Let’s Work Together!

Nobody works alone in a vacuum, and successful work hinges on how well a team communicates and collaborates with each other. This talk will explore many methods, tools, and techniques teams use to produce great web experiences.

How do front-end development teams make sure they write clean and consistent code together? How do designers ensure colors, typography, and other design elements are used correctly? What deliverables should be created in an effective web design process? How are decisions communicated with the team, stakeholders, and the broader organization?

There are no “right” answers to these questions, but this talk will cover some important principles and helpful tactics to help your team make great work together.

Animating Vue

As superfluous as something like animation may initially seem, you can tell a lot about framework by the way that it handles the concept of time. Idiosyncrasies and race conditions in rendering reveal themselves, pauses in DOM and virtual DOM diffing can be exposed. This is one of the ways Vue shows itself to be uniquely capable and elegant.

In this session, we'll cover the basics of working with Vue, how to use the component and some of its offerings to create fluid effects in the browser. We'll move on to watchers, the reactivity system, and transitioning state. Finally, we'll talk about lifecycle methods, SVG, and pushing our animations to the next level.

Cheating The UX When There Is Nothing More To Optimize

You have optimized every line of code of your site / mobile application, used all the techniques at your disposal to have the fastest loading time possible. Yet, users still complain about the slowness. Let’s learn to use different design techniques and UX to work performance also at the level of user perception.

SVG: So Very Good

Icon fonts! CSS-only illustrations! High-resolution GIF animations! Today’s web designers still regularly and enthusiastically employ these techniques… yet they’re all a better fit for SVG, a powerful vector image format that’s already old enough to drive a car.

Join me for an impassioned and entertaining introduction to your new favorite image format: What it is, how it works, and why it’s so awesome.

Together we’ll cover:

• The trouble with high-resolution imagery
• The inventive hacks we’ve used to this point
• How some of our pre-SVG techniques hurt users
• SVG’s surprisingly long history
• How SVG works
• The possibilities of SVG beyond iconography
• What the future holds for SVG

Letters From Oz

Over the past 10 years, Australian designer and artist, Gemma O’Brien, has taken her passion for typography and built a flourishing career around drawing letters. Her bold type and detailed illustration can be seen in work for advertising and editorial clients or painted large-scale onto the walls of galleries, offices and interiors around the world. At SmashingConf 2017, Gemma will tell the story of her big break in the design world, explain how an Australian outlook shapes her work, and consider the importance of analogue craft in the digital future.

What’s Next? The Future of Mobile in Business

For 30 years, IT and personal and mobile computing have evolved to encompass and extend (and disrupt) the industries it touched – from telecommunications to entertainment, and now apparel. Will it continue to disrupt or will Moore’s Law stop its ascent? Horace Dediu discusses innovation and the future of mobile, and explores what the post-mobile world will look like as Apple, Google and others are shaping the mobile experience of the future. Other highlights from the conversation include:

• Understanding the factors that drive adoption of disruptive innovations

• Recognizing the next disruption from patterns of previous ones

• How to resize scope of opportunity when the basis of competition changes

• Other “white spaces” Horace sees that are ripe for disruptive innovation, including education industry and transportation

Real Work/Life Balance in the Studio

After breaking away from agency life and having gone independent, Anton & Irene are treating their Brooklyn-based studio as their long-term passion-project. Now in its third year, they finally managed to find the perfect balance between working on client work (and getting paid!) and working on self-initiated projects (for free!).

They will share their experience on how to successfully have a good work/life balance while producing creative work for both.

Evaluating Technology

We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there's more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that?

This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let's take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies and together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

10 Things I Have Learned After Art School

Being a freelance creative is pretty much about making mistakes and learn from it… repeat, repeat, repeat. There are definitely mistakes each of us have to make, and there are also ones that others made for you so you don’t have to.

Among all the things I learned in 15 years, I narrowed them to 10 most important things to live by, and I would love to share that with you. And oh, because you probably don’t know what illustrators do, so I share a bit of that as well.