Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Announcing Respond 2017, our front end design conference

Round up your front end design team – your CX, UX and UI folks, your user researchers, along with your front end devs – UI engineers, web developers, whatever your team calls them – and get them along to not just the best front end design conference in Australia, but among the very best anywhere: Respond

And this year, Respond isn’t just visiting Sydney and Melbourne, we’re coming to Brisbane, too, with a single day ‘highlights’ edition (there’s simply no way we could do two two-day conferences in two cities in the same week). Read on for all the details, or visit the Respond site.

Way back in 2014, we launched Respond, a “popup” single day conference focusing on the challenges of what was, then still in its relative infancy, Responsive Web Design.

In the years since, we’ve changed a lot about the event, and indeed all our events. Where once Web Directions was all about the main, end-of-year, multi-track Web Directions South – a big top under which we strove to bring all the family working on web-based apps and sites – we’ve moved on to a model of smaller, more focused events that we bring to multiple cities.

As the conference formerly known as Web Directions morphed into Direction, and focused on the big picture at the intersection of Design, Technology and Strategy, Respond has grown from an event largely focused on implementation details for front end designers and developers in a multi form factor world, to encompass the whole range of front end design and user experience challenges.

This year, we are genuinely excited to have brought together a program of extraordinary speakers, covering a broad range of topics of direct and ongoing relevance to your entire front end team.

As always, and in keeping with our curatorial approach, a great deal of thought has gone into what we’ll cover (and who should cover it). One key challenge in putting together programs is to find the “Goldilocks Zone” of content – not something the audience knows too well, and not something too far out across the horizon. Not chasing fads, yet not limited to the mundane.

With that in mind, some of the key topics Respond will cover include

* design languages and systems (including a keynote from the renowned Mina Markham, who developed the design language for the Hillary for America campaign, ‘Pantsuit’, and an intensive look at the work of the Westpac CX team and their Global Experience Language, and SEEK’s use of design systems to help improve communication between design and development teams)

* conversational and “chat” (or natural language) interfaces, with perspectives from Elizabeth Allen at Shopify, and local experts. Is there a “there” there? Is it hype, or reality? Let’s find out

* accessibility, with Cordelia McGee-Tubbs from Dropbox looking at how they make such a complex web application accessible, along with local accessibility hero Adem Cifcioglu

* animation and motion design, with Rachel Nabors and locals showing the way toward an animated web

* typefaces and typography, the way text is used in digital experiences, by the people who make them

There’s always room the underlying technologies of HTML, CSS and SVG, though as always, our approach is not about a laundry list of features, but rather the outcomes you can achieve using these technologies – including better typography, and more engaging experiences through animation.

Overall, we’ve put together a program that addresses design issues we’ll all be dealing with in the coming year, or years. These aren’t just “hot topics”, these are the challenges we’re facing now and going forwards, and Respond has pulled together speakers who are showing the way forward in resolving them and advancing front end design.

Respond really is for your whole front end team.

delivering year round learning for front end and full stack professionals

Learn more about us

Thanks for an amazing few days Web Directions. So many great themes of empathy, inclusion, collaboration, business impact through design, and keeping our future deeply human.

Laura van Doore Head of Product Design, Fathom