And So The Mystery Begins...

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

What we talk about when we talk about web performance

As the numbers of people who access the internet continually grow, and the devices they use diversify, one thing is clear: speed and performance are a top priority.

Despite this, the average web page size has more than tripled in the past 5 years, and many web techniques, platforms, tools and practices don’t seem to champion performance, or consider its implications. One of the biggest challenges, especially in the early days of mobile and responsive, was simply the absence of good information to build awareness about performance impacts.

Luckily, our conversations about performance-related choices are getting better-informed: in the past few years especially, compelling tools and data are being shared that help us measure, track and understand the real state of performance and how it affects our audiences; and techniques are emerging to help make insightful and responsible design and coding choices.

Living Design Systems

Product design and development can cover a range of devices and platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, responsive web applications and web sites, desktop apps, and web-based prototypes… and if you work in a very large organization, you may have a range of products and features to add several variations or themes within each of these areas.

In order to stay productive and effective across teams, platforms, and devices, systemic design and development is imperative. UI Libraries and Style Guides are a great step towards keeping everything aligned. But how can this style guide be a maintainable, useful resource rather than a distraction?

Learn from a product designer's perspective from past and current projects ranging from small teams to large enterprise teams — how she and her teams have strived to maintain a 'single source of truth' for a truly living spec through a living style guide and prototype — all of which can improve your product design and development lifecycle.

The New Front-End Stack: JavaScript, APIs and Markup

The emergence of Git centered workflows, around modern build tools, static site generators and modern browsers, have changed the way most front-enders work.

Matt Biilmann will cover how a new stack is emerging and how this will change how web sites and web apps are built in the future.

Alice in Web Animation API Land

Animation is back in the web development tool chest! We know of declarative CSS Animations and Transitions and fully featured JavaScript animation libraries like GreenSock, but there's a third, dynamic option: the Web Animation API! In this talk Rachel Nabors will take you on a magical journey with Alice from Wonderland to show you how this new API is used to run the CSS Animations in your browser and how you can use it to generate and manipulate animations in your project. Colorful, interactive, useful fun for all disciplines.

Momentum: Crafting a Creative Culture

We have arrived in an age of design. No longer relegated to a function of the marketing department or tacked on to an engineering process, Designers are increasingly taking leadership positions in the top companies in tech. But how do we manage creative teams to achieve their full potential? I'll share stories from my years of leading product development — both successful and not — to show that investing in culture might be the best competitive edge you can gain.

Design Systems in Difficult Places

Gone are the days of knowing what our content is, where and when it’s being displayed, and what our users might be doing at the time. We’re all designing systems now. Modular bits and pieces designed to fit together flawlessly and responsively whenever the user needs it. Or are we happy designing in abstraction without getting our hands dirty with the real problems of web design: People problems, technology problems, content problems.

Mark has been working in large scale publishing design systems for a decade or so, and in this talk, he will walk through the challenging design systems he’s been involved with.