Design Systems have been around for a while, and whilst many people love them, there are also critics who say that design systems kill creativity and don’t work over multiple brands. The answer: please add CSS Zen Garden to create Themeable Design Systems.

Brad will also be running a workshop on Design Systems.

Many people want to design and build more accessible products, but they don’t know where or how to start. The truth is, there isn’t one best way to get started.

In fact, there are many easy ways to integrate accessibility into the work you do every day no matter what your role is. Every small change makes a difference to the overall accessibility of a product. Over time, you can scale up accessibility by incrementally changing your product development process – creating into a practice of inclusion within your organization.

In this lighthearted talk, Robin discusses the parallels he discovered between two seemingly unrelated things: his marriage and the new HTTP/3 protocol.

Learn how both have a strange fascination with weird acronyms (RSVP? ALT-SVC? IDK), why setting up a correct HTTP/3 deployment can require more logistics than preparing a big Wedding party, and how HTTPS certificates are similar to Elvis-impersonator-officiated Las Vegas ceremonies.

We look at how to test HTTP/3 in several browsers and with tools like curl and WebPageTest, how to verify it's working correctly, and how to manage expectations. After all, much like Aunt Greta's ugly crystal bowl gift, not all of HTTP/3's features will be a perfect fit for your home(page).

Come for the connections, stay for the quiche!

Beyond the senior level, continuing to grow your career in tech can be daunting – like running through a complex maze. Where once technical skills sufficed, you now need to grow leadership skills. You find yourself going from surfing complicated codebases to navigating complex organizations. You go from working with your close team-mates to a growing number of collaborators & stakeholders, both within and outside the company.

Wrangling humans is harder than code. Actions of leaders have big ripple effects across the company. Yet it is not easy to find great resources to support this journey.

This talk provides a starter guide to the maze of the higher levels in the tech career. Whether you want to advance as a leader, become more effective in your current role or thoughtfully choose your next leadership role — there will be something for you in this talk!

Over the last decade, Responsive Web Design and Object Oriented CSS have grown from exciting new trends into the foundations of modern, component-driven web design. But our medium is not done evolving. In 2018, Jen Simmons coined this the era of “Intrinsic Web Design” – with powerful new tools that allow us to build entire layouts based on the intrinsic needs of each component.

This evolution of the responsive web is becoming more clear with several new features in CSS. We’ll look at a number of these developments, from Cascade Layers to Container Queries and Scope. Not only do these features build on what we love most about responsive components, but they’re designed to address some of the biggest challenges in CSS today.

Part typographic masterclass and part career retrospective, Elliot takes us on a lighthearted journey through nearly two decades of client projects and side projects, covering the highs and lows of life as a jobbing freelance designer, as a Creative Director in big tech, and as the owner of an independent publishing business — all tied together by a deep love for typography, more than a little music, and a desire to share the secrets he’s learned with others. Exploring how notions of success — or rather, creative fulfilment — can be found outside the usual financial metrics, Elliot outlines the path that led him to his recent collaboration with Google to create Google Fonts Knowledge: an ambitious typographic resource for all.

How best do we achieve smooth UI animations when dealing with DOM changes, responsive layouts, dynamic content and user interaction? Well... we start off by flipping our whole approach upside down. In this session we’ll lift the magicians curtain, take a look at some ‘impossible’ animation challenges, and learn how to approach them using a rather exciting animation technique.

Cassie will also be running a workshop on SVG animation.

During the pandemic, after working on Google Chrome for 10 years, Addy — like many other people — started to self-reflect and think about life lessons. He found that self-reflection can be powerful. When we reflect on what we’ve learned or the mistakes we’ve made, it allows us to apply those learnings to our daily lives. Without this, these ideas can end up fleeting and fade away.

But it's not just his own life lessons he was interested in. What would others' life lessons be, and what can we learn from them?. This began a two-year project where Addy asked some well-known names to self-reflect. What were the lessons that stuck with them over time?

In this talk, Addy will cover many of these ‘lessons’ — and whether you’re an engineer, designer, product manager, or otherwise — so you can use them, the way you want!

Despite being the only section of a website that a user never sees, the HEAD is arguably the most important. It is bound to its own unique set of rules and often governs the overall speed of the page.

In this talk, we’ll look at some specific caveats, some fascinating intricacies, and—critically—the optimum order for a faster HEAD. Find out why your HEAD tags are so messy, so vital, and, I promise you, so interesting.

Harry will also be running a workshop on Web Performance.

Not much can surprise you when it comes to interface challenges, doesn’t it? You can design a decent card, a well-rounded accordion and an exquisite hamburger navigation. But what if there are slightly more complex UX challenges ahead of us? How do we make them accessible to everyone around the world? What if you are dealing with complex filters, multi-page forms or multi-step modals and overlays? What about intricate enterprise-grade tables and dashboards? Or perhaps creating a resilient navigation system for a family of 115 websites?

Well, complex UI doesn’t have to be complicated. We need to hide the complexity under the surface, making it easier for everyone to get complex tasks done easier. In this session with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems to make applications accessible and usable, maximizing clarity and minimizing ambiguity along the way. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating complex tables, this session will give you some strategies and tools you need to get better at your work.

You’ve done the research. Presented prototypes. Triple checked your color contrast. Everything’s coming together, until someone tries to create an account using the new site. “LOG IN ERROR! Operation Failed,” the field shouts, with no hint of a potential solution.

UX writing communicates what visuals cannot, adding clarity, credibility, and consistency. In this talk, we’ll discuss ways to think strategically about the words in your designs, from onboarding flows to field labels. You’ll learn what makes great writing great—and ultimately, how to design words that create a seamless experience.

Designer, Developer, Front-end, Back-end, IA, UI, UX — we've spent so much time inventing titles, drawing dividing lines around our skill-sets, building silos, and highlighting differences, that we seem to have forgotten what it actually means to communicate and work with each other. This lack of teamwork isn't really surprising, either: Our species is quite adept at segregating ourselves from our fellow humans.

How can we make this better? Not just in our teams and workplaces, but at our conferences, meet-ups, social networks, user groups, cafes, trains, and public spaces? Dan will explore this troubling issue and see if together, we can find a solution.

As developers, we're learning new skills all the time. But how can we stay creative while progressing our careers? In this talk, we'll discuss about how we can discover new tools and techniques while having fun. We'll learn how making hundreds of demos to unearth new ways of doing things can lead to an entirely new way of working, and most importantly, how to not take things too seriously.

Jhey will also be running a workshop on Supercharging your skills with Creative Coding!