UpFront Conf 2015

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the web community create style tiles, element collages, style guides, pattern libraries, and a slew of other tools in order to break interfaces down to their atomic elements. Our interfaces are going more places than ever before, so this shift is essential to help us better understand what our websites consist of in order for us create smart, scalable, maintainable designs. This session will introduce atomic design, a methodology for creating robust design systems. We’ll cover how to apply atomic design to implement your very own design system in order to set you, your organization and clients up for success.

The front-end workflow has gotten wildly complex. CSS preprocessors and task runners are some of our new favorite things, but other tools and techniques, such as testing, haven’t gotten as much love lately. Testing your front-end code can be a timesaver and saving grace on complex applications, and writing tests has become a crucial piece of the front-end developer’s workflow. We’ll talk about why you should be testing your code, the variety of tests you can write, what each variety is best suited for, testing tools and frameworks, and how to approach writing tests.

Leave the routers and repeaters, the cabling and the splitters all behind. Just bring those phones, and let's go underground. Let's sit on a train and play music, left to our own devices, with our own devices.

Developers understand the need for fast, smooth websites - but how do you apply this to a mobile website and the vast amount of mobile devices out there? This talk is aimed at all developers that build websites and will dive into basic and advanced web performance techniques - there is something for everyone! The talk also covers free tools that developers can use to test and profile the performance of their mobile websites.

Browsers do more than just presenting content - they can also allow us to collect data from the environment. We’ll look at what information we can gather using the web platform, and what kinds of things that we can do by considering the physical situation in which we use our devices.

It's time to get your typographic skills right up to the cutting edge of what is practical and desirable on the web right now. This talk with introduce the tricky decisions around font choice and font pairing, the important part typography has to play within responsive design, and the tricks highly skilled typographers have been using for decades and see them applied to the web.

With 19% of people in the UK accessing the internet using a game console, it’s time to look beyond desktop, mobile and tablet browsers. Browsing the internet on a game console presents us with new challenges, such as designing for the 10-foot UI, and building sites that could be interacted with using voice, gesture, a second-screen, or using a d-pad or a smart watch.

It may all sound a bit far-fetched, but considering how your site will be used by people using console browsers will not only benefit your current users, but also prepare you for the oncoming zombie-apocalypse of internet-enabled devices.

We design sites for a myriad of devices with varying connection speeds. More and more, we’re discovering the importance of fast page speed. Even 100 millisecond delays in load times negatively impact user experience and conversions. The problem is, making a site fast and lightweight is often at odds with other design goals—like creating visually immersive experiences or meeting all of an organization’s rich-media ad requirements.

While a stripped ­down site with no images, set entirely in Arial, is certainly going to be light, it’s not going to accomplish all of our client’s business goals. In this talk, we'll discuss how we can make smarter design decisions, from the beginning of a project, to ensure that our sites perform well. Some topics Yesenia will discuss are optimizing typography and UI, and how to get clients on board.