And So The Mystery Begins...

Have you figured out yet who was the Mystery Speaker this year? ;-)

Designing Systems: Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between

As our lives grow increasingly reliant on digital products and services, designers are asked to deliver coherent experiences across a multitude of platforms and formats, without sacrificing development efficiency and maintainability.

It’s no surprise then, that our industry should find itself obsessed with style guides, pattern libraries and modular front-end frameworks. Not a day passes without a new design system being showcased or a tool launched that promises to ease their creation. Without considering the audiences that will use these systems, and the changing factors that may affect their usefulness, these new tools could do more harm than good.

This talk will review the emergence of design systems on the web, and compare current practice with the development of older systems that have endured over many decades. From the leadership of Frank Pick at London Transport, to the genius of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s humble Lego brick, discover the core tenets of a sustainable and maintainable design system, and the realities we must face when creating them.

You can sketch. (You might just not know it yet.)

Sketching is a great tool for designers (well, actually for anyone who needs to think about complex problems and communicate with others) to have in their skill set. It’s fast, efficient and everybody can do it. Everybody? Yes, everybody… even you.

In this hands-on session, Eva-Lotta will show you some basic techniques to start sketching your ideas. You'll get some hands-on practice on how to sketch simple pictures to inject into your everyday notes and work. She’ll show examples of how easy-to-do sketches can help make your thoughts clearer, your notes more structured and your communication more engaging.

You are invited to sketch along, learn-by-doing right in the session and walk away with a neat little visual vocabulary that you can use straight away in meetings, workshops or your secret notebook.

If you think you are rubbish at sketching and want to get a fun kick-start to getting into using pen and paper (again), this session will be just right for you.

Get your pens ready!

Deconstructing Performance

A web site should be loaded in less than a second; we should reduce the number of server requests; keep your javascript and CSS files merge and compressed under 50 kilobytes.” – these are just a few among technical solutions and recommendations we are getting in the industry to tackle the performance issues. But there is one catch – your users don’t care about kilobytes, milliseconds and number of requests. Performance is not about Mathematics.
Performance is about Perception. Thereby user’s perception of your website’s speed is the only true performance measure.

Crafting for #worlddomination

There is nothing wrong with a healthy dose of ambition, like world domination. The closest thing to world domination is probably changing people's behavior for the better. Have people run more. Have employees work more efficiently. Have people throw away less litter. Have people spend their money more wisely. In other words: crafting small interventions that have huge impact. Polle takes a case or two from his work at IKEA, KLM, Nike and Starbucks on designing for behaviour change.

Innovative SVG Animations

By now most Front-End Developers know the benefits of working with SVG: great support, resolution, and scalable images that can reduce the needs for multiple HTTP requests and be easily scaled to multiple viewports. But SVGs are capable of so much more. In this session, we’ll manipulate vectors with a myriad of creative techniques, ranging from the practical, such as data visualization with React, to the delicate, such as imitating candle smoke with morphing path data. We’ll use SVGs as a window with clipPath, push the boundaries of the CPU with filters, and even combine techniques to create otherworldly effects.

On Icons

Icons save space. Icons look crisp. Icons give quick answers to hard questions: How can we make it nicer? How can we brand it? How can we make it fun? We ♥ icons. Until they start messing with our minds.