Future of Web Design 2015 in New York

The sessions talked about emerging technologies, perfecting skills that we might already have, and as the name gives away, what the future of web design looks like.

I asked several attendees what they had learned, what their biggest takeaway was, and what they might take back to their job. You can listen to some of their responses below.

The Stand Out Talks

Aaron Gustafson gave a great talk called “Falling in Love with Forms.” He started by openly acknowledging that “forms suck.” And then went on to explain that forms could be easy to build, effortless to use, and accessible. His talk explained in detail how we could make forms more accessible and how the markup you use matters to those who use a screenreader. But my favorite part was almost at the end when Aaron said that you can’t always make an interface perfect, but you can make it usable. You’ll find slides here.

Another stand out was definitely Mina Markham. Mina’s talk was titled “SMACSS Your Sass Up.” If you’re unfamiliar with SMACSS, there’s a whole book on the topic, but the abbreviation means Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS. It’s not a framework, but an approach to writing CSS. Mina did an excellent job of explaining how this approach works within the context of CSS and Sass. There was so much good stuff in this talk, I’ll just link to her slides. But again, my favorite part came at the end when Mina said that we don’t have time to redo everything, so we need to make time to refactor. We can do this by taking time to extract components, create variables, apply naming conventions, and use nesting and `@extend` properly.

Oh, and then there was Jen Simmons’ talk. It blew my mind. Jen is leading the way in rethinking how we make layouts for the web. There’s a lot of power in some newer CSS properties that completely change the game. We don’t need to be stuck to the same old layouts everyone seems to be doing these days. Flexbox, shape-outside, etc. are amazing tools that can give us back some of the creativity we’ve lost on the web. It was truly a great talk, and of course, there are slides.

The Big Picture

I think there was a central theme, and here’s what I saw to be the future of web design: we have to lose the dogma. The web is moving really fast, and it’s easy to get stuck in the way we’re designing for it. Even the way we’re marking it up and the CSS we use.

The web is the medium of the future. And just as time moves quickly, so should I with my methods, processes, and thinking.

Future of Web Design helped me think about being more open to new web technologies, using new CSS properties like Flexbox to create more creative layouts, and to rethink the way I’m using my existing tools. I need to be open to questioning the way I do things. Just because it’s the way others do it, or the way that I’ve done it, doesn’t always make it right or the way of the future.

The web is the medium of the future. And just as time moves quickly, so should I with my methods, processes, and thinking.

The other big lesson that I drew is that we’re all trying to do the best work we can. Most of the speakers work at some great companies, yet all of them admitted to the fact that their work is never ideal. Your code is never as organized as you’d like it, and sometimes you have to use !important.

It’s OK! What’s crucial is that we see ways to improve and are working on them. We kind of go back to my first point. The web is moving so fast, that’s it’s impossible to always be moving with it. And the truth is that the new stuff isn’t always usable in production.

In Conclusion

I’m first thankful to ACL for giving me the time to go to this conference, and to Future of Web Design for putting on a great event. I learned a lot, had the chance to talk with some great people, and came back with some great ideas to implement.