How I hosted my first Framer Meetup
A recap of the first Madrid Framer Meetup, at the Designit office Nov 4th 2016.
About me: My name is Fausto Pérez. I currently work as a UX/UI designer at Designit but I have an eclectic background: though I worked as a front-end developer for some years, I played in a band and built guitar amplifiers for most of my professional life.
Part of a digital designer’s job — any job, really — is being a perpetual learner and trying to stay up to date. I know some JavaScript and CSS so, when trying prototyping options, Framer seemed like the right tool for me. Once I tried it, I was totally mind-blown by the power and the possibilities of the app. I truly believe Framer is a game changer for designers, so I became a bit of a Framer evangelist inside the Designit office. Sorry about that, folks! 👋
At Designit we have this thing called Practice Development, a company sponsored allowance you can use to learn new skills, attend conferences, etc. When my Framer trial finished, I used part of that money to purchase a license, and set myself on a quest to properly learn the tool. The first thing I did was join the Framerjs Facebook group, set up a GitHub repository and a Dribbble account in which to show my progress.
Some weeks and lots of exercises passed and then I followed this Marc Krenn tutorial about Firebase. Using his code as a foundation, I only modified the visuals, then posted a prototype that got featured in the July 2016 Framer Monthly newsletter, just three months after I first opened Framer Studio, how awesome is that?
At some point I noticed there weren’t any meetups in Madrid and, feeling adventurous, came up with the idea of hosting one myself. We could do it at the Designit office. We have a nice space for around 30 people. We could provide the usual pizza🍕 and beer 🍻 as well, but what to do next?
I put a message on the Facebook group trying to get in touch with the local community — with no luck — but Krijn from Framer answered:
Speaking with my colleagues at Designit they suggested to contact Ale Muñoz, who used to work with us and now works at Bohemian Coding, the company that builds Sketch.
Ale was a splendid help from the beginning👌. He put me in touch with Elena Stoyanova from Framer, who kindly guided me through all the little details about organizing a meetup. Through Elena I met Iván Flores, a Mexican designer working in Madrid at Cabify who had attended an Amsterdam meetup and might be available to join as a mentor.
Being cheeky, I got Ale involved as a speaker and asked Elena about the possibility of someone from the Framer team to join us. A few days later she confirmed that Niels van Hoorn and Krijn Rijshouwer would be attending as well.
So we had Ale from Sketch and Niels and Krijn from Framer as speakers. I mean, this was huge. Meeting the people who create the tools you use in your everyday work is invaluable. These guys were coming to Madrid just for this. I knew this was going to be great.
So, I set up an nvite page with the event details and the Designit marketing team (thanks a lot Carlota!) helped me spread the news. In a couple of days, we already had a full house, and as many people on the waitlist! Sorry to everybody who couldn’t attend, there will be more opportunities for sure!
Before the event I sent a quick survey to help prepare the content: the guests were a few front-end developers but mostly UI/UX designers from local design firms with little previous Framer experience.
The event
As you already might know, the Framer guys are a positive, encouraging crew on social media. I had imagined them as these mythical online people with unpronounceable names, but let me tell you they do exist and they’re even actually nicer in person! It was great meeting you guys!
Pizza and beer were ready, the space was setup with Framer and Sketch stickers on the tables, and people we starting to show up.
We tried a sad attempt at a Facebook live broadcast but we experienced a lot of WiFi problems and, in the end, we gave up. Sorry about that!
After I quickly introduced our speakers, Krijn went through a Framer overview and explained where Framer sits in the design app ecosystem and why it belongs in a category of its own.
The next speaker, Ale, shared very valuable tips and tricks on exporting assets from Sketch, and explained how the two apps communicate together.
Then Niels walked us through a quick introductory example, talking about autocode, draggable layers, events, and the Utils.modulate function.
An improvised break followed, people grabbed a beer or two and a slice of pizza and had a quick relaxed chat.
Then Iván Flores and myself presented some personal prototypes, with the only intention of getting one of those nice Framer t-shirts. Thanks guys!
After the quick presentations, Krijn and Niels suggested splitting people up based on previous Framer experience and having the tables rearranged in small groups. The meetup kinda evolved into something else from there. As soon as people started to write their own code they began to try ideas by themselves and lots of questions and discussion emerged.
We all ended up staying one hour longer than planned and wrapped up the evening having some nice tapas at a few nearby restaurants.
Cool first day prototype by Lucía Gómez:
Learnings
- Setup a good WiFi connection and make sure it can handle the load: people downloading Framer Studio, Facebook live broadcast, etc.
- The nvite system is a bit of a nightmare to manage and that’s where you’ll spend most of the time the previous days: managing the guest list and confirming people are actually attending.
- Some English is OK but try to speak the language of the audience (this relates to Spain, but I imagine this to be similar in non-English speaking countries).
- Have some resemblance of an agenda but be ready to improvise!
And now what?
Where is this going? Hopefully, this was the first meetup of many. We have already had some interest for a second one, and I definitely want to try again. I don’t think we could have Ale or the Framer people every time we meet, but we can try and fly alone for sure.
If you’re interested in attending / helping organize the next one, please get in touch here:
Let me thank Niels van Hoorn, Krijn Rijkshouwer and Elena Stoyanova from Framerjs and Ale Muñoz from Sketch. And also my fantastic colleagues at Designit, without whom this couldn’t have happened!
Keep learning folks and happy coding!
