dsgnday sessions: Recent Episodes
Web Conferences Amsterdam
dsgnday was a full-day conference with eight presentations about the art and craft of web design. It took place on Tuesday 11th of November, in Amsterdam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.