What we learned at Awwwards Conference in Berlin
Together with our design team from Octopus Labs, we visited the Awwwards Conference in Berlin — in this article we will share the things that impressed us the most.
The conference: ideas worth sharing
Each year, the top names in digital design come together at Awwwards Conference. It’s one of the most high-profile design movements, bringing together top designers from across the world to share well-kept secrets, processes behind award-winning projects, and innovative techniques with the potential to reshape the digital industry.
In brief, the key speakers spoke about three main themes:
1. Look how cool I am: here, the narrative was built around impressive visuals, interaction and sounds to highlight impressive design.
However, instead of providing clear guidance, this showreel left us with myriad of questions than answers. But with no doubts, we all were excited and inspired to go home and do something better.
2. Reflection on the creative careers: the passion of these speakers shone through. They talked about their professional journeys, and some of the important mistakes they learned from along the way.
For instance, overcoming anxiety around your design abilities was the key message in the “Embracing the Imposter” talk.
3. Practical staff. This category belonged to developers and engineers who shared new technologies and useful shortcuts.
In this section Chris Heilmann and Surma told us about Progressive Web Apps — technology that, among other things, could merge the app store with your browser. It’s something that’s touted to revolutionise the whole design industry very soon.
Delightfully, some designers fall into this category as well this year — when discussing new paradigms of anticipated design to eliminate unnecessary choices or the methodologies of innovative design.
The evening came to a close with a prize-giving, and the awards being given away from website of the year and the agency of the year — RESN.
Fun stuff
During the conference we played with a new prototyping tool from Adobe XD:
And you could say a few too many cakes were enjoyed during our networking session and afterparty:
Without a doubt, Awwwards did a great job finding inspirational speakers for the event. While some of us most enjoyed ‘hacks for development’, others left chewing over new design thinking processes. Find out below some of the key insights out team took away 👇
“While I really enjoyed a lot of the talks (especially some for TA/VU, Hello Monday and Norgram), I think the most insightful one was by Julia Kloiber. She talks about designing for the public good, but she also specifically spoke about good form design and demonstrated some really good examples of things I think we could (and should) implement here at Octopus. The whole conference will make me want to design more. Seeing all that different work and listening to people talking about their design journey made me want to push the design limits, and do more in terms of UX, UI and interaction — trying to design for tomorrow.”
“This year the Awwwards Conference in Berlin gathered the best digital designers and developers from Europe and other markets. Previously, Awwwards was mostly focused on visual design and front-end development. However, this event felt like an expansion to a wide range of design disciplines and has become much more relevant for various digital specialists. As such, many talks focused on user experience and usability, team and personal development.
I was particularly interested in two topics: how to align different mindsets within the multidisciplinary team using Lenses of Innovation; and how to improve the user experience with Progressive Web Apps. I consider both areas as quite important for modern design practice and am going to apply the findings from the related talks in my everyday job.job.”
“I believe as designers we shouldn’t settle for conventional design. We must push our imagination beyond our limits, discover the undiscoverable and find new ways to bring personality and uniqueness to any products we design. We shouldn’t be looking at aesthetics and ordinary guidelines, but instead we focus on defining design systems and refining our experiences. We are all human after all. All my thoughts are inspired by all talks in the conference. Some more than others, but I am a good listener and deep thinker.”
“The most insightful talk for me was the one by Julia Kloiber, founder of Code for Germany. She talked about how we can use design to make people’s lives better, especially people that have no access to the internet when they most need it. And, how the user experience can change the way people interact with a product they have a necessity to use. She spoke, too, about how we can use design to create a better experience when dealing with government websites. As it says on the website about her, “applying creative solutions to difficult problems”, helping to foster social change.
In terms of good practice, I think we’re already applying a lot of it to our very complex products, but there’s definitely space to improve. In particular, talking with our users and getting feedback. Also, a talk by Joël van Bodegraven from TravelBird in Amsterdam, really stood out to me. I’d really like to improve our process and reduce the amount of choices we need to make every day, because as he said “Choice can be painful” — which, of course, results in a few giggles from our team.”
“I was excited about the talk by Hello Monday and Build in Amsterdam. Especially for the energy and passion they have for their projects, about digital design and in general about their team. In future, I want to talk more with users, to understand better their ideas. In addition, I would like to add more steps before the visual design: user research, rapid prototyping. And follow the iterative process to design quick and test faster to ensure we get the best solutions possible in terms of UX and obviously UI.”
“ The beating heart of the talks was about delivering impressive projects. And indeed, if a strong innovative culture can be a superpower, then all those speakers have it in spades. Amongst all, Tobias Ahlin definitely knows the deal of layers of innovation. His talk about the layers of innovation covered topics on how to embrace myriads of A/B testing to find a best solution, work in cross-functional teams and always stay curious and keep experimenting (fox archetype). Finally, the secret of his Spotify and Minecraft projects were revealed — “companies need to have common goals but conflicting values, and a commitment to consider different points of view and deliver diverse ideas”.
Anticipatory design, or how to be one step ahead when designing user experience, is something designers should master in order to create innovative projects. The recipe is simple: learn about behaviour from IoT, predict decisions with Machine Learning and anticipate future needs by UX. Then, simply map the whole user journey and deliver the right data in the right time. Also, how is it important to find a balance between moving fast and breaking things, versus moving slow and fixing things.”
Bonus: team-time in bohemian Berlin
To cut a long story short, trips are a great opportunity to foster positive team vibes. We had great time together in Berlin, filled with sightseeing, urban art and brutal architecture. We explored hidden coffee shops, reflected on the conference in local pubs and cooked dinners in our fancy apartment. All this helped us to know each other and feel more comfortable as a team.
