With our third annual conference in San Francisco, we want to explore strategies for breaking out: leaving behind generic designs and smelly code base. We want to find out the why, and the how of outstanding and fast experiences, and what we all need to know today, to be more productive and make smarter decisions tomorrow.
One track, two conference days, 14 brilliant speakers, and just 500 available seats. CSS Grid, Design systems, new frontiers of CSS and JavaScript, accessibility, performance, lettering, graphic design, UX, multi-cultural design, among other things. We can’t wait to meet you there already! Need to convince your boss? Check the Convince Your Boss PDF (83 kb).
Using scientific proof and state-of-the-art multimedia techniques, Aaron James Draplin of the Draplin Design Co. delivers a suckerpunch of a talk that aims to provide bonafide proof of work, the highs and lows of a ferociously independent existence and a couple tall tales from his so-called career in the cutthroat world of contemporary graphic design.
CSS Layout Grid is a game-changer. But what strategy makes most sense when building layouts today? Grid-first? Flexbox-first? Fallback-first? Following along with practical examples, you’ll learn how Grid works, and how it can be used to implement modern layouts and responsive designs.
In this talk, Mina will be highlighting the struggles, the solutions and the workflow when redesigning and rebuilding Slack, and specifically how the team uses CSS Grid in production, and how it optimized the experience for performance and accessibility.
UX Live: Psychology and The Perfect Design
What exactly is the perfect design? Well, that's what you will find out in the session. We'll look at the three aspects that define the perfect design and how you can make it work in your projects.
Trent will share recent experiences and explore ways to evaluate and discuss the inclusion of 3rd-party scripts.
Fast By Default: Modern Loading Best Practices
Optimizing sites to load instantly on mobile is far from trivial. Costly JavaScript can take seconds to process, we often aren't sensitive to users data-plans and browsers don't know what UX-critical resources should load first. Thankfully there's a lot we can do to give our users a MUCH better loading experience. Watch Addy Osmani (and friends) illuminate new loading best practices for diagnosing and making real world sites load instantly today.
Cross Cultural Design in the Age of Globalization
In this talk, Creative Director Yiying Lu will share her branding design, illustration and typography projects from a multi-cultural & linguistic aspect. She will showcase and talk about her cross cultural design practices for global companies and organizations, such as Disney Shanghai, NYU Shanghai, Twitter, Cre8 Summit, 500 Startups, the Dumpling Emoji Project and so on. This talk will take audiences on a journey of exploring creativity within cross-cultural communication in the age of globalization.
Media queries have always been a cornerstone of responsive design but the role of media queries is changing. It's now possible to make websites with responsive properties that are not tied to specific breakpoints. Learn how to use fluid typography, responsive SVG, adaptive flexbox components, CSS grid and custom properties to create unique responsive solutions that go beyond media queries.
Approaching Pixels And Projections
Kate is a designer and director that approaches each project applying logic to the problem and a passion to the solution. She’ll be sharing an insight into how she works, some of the experiences she’s encountered over the years and how she approaches some of the more challenging aspects of these experiential projects.
Our Everyday Relationships with Digital Interfaces
Claudio is passionate about interactive design, emotional experiences and helping others to achieve more through his work. Over the years his work has been awarded by the Emmy Awards, the One Show Interactive, the European Design Awards, TheFWA and Awwwards.
Web Typography: Where East Meets West
Modern CSS gives us the ability to set type for a dynamic medium, which is something relatively new, and requires us to look at typography with a fresh perspective.
Design in the Era of the Algorithm
The design and presentation of data is just as important as the underlying algorithm, and designers have an urgent role to play in crafting the emerging generation of AI interfaces. Designer Josh Clark explores a rich trove of examples—at once entertaining and sobering—to unearth design principles for creating responsible machine-learning applications. Learn to use AI as design material in your everyday work. Adapt to the machines’ weird, unexpected, or flat-out-wrong conclusions. And above all, scrub data for bias to create the respectful and inclusive world we all want to live in.
Vue is uniquely friendly to all levels of web developers. Whether you’re coming from a jQuery background or from other frameworks and are curious why people keep talking about Vue, or are interested in supercharging your workflow building out complex web applications with fewer bugs and more maintainable code, this course is for you.
Entrepreneurial success relies on approaching problems with a creative mind and critical eye. This workshop is designed to teach participants multiple tactics for creative and critical thinking in a fastpaced, adaptive, and agile environment, with a focus on communication.
Whether you are designing an app or a website, following best practices and design methodologies will always help ensure your designs are usable and engaging. In this workshop we’ll explore the design process in detail including user research, sketching, and visual design. Through real world examples you’ll see how an idea can evolve into a design.
This workshop is sold out • In this brand new workshop, Vitaly Friedman will cover practical techniques, clever tricks and useful strategies you need to be aware of when working on responsive websites. From responsive modules to clever navigation patterns and web form design techniques; the workshop will provide you with everything you need to know today to start designing better responsive experiences tomorrow.
This workshop is sold out • This workshop is designed for designers and developers who already have a good working knowledge of HTML and CSS. We will cover a range of CSS methods for achieving layout, from those you are safe to use right now even if you need to support older version of Internet Explorer through to things that while still classed as experimental, are likely to ship in browsers in the coming months.
This workshop is sold out • Spend a day exploring the web’s emerging interactions and how you can put them to work today. Your guide is designer Josh Clark, author of Designing for Touch and ambassador of the near future.
Ever struggled to choose the right colour or typeface? Have you ever felt like a design you’re working on just isn’t feeling right but you can’t figure out why? Then this crash-course workshop in graphic design can help make the difference to your design skills.
This workshop is sold out • With HTTP/2, Service Workers, Responsive Images, Flexbox, CSS Grid, SVG, WAI-ARIA roles and Font Loading API now available in browsers, we all are still trying to figure out just the right strategy for designing and buildings responsive websites efficiently. We want to use all of these technologies and smart processes like atomic design, but how can we use them efficiently, and how do we achieve it within a reasonable amount of time?
Originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition to exhibit works of art, this beautiful structures is one of the top tourist must–see locations in San Francisco. Renovated and reopened in 1970 — and updated in 2009, this stunning architecture and lavish theater is somewhere we are so happy to call home for a few days!
The Downtown Campus of San Francisco State University is unlike any campus we’ve seen before. This unique campus takes place on the 6th floor of the Westfield San Francsico Centre, with all classrooms configured around a vertical glass-enclosed atrium that offers wonderful views in all directions from the historic sky-lit dome, across to adjoining classrooms and below to shopping activity.
We reserved 50 tickets for small startups and students.
Just send us an email to Markus and we’ll be back ASAP.
Pretty much because of the value SmashingConf will provide. We’ll explore how designers and developers work, design and build and how they approach problems strategically. Think of it as a playbook with handy rules of thumb for your next projects: it can’t get more practical than this.
Take a look at some of the videos from previous events, and check out some of the photos—The Smashing community is truly smashing, fun, inclusive and a delight to be a part of!
Watch SmashingConf Videos
Need to convince your manager to send you to the SmashingConf? No worries, we’ve got your back! We prepared a neat Convince Your Boss (PDF) (0.15 Mb) that you can use to convince your colleagues, friends, neighbors and total strangers to join you or send you to the event. We know that you will not be disappointed. Still not good enough? Well, tweet us @smashingconf and we’ll help you out — we can be quite convincing, too, you know!
Download the PDF
SmashingConf is committed to providing an inclusive, accessible, and safe space for all attendees. The Conference will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts, a fully wheelchair accessible, renovated theatre located in the Presidio area of San Francisco, CA at 3301 Lyon Street. The Workshops will take place at Downtown Campus of San Francisco State University. The building is fully wheelchair accessible.
If you’re in need of any further assistance, or have questions, do not hesitate to contact Amanda (our event producer) at amanda@smashingconf.com.
