I Don't Care What Airbnb is Doing

(and Neither Should You)

“Hey, have you seen that thing that Airbnb did? Let's do something like that.”

When thinking about how to solve our design problems, we often look to what others are doing. And when we don't, our stakeholders do. We call this “inspiration”. But at the heart of it is a focus on solutions rather than problems. We fall in love with a solution to someone else’s problem and try to make it fit our own. We contribute to design sameness, and confuse it with reasoned convention. In making things easier for ourselves, we might miss opportunities to really make a difference.

In this presentation at beyond tellerrand, Stephen will explore the why and how of deeply understanding design problems. He’ll look at why it’s important to think outside of the box, when it’s appropriate to look at the work of others, and what to do with it when we do.

Data, Design, Code

For the last few years Shirley has worked with various clients across the tech, media, and journalism industries to create visual narratives with their data. In this talk, she will show some of these past projects, but more importantly, share the lessons she learned while creating these custom data visualisations for the web – across the whole data, design, and code process.

The Scoville Scale of Web Font Loading Opinions

Fonts on the web have a long, storied, and sometimes problematic history for not just web site designers and developers, but typographers, type foundries, and web font hosts too. We all want type to solve real problems but what happens our typographic opinions are in conflict—who takes priority? In this talk we’ll analyse a few of these spicy opinions, rank a few hot takes on the Scoville Scale, and learn how we can improve real-world experiences when using fonts on the web.

Flexbox Holy Albatross

With the Lobotomised Owl Selector and now the Flexbox Holy Albatross I’m worried people are going to think I have a thing about birds. I mean, it’s pretty cool that birds are essentially fluffy dinosaurs. Then again, crocodiles are kind of actual, real dinosaurs, still living today! So, like, they win on that count. Wait, how did crocodiles survive the meteorite impact when all the other dinosaurs died off? What did they know that velociraptors didn’t? Did they have bunkers?

In any case, this talk is the story of a peculiar and peculiarly named CSS layout technique I came up with, what it means to write algorithmic layouts, and how to integrate this layout primitive into your design system via the custom elements spec’.

Take Back Your Web

We used to control our online identities, content, and experience. We now share Twitter names instead of domains; even web developers tweet and post on Medium instead of their own sites. We scroll social media and feel empty instead of reading news & blogs to feel informed and connected. Algorithmic feeds amplify rage & conspiracies, enabling tribal ad-targeting to polarise and spread misinformation, threatening democracy itself.

What happened? And what are we doing to fix it?
That's a big question that will require all of us, our communities, our employers, to shift. I don't want to wait, and you probably don't either.

What can you do for yourself, today?

Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.