Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Doug Schepers – SVG Today and Tomorrow

Doug Schepers PortraitThought SVG was dead? Think again. Once relegated to plug-in status, Scalable Vector Graphics is now spreading rapidly, in browsers, mobiles, and even televisions, with broad native support and graphical script libraries. It’s used on major websites like Wikipedia, Google Docs, and the Washington Post. Whether images or apps, standalone or integrated into HTML, CSS, or Canvas, SVG is a powerful tool in a developer or designer toolkit. With full scripting support, animations, and advanced visual effects, SVG lets you reuse skills you already have. Learn how to use SVG to best effect to add standards-based bling to your webapp or site, see what works and what to avoid, and glimpse where the future lies.

Rachel Andrew – Core CSS3

Rachel Andrew PortraitThis session will be a solid introduction to CSS3 by way of practical examples that can get you started using CSS3 on your projects today.

HTML5 Live, a two week online course from John

A quick note to all that with SitePoint, a fantastic community for web designers and developers, and publisher of many excellent design and development books, I’ll be running a two week course, online starting next Monday on HTML5. And best of all, it’s only $US9.95 (yep, less than a tenner!) Here’s how it works. Each […]

More Web Directions @media podcasts and slides come online

Thanks to a lot of hard work from Guy Leech, a whole bunch of the podcasts and slides from Web Directions @media are now online. It’s always great to give back by making these available, and we’d like to particularly thank our speakers for their generosity. Help us make it all worthwhile by spreading the […]

Tom Hughes-Croucher – An introduction to server-side JavaScript

Tom Hughes-Croucher PortraitServer-side JavaScript has really started to take off, with a number of great projects providing different pieces of the puzzle. This talk will introduce server-side JavaScript and provide an overview of the existing projects as well as some ideas about where it’s all going in the future.

Mark Boulton – Designing grid systems

Mark Boulton PortraitGrid systems have been used in print design, architecture and interior design for generations. Now, on the web, the same rules of grid system composition and usage no longer apply. Content is viewed in many ways; from RSS feeds to email. Content is viewed on many devices; from mobile phones to laptops. Users can manipulate the browser, they can remove content, resize the canvas, resize the typefaces. A designer is no longer in control of this presentation. So where do grid systems fit in to all that?

John Resig – Testing mobile JavaScript

John Resig PortraitThis talk will be a comprehensive look at what you need to know to properly test your web applications on mobile devices. We’ll look at the different mobile phones that exist, what browsers they run, and what you can do to support them. Additionally we’ll examine some of the testing tools that can be used to make the whole process much easier.

Christian Crumlish – Designing for play

Christian Crumlish PortraitTaking ideas from game design, musical instrument design, and play-acting techniques including improv and bodystorming, Christian will address the role of play in digital experiences and how we can design to foster and encourage play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

Sandi Wassmer – Inclusive design is for everyone

Sandi Wassmer PortraitInclusive Design is currently the domain of people who design physical things, like product designers and architects, but Sandi Wassmer is firm in her belief that Inclusive Design applied in the online environment just makes sense.

Remy Sharp – Browsers with wings: HTML5 APIs

Remy Sharp PortraitHTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s plenty for web app developers with new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out as their own W3C specifications. This session will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs. But it’s not all pie in the sky – plenty is useful today, some even in Internet Explorer!

Three must-see presentations which came out of Web Directions @media

After any conference we always do our best to share the love by creating a podcast and resource page for each presentation from the event. Apologies that it has taken a bit of time to get these out there this time – we’ve had the small matter of two more event sites to launch in […]

Hannah Donovan – Telling stories through design

Hannah Donovan PortraitHannah Donovan will talk about the designer as a storyteller—especially in terms of the importance of this role within a team. Improve your output as a designer by taking a closer look at influencing the input. As a visual narrator we help to visualise, inspire and curate for the people we work with as well as connecting scenarios around the larger product saga that supports the interfaces we design. By examining your input, make your output more effective with your team and users alike, paving paths for people to tell their own stories as your product evolves over time.

Steve Souders – Even faster web sites

Steve Souders PortraitWeb 2.0 is adding more and more content to our pages, especially features that are implemented in Ajax. But our web applications are evolving faster than the browsers that they run in. We don’t have to rely on or wait for the release of new browsers to make our web applications faster. In this session, Steve Souders discusses web performance best practices from his second book, Even Faster Web Sites. These time-saving techniques are used by the world’s most popular web sites to create a faster user experience, increase revenue, and reduce operating costs. Steve provides technical details about reducing the pain of JavaScript, as well as secrets for making your page load faster in emerging markets where network connectivity is a challenge.

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Joe Toscano Founder, designgood.tech