We’ve carefully selected our speakers so that we can give our attendees a combination of UX, responsive design, illustration, animation, and more. The day has been designed with web designers in mind, and every session will offer practical advice that you can start using right away.
Coffee, tea, lunch, and drinks afterwards were included in the ticket price.
Mark Boulton: My Handbook
Over the years, every designer picks up a ton of little tips and tricks along the way. Scraps of code, ways of doing things, stories of how not to do it, and how to do it. In this talk, Mark will share some thoughts from his notebook. You’ll hear tales of designing by committee, the death of typesetting, content mountains and what happened when he led a team of designers in India for a week.
About Mark
Mark is a typographic designer and a member of the International Society of Typographic Designers; author of Designing for the Web and Web Standards Creativity; Britpack alumni; co-creator of Gridset; and was a founding partner of indie publisher, Five Simple Steps.
Mark is currently the Design Director at Monotype following the acquisition of his small design studio: Mark Boulton Design in 2014. Previously, Mark Boulton Design worked with global media companies such as ESPN and Al Jazeera; small brands with big stories like Hiut Denim; technology organisations such as Drupal and Alfresco; and home to the greatest scientific experiment on earth: CERN
Living in Wales with his wife and two small children, Mark likes nothing more than riding up hills on his bike, trying to cook Japanese food, and consistently moaning about the design of bathroom taps.
Bonny Colville-Hyde: Comics are real work
When was the last time your work was shared virally within an organisation? Comics are a great, disruptive tool that can get attention other documents can’t. This session will cover a variety of ways you can use comics in your everyday work to help champion user centred design across teams, departments and even whole organisations.
We’ll look at real world examples of user experience comics that have been used for a range of projects, and design problems. We’ll also cover some basic comic making tips to get you started.
About Bonny
Bonny is a user experience consultant based in Bristol, in the UK. She’s passionate about making things more efficient, effective and satisfying for people by collaborating with clients and changing the way they think of their customers. Her role is flexible, and she likes to adapt to the teams she works with, so no two projects are ever the same - just like the problems she’s trying to solve. Bonny has worked with a huge range of clients and sectors, from international ecommerce giants, through to financial services with complex internal systems, and small charities looking to raise awareness of their services.
Stephen Hay: Easing the Pain of Designing in the Browser
Perhaps you already “design in the browser”, or you see the advantages and would like to get started. If you already design in the browser, you might feel that Photoshop is quicker and easier. If you still design in Photoshop, you could have the idea that designing in the browser seems a bit too much like development. Luckily, there are ways to make the process easier and take advantage of the real benefits of this new approach.
Join Stephen as he walks through a browser-based design from the ground up, demonstrating the thinking, tips, and tools you can use as you follow this process to a finished product.
About Stephen
Californian by birth and Dutchman by choice, Stephen is a designer, consultant and author of Responsive Design Workflow (New Riders, 2013) and contributing author to Smashing Book #3. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and has written for A List Apart and other industry publications, including his popular-but-sparingly-updated blog The Haystack. While spending an increasing amount of time leading workshops, writing, and speaking, Stephen still spends the majority of his time working with clients large and small through his consultancy, Zero Interface.
Val Head: Designing Animation Awesomeness
Gone are the days of being stuck with nothing but hard-cut transitions on the web! The future of web design includes sophisticated animations in its interactions, and it’s up to us as designers to make them both meaningful and awesome.
In this session we’ll cover where animation can add important detail and inform UX; how to get animation ideas out of your head; and techniques for prototyping animations as part of our design process. Just like typography, colour and others, animation is an element of design that can speak volumes in our work. Considering it early in the design process means we’ll be designing the best kind of animations. The kind that can make our work more memorable and enjoyable to use.
The beauty of the web is how freely available it is to people all over the world. However, web sites aren’t always designed with access for everyone in mind. Laura will speak about the importance of web accessibility, and how to convince your boss and colleagues of the advantages of an accessible site. Laura will then walk you through practical tips for designing accessible, usable and beautiful websites.
Laura Kalbag is a designer easily excited by web design and development. Among her list of ever-changing pet subjects are responsive design, accessibility, web fonts and design theory, but she’s really fascinated by anything in the areas of web, mobile and design.
Laura works as part of the ind.ie team, building an independent smartphone that empowers consumers to own their own data.
Peter Boersma: You can do better! - Expand your influence and improve your design process
In order to do great work you need to influence more parts of the design process than creating wireframes or front-end code. In this presentation, I will walk you through the expanded sphere of influence on the user experience. I will encourage you to look beyond your deliverables, outside of your department, and past your current way of working. I will help you spot opportunities and draft a plan to improve your design process.
Peter Boersma is UX Strategist at SDL and a design process freak. Since 1995, he has been designing complex, digital systems at (increasingly internationally-oriented) interactive agencies for clients such as ABN Amro Bank, the UK and Jamaican Inland Revenue departments, Nokia, Shutterstock, Michelin, and Nikon.
At most of his former employers, he made himself responsible for documenting the design processes, as well as optimizing and promoting them, both inside and outside the organization.
Peter has given presentations and taught workshops at many national and international User Experience conferences, some of which he helped organize. Since 2001, he is the host of the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hours.
Leisa Reichelt: The Strategy is Delivery
This talk is a bit about strategy but probably not what you might think of as strategy. It’s about how we make strategy that actually gets good things implemented. It is about changing the way that we work so that our organisations are more able to make better decisions for our end users. It’s about be proud of the projects that make it into the world rather than mourning what could have been if only they’d made it like our Axure prototype. It’s a talk about taking responsibility for helping our organisations to deliver. It has some ideas you might like to try at home.
About Leisa
Leisa is the Head of User Research at the UK Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office, HM Government. She leads a team of researchers who work in agile, multidisciplinary digital teams to help continuously connect the people who design products with the people who will use them. Before joining the public sector she was a freelance consultant and worked with clients including Virgin Atlantic, BBC, SonyBMG, HSBC, The Economist, Drupal and the University of Surrey. Leisa tweets at @leisa and occasionally blogs at disambiguity.com.
Mike Rohde: The Sketchnote Mini Workshop
Mike Rohde will teach the basic elements of sketchnoting, then lead the group in a session where we all create sketchnotes together. The group will share and review sketchnotes and have time for Q&A. This session is perfect for anyone who wants to learn a new way of capturing their ideas: from meetings and conferences to your own ideas and experiences.
Mike Rohde has a passion for simple and usable design solutions. That passion, along with his lifelong habit of recording concepts and observations through sketching and doodling, inspired him to develop sketchnotes—a practical art that translates simple and complex ideas into easily recalled bits of information.
Professionally, Mike focuses on user interface, user experience, visual design, and icon design for mobile and web applications at Gomoll Research + Design in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Mike’s popular first book, The Sketchnote Handbook, convinces people around the world to become sketchnoters every day. Translated into German, Russian, Chinese, and Czech, it guides readers in using their natural visual capabilities to create sketchnotes for better understanding, and to have fun taking notes.
He enjoys speaking publicly about his passion for sketchnoting, sketching, and visual thinking skills at venues across the United States.
Mike lives with his wife, Gail, and children, Nathan, Linnea, and Landon, just outside of Milwaukee. He’s an avid Green Bay Packers fan.
