SmashingConf NY 2016
I recently had the pleasure of attending SmashingConf in New York. Organized by the people behind Smashing Magazine, the two day conference focused on design, front-end coding and the wonderful things that people are doing with the two. I chose to attend SmashingConf because I had heard that the conference was overall very accessible and friendly for those new to coding and design. Tickets were only $600 and New York was only an overnight bus ride away. I found an excellent deal on a Airbnb nearby and with food was able to do the entire conference for less than $800.
The location of the conference was at the New World Stages on West 50th St, on the actual stage that Avenue Q is performed upon. Having a the set, the gritty fronts of a couple of brownstones, was charming and set a nice mood for the talks.
The first speaker was Brendan Dawes, a designer and artist out of the UK that likes to use explore the fringes of UI and the conveyance of data by making quirky devices like a Play-Doh video controller that adjusts speed of the video playing depending on the amount of surface area that the Play-Doh has, and physical expressions of data like these teal cubes and orange lattice structures that represent his own Twitter activity over the years. His talk, Paper, Plastic & Pixels, really demonstrated the awesome and eccentric things that the Internet of Things is capable of.
The next speaker was Alla Kholmatova, whose talk, Atom, Modules and Other Fancy Particles, explored the best practices of pattern libraries and modular systems. Having never worked with pattern libraries myself, this one was completely over my head, but I imagine someday in my career, I’ll have a eureka moment and be able to come back and make better sense of it all.
Phil Hawksworth then spoke about harnessing the front-end to make static sites, quicker and easier to develop and cheaper to host, more dynamic by using generators, templating, better styleguides, and automation. Shifting and outsourcing the complexity by keeping the distance between the complexity and the user make the site more reactive. His talk was called Dynamic Static Site Strategies (And Other Tongue Twisters).
Sarah Drasner’s talk about SVG animations, Innovative SVG Animations, was definitely one of the more inspirational talks for me. I have zero experience with SVG and a lot of the technical speak was lost on me, but holy hell, do I want to learn to do what she does. I really loved her animations and recommend visiting her site and watching her talk, because it’s all super impressive.
In my opinion, the most entertaining talk of the whole conference was Connected Devices In A Connected World by Stacey Mulcahy, a tech evangelist from Microsoft, who talked about all of the cheap available tech out there that we can use to add to the growing Internet of Things. I was aware of arduinos and Raspberry Pi, but I’ve been so focused on trying to refine my code and get a job that I haven’t really thought about making stuff. Making cool stuff. My wife and I recently bought a new house, and I’m going to be making some cool stuff for our new house. Don’t tell her, please.
We learned about The Future of Preprocessors from Roy Tomeij. With CSS getting better and better, what are preprocessors like SASS still good for and how can we leverage the two together to make better code?
Espen Brunborg explored how to help rekindle creativity and thought in our designs by adding a bit of comedy to the process with his talk, The Secret Life of Comedy. When users get the result that they expected through your design, they feel good. Design should be intuitive. But comedy works when you get an unexpected result. How, and more importantly where, can this be brought into your design?
The ways in which we interface with the web is constantly changing and expanding, especially in the new ways of input (Play-Doh!). In his talk, Adapting To Input, Jason Grigsby delved into the history of all of the different methods of input that we’ve developed throughout the history of computing as well as what the future holds and how we can design for that slightly uncertain future.
The first speaker of the second day of SmashingConf was an intentional mystery and was not disappointing. Seb Lester is a brilliant type designer and calligraphist. Video of his talk is not available, but I highly recommend exploring his site and his YouTube channel.
The Director of Communications for MailChimp, Kate Kiefer-Lee, talked about how developing strong writing skills can help you to reframe other problems that you might encounter in a project. In Writing In The Real World, we learned about how to write in our own voice, with kindness and clarity as well as some great tips for self-editing.
Australian Glenn Maddern then talked to us about how modularization and local CSS can transform the way we write our code. While his ideas do make it very difficult for another user to parse his code, CSS In The Age Of Components is worth watching just to see CSS written using emoticons. I refuse to use them anywhere else, but using them in my CSS could be fun.
Aaron Gustafson’s talk, The Features Of Highly Effective Forms, was full of useful tips on how to leverage HTML5 to make any forms process for your user simpler and more effective. Focused, usable forms optimized for better UI is something that we all want, right?
Mat Marquis spoke next. His talk, Performance Under Pressure, focused on a number of great tips for keeping great performance for your sites at the forefront of your build process, without sacrificing flexibility, maintainability, and accessibility.
In 2000, the various departments of the government of the United Kingdom each had their own website, with completely different designs, layouts, and UIs. With the launch of their Gov.uk initiative, the British government brought all of the departments under one consistent design. This was no easy task and Frances Berriman shared her experiences in navigating those choppy waters in her talk Driving Culture Change With Design.
The conference was closed out with an outstanding talk from Josh Clark. In The Physical Interface, Josh talked about how the nexus of the Internet of Things and the increasing physical nature of our interfacing with that internet is changing the landscape of what is possible. The physical world is becoming more and more digital all the time. How we design for those possibilities is what will make all of the difference.
And that was SmashingConf NY 2016. It was my first real conference and I enjoyed it thoroughly. While much of the talk was a bit over my head, it was accessible and most importantly attainable. I look forward to applying much of what I learned here in the future.
