Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Tom Coates – Opening keynote: A New Network

Photo of Tom CoatesIt’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.

Jack Draws anything at @media

I’d not heard of Jack Draws anything, a wonderful initiative by the 6 year old Jack Henderson who will draw whatever you want, for a donation that goes to the Sick Kids Foundation. So far he’s raised £20,000! Bruce Lawson, one of the great presenters at @media asked Jack to draw a picture of big […]

Lea Verou – Mastering CSS3 gradients

Photo of Lea VerouWith most browsers adding increasing support, and the simplicity of providing fallbacks for those that don’t, CSS3 gradients are something we can start to use right now. They benefit our users with faster websites and ourselves with more time in our hands to spend in other things, since they are easy to create, edit and update. A very powerful feature that can also be utilized for a surprising number of design effects, even ones that don’t resemble gradients at all. In this talk, Lea will explore CSS3 gradients in great depth and it’s almost guaranteed that no matter your expertise level, you will walk out having learned new things.

Brian Suda – Visualising Data

Photo of Brian SudaIn this presentation, I’ll walk you through a quick overview of some basic chart and graph design, then look at how easy it is to write some quick scripts in your favourite language to produce beautiful graphics. SVG is an under-​​rated technology, but it can be created programmatically and quickly to visualise data.

Jonathan Stark – The mobile frameworks landscape

Photo of Jonathan StarkIn this session, Jonathan Stark takes an in depth look at several mobile frameworks, including JQTouch, JQuery Mobile and SenchaTouch, comparing and contrasting their approaches, and most appropriate uses. As a developer looking to tailor experiences and applications for the mobile web, this will be an invaluable session.

Michael Mahemoff – HTML5 offline for fun and performance

Photo of Michael MahemoffIn this session we’ll get hands-​​on with the application cache to make the app run when it’s not online. We’ll check out the techniques for client-​​side persistence: web storage and indexed database. Finally, we’ll look at the latest techniques for file access — reading and writing files on the user’s hard drive from a web app is being defined by web standards and implemented in today’s modern browsers.

Bruce Lawson – Native multimedia with HTML5

Photo of Bruce LawsonWe’ll look at the pros and the cons of HTML5 multimedia and see how to write simple controls with JavaScript. Most excitingly, we’ll also look at how HTML5 builds in support for subtitles and captions for multimedia accessibility. And you might pick up a Turkish dancing tip on the way.

Hannah Donovan – Designing without the browser

Photo of Hannah DonovanDonovan argues the processes for the future lie in our more material-​​based graphic designer pasts, and our cousin disciplines of industrial design and architecture. After a decade of honing our newfangled browser-​​based skills, learn how to dust off and sharpen the tools of our roots.

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer