Say Something!

For the last ten years Chris specialised in lettering. But even though she works with text and draws letters every day, until very recently, she didn’t actually say anything.

In this talk Chris will trace her transition from a designer who draws what her clients ask her to draw, to an artist who write her own texts and initiates her own projects.

She’ll consider why it is so hard for some of us to say anything at all, what her grandma’s reaction to her coming out has to do with it, and what finally got her to speak up.

Looks GREAT To Me: Getting Past Bare Minimum Code Reviews

Ah code reviews. We need them, but we dread them. We do them, but not well. How do we deal with gigantic PRs? Why can't we write effective code review comments? How do we make code reviews shorter? Is SSDaaRB (Single Senior Developer as a Reviewer Bottleneck) something we just have to accept? In this talk, I'll not only answer these questions, but give you actionable advice on how to improve your code review today!

Typographer vs. Accessibility

Designing for accessibility sucks 😩! It is limiting creative expression, making things look ugly, and is mostly for the blind anyway. But is that really true? How can sublime typography and accessibility go hand in hand?

In this talk, Oliver confronts himself with his own misconceptions as a designer and type nerd. Is 16 px the required minimum font size? Is high contrast necessary? Should you really avoid serif typefaces? And is Comic Sans best for dyslexic readers (while being the worst for everyone else)?

In a fun, engaging session, Oliver takes an often overwhelming and fuzzy topic for creatives and breaks it down. You will walk away inspired 🤩 with practical guidelines on how you can set the text of your next design project beautifully accessible, to reach and convince more people.

The Gentle Art of Design Feedback

One of the surest and cheapest ways to quickly improve a piece of design is to get some feedback. The difference that good and actionable feedback can make is extraordinary. And yet, we so rarely engage in design feedback. In fact, it is probably the most underused and under-appreciated design tool that we have. Why is that?

The answer may be simple. If you do design feedback poorly, it feels like wasted time, where people are unsure what to say, and feel awkward saying it. We have all suffered through meetings where people give you unfounded onions, which is frustrating, or nod their heads in approval, which is nice but doesn’t really help you to improve your work.

The barriers to effective feedback are practical and psychological. There is a lack of processes and techniques, and people feel apprehensive about both giving and receiving feedback. When something is unclear and unpleasant, we avoid it.

In this talk, David will focus on the psychological barriers to good design feedback. He will share practical advice, as well as some Jedi mind tricks, for how to enjoy having your design critiqued, and how to critique other people’s design without anyone feeling uncomfortable.

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

The web is becoming an eerily lifeless place. Its public spaces are filled with a mix of bad faith actors and automated predators like bots, advertisers, clickbait attention-grabbers, and angry twitter mobs. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures are quietly hiding out of sight. Generative AI systems are about to make this situation worse. We now have tools that can churn out tens of thousands of words, images, and videos in seconds. The volume of mundane, low-quality, and uninspired content published to the web is about to explode. How will we find original insights under this pile of cruft? How will we figure out which authors are flesh-and-blood humans we can form emotional and intellectual relationships with? And does it even matter if something was made by an AI instead of a human?

Now is Better

Stefan Sagmeister looks at the world from a long-term perspective and presents visualisations that arrive at very different conclusions than you get from Twitter and TV news.