormy waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Surrounded by the many myths and legends emerging from the land and sea, these stories were destined to bleed into his picture book illustration. Winner of the Judges’ Special Award at the 2023 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Awards, Paddy will share the inspiration he draws from the landscapes and seascapes of Ireland, his writing and illustration process and how he established his career while being completely self-taught. He'll also take a deep dive into some of his latest picture books.

Creativity Cannot Be Computed

Computers are great. But should we put them in charge of creativity? Can they push boundaries, take moral stances, move audiences or turn personal experiences into works of art that resonate? In his talk, Hidde will make the case for making and enjoying art, in all its shapes and forms. We'll explore what makes art special, to understand better what it means to delegate its creation to computers.