Why Side Projects are Stupid

Tobias van Schneider

 

Tobias is an award-winning German designer, raised in Austria and currently living in New York City. Whilst being self-taught, Tobias is focused on Branding and Interactive Design, keeping a multi-disciplinary approach to all of his projects. He had the privilege of working with companies such as Red Bull, BMW, Google, Wacom, Sony, Fantasy Interactive, Stinkdigital, Toyota, Ralph Lauren, Bwin and as Art Director and Lead Product Designer with Spotify USA. His work has been awarded by Adobe, Cannes Young Lions Austria, The Webbys, Awwwards, FWA and more recently The Net Awards Designer of the Year. His work has been featured and written about in highly acclaimed press such as .net Magazine, Computer Arts, FastCompany, Wired, The Washington Post, Inc Magazine, FirstRound Capital, BusinessInsider and many others.

 

Tobias showcased some of his work and side projects that started out as stupid ideas but ended in success.

 

Here are some of the ideas he conveyed during his talk:

Kiss, keep it simple and stupid

Learn something new

Make something useful in a new way

Just make people laugh

Let yourself be stupid

Ignore everybody

Trust your gut

Be a Jack of all trades

Stay busy

 

Have a look at his portfolio, it is very inspiring!

www.vanschneider.com

 

 

​

 

Empowering Designers to Code

Diana Mounter

 

I'm a Product Designer at Etsy, based in Brooklyn, NY. I take a considered approach to design, think less is more, thrive on collaboration, and appreciate critique.

 

If you're a designer who wants to code, you can learn a lot from online tutorials, side-projects, and contributing to Open Source. However, unless you get to work on something with a significant user base, you're unlikely to get exposed to the experiences that will help you write production-level code. For most designers the best way to learn serious front-end development is on the job. Many companies want to attract designer-coders, but they need to back this up with a culture that embraces them, and supports designers with training, tooling, and documentation. In this talk you’ll learn how you and your team can build a designer-friendly coding environment to improve design workflows, team collaboration, and product design decisions.

 

Diana’s talk was about designers that can code as well, also known as a unicorn. She explains why it is important to empower designers to do and understand more of coding and building bridges between developers and designers. She explains the positive difference it makes when designers and developers understands each others fields better and communicate better.

 

Website: http://broccolini.net/

Slide show

 

 

 

Front End Development Transformation at Scale Damon Deaner

 

Damon Deaner is the Head of Front End Development Programs for IBM Design and is responsible for building and supporting the world-class Front End Development competency at IBM. Previously, Damon spent many years working closely with and advising IBM’s largest software customers. Most recently he led the Digital Experience Design Services team, providing user experience services to clients around the globe. He joined IBM in 1999, is from the Great Plains states and currently calls San Diego, CA home.

 

Damon’s talk had a lot to do with front end development and bringing skills and expertise together like:

 

UX Design

Visual Design

Design Research

and Front End Development

 

Damon also started a design camp at IBM where all the new young experts from these different fields come together, it is like a boot camp slash meet and greet mashup.

 

Here is some excellent quotes from IBM:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slide show

 

 

Falling in love with forms

Aaron Gustafson

 

As would be expected from a former manager of the Web Standards Project, Aaron is passionate about web standards and accessibility. In his nearly two decades working on the web, Aaron has worked with a number of companies you’ve probably heard of including Box, Happy Cog, Major League Baseball, McAfee, the New York Times, SAS, StubHub, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vanguard, Walgreens, and Yahoo. He recently joined Microsoft as a web standards advocate to work closely with their browser team. Aaron loves to share his knowledge and insights in written form. His three-part series on progressive enhancement for A List Apart is a perennial favourite and his seminal book on the subject, Adaptive Web Design, has earned him numerous accolades and honours. When he’s not writing, Aaron is frequently on the road presenting at conferences and running workshops across the globe. Back home in Chattanooga, TN, Aaron is the proprietor of the Chattanooga Open Device Lab and helps organise the Code & Creativity talk series with his partner Kelly McCarthy. He is a longtime member of Rosenfeld Media’s “experts” group and writes about whatever’s on his mind at aaron-gustafson.com.

 

Forms. Without them, the web would not be what it is today, but they are challenging from a markup and styling standpoint. In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including new HTML5 field types; validation, error messages & formatting hints; how to mark up and style forms for the greatest flexibility in responsive designs; and best practices for enhancing forms with JavaScript.

Aarons talk was about simplifying form and the HTML and CSS code involved.

 

Slide show

 

 

How to mentor someone without ruining their caree

Steve Hickey

 

Steve Hickey is a User Experience Strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil in Watertown, MA. Educated in print design at UMass Dartmouth, he jumped to the web immediately after graduation. He started out building marketing emails but quickly moved into creating sites and applications built with clean and semantic code. A proud and meticulous craftsman, Steve loves a good design/dev/UX challenge. He's the company typography nerd and is always keeping up with (and mercilessly criticizing) the latest trends and techniques. He's a craft beer aficionado and brewer, an unapologetic Star Wars fan, an aspiring handyman, and a future marathoner.

 

In just three years Steve Hickey went from being a failed product design apprentice to mentoring his own successful apprentices at Boston-based UX agency Fresh Tilled Soil. How did he do it and how can you avoid some of the common pitfalls that come up when mentoring young designers and developers? Use Steve’s experiences to start your own apprenticeship program and spread your influence in the field through the people you mentor.

 

Website: http://stevehickeydesign.com/

 

Slide show

 

 

The future of web design is not code

Vlad Magdalin

 

Vlad is the co-founder and CEO of Webflow, where he obsesses over building software that empowers web designers to be more productive. He designed his first website in 1999, and has been in web development ever since. Vlad's mission is to make the future of web design truly centered around the craft of design, and not so much about the current focus on writing code.

 

If you were starting as a web designer twenty years ago, you could have learned everything you needed to know about coding for the web by reading 'HTML for Dummies' over a few weekends. Then, as new browser technologies like CSS came around, you learned them bit by bit as they came out. It was relatively easy for one person to design, code, and deploy professional-looking websites. This is the way that most of the seasoned veterans in our industry (and speakers at this conference) learned to master their craft. But if you're just starting to get into web design, it's a brave new world. It's nearly impossible for a beginner to get started with building even a basic custom website, because the list of technologies, libraries, and techniques - you need to know about the hundreds of tags in HTML5, the plethora of CSS3 properties (about which entire books are written), responsive design, performance, optimization, minification, pre-processors, CDNs, jQuery, React.js, and the list goes on.

 

With each passing day, it becomes harder and more overwhelming for designers to get started in this field. Most seasoned veterans will tell you to specialize in something - whether it's content strategy, or backend code, or CSS animations, or layout techniques, or WordPress customization. The answer to almost every question is 'you have to learn code'. The real answer to this problem is not more code, but a lot less of it. Other creative disciplines - including 3D animation, video editing, desktop publishing, and CAD - have been solving hard technical problems with software for a long time, and it's time for the web design industry to catch up.

 

Vlad will show a demo of how you can create and deploy a fully responsive, CMS-driven website - live on stage in less than 10 minutes without writing a single line of code. This will be a small glimpse at the type of powerful software we'll need to create to move the web forward.

 

Build Professional Websites Visually

Design and launch dynamic, responsive websites.

Without writing code.

 

Link to site: https://webflow.com/

 

 

Dismantle your workflow and live to tell the story

Dan Rose and Dennis Kardys

 

Dan Rose, a native of Syracuse, NY, is a designer at Adjacent. His affinity for incorporating Photoshop into efficient design workflows inspired him to create Photoshop Etiquette, a comprehensive guide to discernible PSD creation for web designers. He’s also an AIGA Upstate New York board member, and has pioneered regional events like Syracuse Sync and Create Upstate. You can follow his musings on Twitter, @dblizzy. Dennis Kardys is a Chicago based designer and author with an affinity for all things mobile. He's the author of the recently published Mobile Web Triage, and a contributing author to Smashing Magazine's The Mobile Book. As Design Director at WSOL, Dennis leads a team of wisecrackin' designers and developers in helping universities, hospitals and corporations alike take the plunge into responsive design. When he's not busy sketching, evading meetings or squinting at markup, you're likely to find him ranting on twitter as @dkardys , or playing country music instead of maintaining his design ethics blog, robotregime.com.

 

Evolving your web design workflow and embracing the newest and coolest tools of the trade can sure sound like the cat’s pajamas! But abandoning tried and true processes can have significant consequences and cause a heckuva lot of disruption—both for your company and your clients! In this talk ex-cohorts in crime, Dennis and Dan, will discuss the messy business of dismantling (and rebuilding) workflows, tackling tough questions like what to dismantle and when, how to remain productive amidst disruption, and most importantly: how to totally shake things up without getting fired! - See more at: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/55771#sthash.QxlYeimB.dpuf

“Good Design is

Good Business”

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. CEO. IBM

“There’s one key to our future growth: the client experience.”

Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM