Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Earlier this week we announced the complete lineup for our Web design focussed conference Respond, featuring a truly stellar lineup you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in the World, fresh from such events as An Event Apart, and Smashing Conference, as well as wonderful locals, some who’ve spoken all over the world, others we’ve only recently unearthed. We’ve worked hard to bring together this diverse lineup.

• Ethan Marcotte will cover design patterns, processes and practices for the responsive age
• Jen Simmons will look in depth at the new CSS layout technologies like Flexbox, Grid, Shapes, Multicolumn and Viewport Units to create amazing page layouts
• Sara Soueidan, one of  the world’s leading SVG experts will show how the combination of SVG and CSS brings extraordinary design capabilities to every browser.
• Karen McGrane will show how adaptive content supports targeting content to device type—and why that’s rarely necessary
• Rachel Ilan Simpson on how we can design for security without sacrificing usability. I honestly think this session by itself makes it worth attending
• Russ Weakley will show us how to make our shiny new Web applications accessible 
• In an intensive in-depth session we look at a tale of two redesigns. While Fairfax have completely redesigned and rebuilt their flagship publications, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (both in beta), online retailers Kogan went the other way, incrementally redesigning from a split mdot/desktop arrangement to a responsive solution. We hear from designers on each project on what they learned, and how it went. I feel this will be one of the most valuable sessions we’ve ever had at any of our events.
• HTTP2 isn’t coming, it’s here. Web Directions has just switched over. Peter Wilson will look at why and how to transition, and how to keep performance up as you do. Another vital session. 

Then there are our focused sessions, where in 20 minutes we really dig deeply into a topic of importance.

• Michael Mifsud will look at CSS Variables. No, not the ones you’re probably familiar with from Sass or other preprocessors, but CSS Variables in the browser.
• Jessica Edwards creates mobile interactive advertisements day in day out, and needs to create the most engaging, high performance, low bandwidth experiences possible. Learn how she does it with a range of new CSS features like Filters, Blend modes and Gradients that you can use. Today.  
• You might be surprised at how adaptive typography can be to the user’s screen size and resolution these days, if you use the right units. Learn all about responsive type from Craig Sharkie
• Images still present one the most significant performance challenge for any site, indeed the responsive landscape only makes the challenges of delivering images more difficult. But the element is here to save us. Learn how from Matthew Kairys.
• And by no means least, the legendary Kevin Yank uncovers some of CSS best-kept secrets, with a range of selectors you may not know even exist, as well as a glimpse into the future.