Schedule

• Details

  An Evening with Shopify

  Join the Shopify Partners team for an informal evening of short and informative design-focused talks. Whether you are a seasoned web designer, considering getting started, or just keen to meet other web professionals, you are most welcome to join us.

  Drinks will be provided, and all are very welcome to stay after the sessions finish to mingle and chat.

  Time: Talks will kick off around 7pm (doors open from 6.30pm) and we'll be wrapping up around 9pm.
  

  Cost: Free! 

  Location: This workshop will take place at The Black Box:
  18-22 Hill St, Belfast, BT1 2LA

• 19:00

  Talk Details
  

  Paul McKeever

  Getting a Real Job at a Big Company

  Three short stories on design leadership.

  What's it like to go from working with design in an agency environment to building a product?

  Paul tells his story of working with design in three very different environments, and what he learned about being an entrepreneur and leader along the way. 

• 19:45

  Talk Details
  

  Nicola Carruthers

  How to Run a Business with Your Husband and Not Kill Each Other

  Working with your significant other presents a unique set of challenges. How do you grow from freelance to agency, while keeping the marriage afloat and raising three kids? Nicola Carruthers shares the mistakes she's made, so you don't have to. In addition, she'll cover some of the things her and her partner learned about striking a work/life balance. 

• 20:30

  Talk Details
  

  David Bailey

  Further Together: Designing Culture Change

  The Global Experience Language (GEL) is the BBC’s shared design framework. It underpins the design of their entire online output. David’s team facilitate the origination and development of GEL, enabling a more efficient design department produce consistent UX across the BBC online.

  David's talk focuses on the challenging combination of strategy and culture in a large organisation, and how their department’s joined-up approach is inspiring change whilst benefiting the BBC’s ongoing digital transformation.

• 8:45

  Registration and Welcome

• 9:30

  Talk Details
  

  Christopher Murphy

  We Are Orchestrators

  It’s been nearly 30 years since the birth of the web, and in that time our role as designers has changed dramatically.

  In the 90s we designed for a desktop context, focused primarily on standalone experiences. A decade ago, with the introduction of the iPhone, our remit expanded, embracing the challenge of designing for both desktop and mobile contexts. The recent emergence of a ‘connected landscape’ has transformed our industry once again. The challenge we now face as designers is to build ‘ecosystems’, considering hardware and software; desktop and mobile; web and native….

  As we race headlong into the future, a new role is emerging: the designer as ‘orchestrator’, a strategist transcending disciplines, akin to the ‘auteur’ from the world of film.

  By learning from the medium of film we’ll identify strategies for managing experiences holistically, delivering a total experience — or gesamtkunstwerk — that is both moving and memorable.

• 10:15

  Talk Details
  

  Laura Elizabeth

  Launching Your First (Side) Product

  Many people, whether it's freelancers or business owners, in-house designers or developers, make products in their spare time. But have you ever thought about selling your product to others who would find it useful? In this talk, you'll learn how you can successfully launch your first product and start creating an income from it. We'll go from finding and validating your idea, building the product, all the way to getting your first customers.  

• 10:55

  Morning Break

• 11:20

  Talk Details
  

  Harry Roberts

  Why Fast Matters

  We’re all — hopefully! — well aware that performance is important; it’s great for business and it’s great for our users. But things are still not fast enough. With more and more emerging markets coming online, and more and more apps moving to the web platform, we’re reaching an intersection where connections are getting slower and websites are getting heavier. In this talk, we’ll learn just what these emerging markets mean to us, and how we can begin to move in the right direction.

• 12:05

  Talk Details
  

  Chris Armstrong

  Creating an App on a Shoestring Budget

  The workflows and processes preached by Google and Facebook (eg their five-day design sprint) work great if you have a team of 20+ and/or $2million in the bank, but how about when you’re bootstrapping and can only afford a couple of days a week?

  Chris will talk about lessons learned developing creative collaboration platform Niice with a part-time team and no investment.

• 12:45

  Details

  Lunch

  See our location guide for recommendations.

• 14:00

  Talk Details
  

  Eva-Lotta Lamm

  Visual Literacy and Visual Fluency

  Why expressing our thoughts visually is a superpower we should master

  We are visual creatures by nature. We start to look at the world around us and make sense of what we see before we start to speak. We consume hundreds of images every day: photographs, infographics, diagrams, maps, icons, emoticons. We are pretty much experts when it comes to understanding information presented in a visual way. But when it comes to expressing ourselves visually, we are often not as well versed. We might pick some emoticons to add a personal touch to messages or share a photo, but we still too rarely (or never) use the full potential of visual expression to make our important ideas and thoughts heard and understood. We talk at length but we don't get up often enough to sketch out our ideas on a whiteboard in front of our colleagues. We write a lot, but we don't use the power of visual structure and spatial arrangement enough to give our words an extra layer of meaning and make them quicker and easier to scan.

  In her talk, Eva-Lotta will show why visual literacy and visual fluency matter and how images, visual structure and spatial arrangement can complement words in a powerful way. She will talk about her experience in using pen and paper (or marker and whiteboard) to explain complex problems and share the insights she gained in the process.

• 14:45

  Talk Details
  

  Sareh Heidari

  Scaffolding CSS for Scale

  Ever thought about localising your site, but realised it led to a lot of messy duplication? Do you want to re-use component styles, but have some styles overwrite others due to that cascade? Not sure where to start with CSS architecture?

  In this talk, you'll learn how to get started with your own lightweight, localised CSS setup. We'll go through how we use Grandstand, a CSS framework built by BBC Sport, as the scaffolding for our CSS. Starting with bare bones of just ~10kb, it has the flexibility to allow layouts in 10 scripts for 20+ languages, and we’re using it across the BBC News & Sport sites.

• 15:25

  Afternoon Break

• 15:50

  Talk Details
  

  Sharon Steed

  Cultivating Community: Building Powerful Relationships by Communicating with Empathy

  One of our most valuable commodities as humans is our ability to build relationships — both personally and professionally. And the key to any successful relationship is empathy: being able to understand someone, connect with someone and view the world through their eyes. The problem is that the empathy needed to cultivate relationships, foster collaboration and build strong communities is often times lacking, especially when we are around people who are different from us. If empathy is the tie that binds us, then vulnerability is the thread that holds that rope together.

  It’s time to change the status quo in tech. Let’s explore the impact of empathy on communities. We’ll discuss how communication plays a role in building successful relationships; how empathy fosters highly collaborative teams; and finally we’ll talk about true accessibility. Why? Because innovation is at its best when it’s inclusive. And to be inclusive, you must be empathetic.

• 16:35

  Talk Details
  

  Una Kravets

  The Power of CSS

  CSS and HTML alone are much more powerful than people tend to give them credit for. From fauxtoshop to recreating common UI elements and querying for browser information via at-rules, CSS gives you a lot of control. This talk will go over some of these superpowers, patterns and capabilities, keeping accessibility in mind along the way. You’ll definitely learn some tricks and hacks and why you should or shouldn’t use them.

• 17:15

  Details

  End and Drinks!

  Come to 21 Social for a free drink on us!

• 10:00

  Talk Details
  

  Harry Roberts

  Front-End Performance: Building Faster Websites

  Every case study, every report, and every bit of feedback always tells us the same thing: speed matters. It’s good for users, it’s good for accessibility, and it’s good for business. But why are modern browsing experiences so slow? If technology is getting better, why are websites getting worse?

  In this workshop, we’ll take an in-depth look at:

  • how the network really works, and how to design around it
  • how to keep websites fast whilst keeping clients and stakeholders happy
  • how to optimise our assets for faster delivery
  • how to trick the browser into delivering assets with different priorities
  • how to measure and profile performance wins and losses
  • a whole host of tips, tricks, and techniques to help us deliver the same experiences in record times
  • a bunch of fascinating little factoids and trivia which help shine a light on what’s really going on under the hood
  • how to prepare for the web (and its users) of tomorrow
  • lots of naughty little micro-optimisations, just for fun
  • and a lot, lot more.

  This workshop is targeted at intermediate to advanced front-end developers, web designers, and software engineers, or anybody who writes code. There will be resources and case studies for you to take back to non-technical stakeholders to help convince them of the power of performance.

  You will need a laptop, and something for making a lot of notes.

• 10:00

  Talk Details
  

  Eva-Lotta Lamm

  Sketching Interfaces

  Rapidly develop and iterate website designs and app interfaces, alone and in groups

  Sketching is a core skill and tool of any designer. It is a quick and cheap way to ideate, develop and iterate on possible design solutions, both alone and with a group.

  In this workshop, we will take a closer look at when and how to use sketching in the design process, how to make your sketches communicate more clearly and efficiently and how to run a collaborative sketching session with a group of people. We will start with basic sketching techniques and build up the pace through a mix of theory, exercises, practise sessions and group critiques.

  What you’ll learn

  • when to use sketching in the design process
  • sketching out flows to provide an overview
  • sketching detailed screen designs
  • sketching interactions and transitions
  • labelling and annotating your sketches
  • how to decide on the right level of fidelity for your sketches
  • how to run a sketching session with your team
  • tips and tricks to enhance your sketches

  Who should attend

  This workshop is ideal for designers, developers, product managers or anyone who is involved in creating websites or applications and wants to add sketching to their range of tools.

  All skill levels are welcome and no previous sketching skills or knowledge are necessary.

• 17:00

  Workshops end