How Being A Graphic Designer Helped Me Through Stuff

As a graphic designer, I'm lucky to make stuff for all kinds of stuff. But more and more, I'm realizing the profound impact it has on the stuff in the rest of my life. Stuff in my backyard. Stuff that holds stuff. Stuff on the open road. Stuff in my bank account. Stuff for my nephew. Stuff with our family's stuff. Stuff for people I'll never meet. And stuff on one of the saddest days of my life. That's a lot of stuff. Plus, we'll update you on all the stuff we've been up to, aside from all this stuff. Tons of new stuff!

Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout

Once you have grasped the basics of CSS Grid, you quickly discover how it enables many existing design patterns in a streamlined, elegant way. However, we shouldn’t see Grid in isolation. Understanding how other parts of CSS work together with Grid is key, in order to get the most out of our new abilities.

In this talk Rachel will be concentrating on a couple of these areas, CSS Box Alignment and CSS Sizing. Rachel will show you practical ways in which a little bit of knowledge in these areas can unlock the full potential of the Grid Specification. You’ll learn how to create useful components and to start thinking of ways in which you can solve design and interface problems in more creative ways.

Redesigning Slack

In this talk, Mina will be highlighting the struggles, the solutions and the workflow when redesigning and rebuilding Slack, and specifically how the team uses CSS Grid in production, and how it optimized the experience for performance and accessibility.

Designing Powerful User Experiences With Psychology

What do an overnight 40% drop in road accidents, a night in on the couch watching TV and a good night’s sleep have to do with digital product design?

Humans only have limited mental capacity and no-one is ever operating at 100%. We are all influenced by the world around us and by how our minds work. As designers we need to be able to understand this and design for it.

To help you understand how psychology can transform your designs, we’ll look at:

• The micro: Psychology to optimize Interaction Design. How psychology can help design the perfect search UI and how to apply to psychology to design bullet-proof UIs.
• The macro: Psychology to transform the User Experience. How to use psychology to create innovative user experiences and transform digital product design

After the talk, you’ll be able to:

• Design product, app and website UIs that match how people think and behave.
• Apply a framework to design innovative digital products.
• Make better, informed design decisions and advocate to the wider team using psychology theory.

Name That Script!

How many third-party scripts are loading on our web pages these days? How can we objectively measure the value of these (advertising, a/b testing, analytics, etc.) scripts — considering their impact on web performance, user experience, and business goals?

We’ve learned to scrutinize content hierarchy, browser support, and page speed as part of the design and development process.

Similarly, Trent will share recent experiences and explore ways to evaluate and discuss the inclusion of 3rd-party scripts.

Fast By Default: Modern Loading Best Practices

Optimizing sites to load instantly on mobile is far from trivial. Costly JavaScript can take seconds to process, we often aren't sensitive to users data-plans and browsers don't know what UX-critical resources should load first. Thankfully there's a lot we can do to give our users a MUCH better loading experience. Watch Addy Osmani (and friends) illuminate new loading best practices for diagnosing and making real world sites load instantly today.

Cross Cultural Design in the Age of Globalization

In this talk, award-winning creative director Yiying Lu will share her 10 years of cross-cultural design practice for global brands and businesses such as Disney, Twitter, 500 Startups, Wasabi Warriors and so on. She will tell her personal stories of how she created artworks for the Twitter Fail Whale, the Conan O’Brien Pale Whale, the official Dumpling Emoji, as well as the Shanghai Disney Recruitment Campaign. Additionally, she will mention her unique experience as IDEO’s first Artist In Residence in China. Join Yiying on a journey of exploring cross-cultural creativity through colorful logos, whimsical illustrations, symbolic typography designs with occasional puns & jokes - as she has been working on her stand-up comedy sketch for a while.