This session will cover a few topics in relation to open source design, including: Open source licenses, Benefits of open sourcing design work, How to open source work, How to contribute design to open source projects, How to make friends with other designers. This topic is aimed at designers and some development practices will be discussed.

A jack of all trades and master of none. We’re told that we can either go deep on a particular topic or go general. After all, how can someone know everything about everything? However, with the right focus and plenty of time, we can become magical unicorns of design and development.

In the world of ever-changing design deliverables, a browser-based style guide serves as an anchor to the design system, and bridges the gap between design and front-end development. While a style guide is almost always a good idea, many factors determine what it should define and how it should be used in the lifecycle of the project. In her talk, Sophie will cover what a style guide should contain and how it can be used by a whole team (not only designers and developers!) — and how these things differ for client work, internal products, and open source products.

IBMers around the world are working to relentlessly reinvent our 104-year-old company and we’re using IBM Design Thinking to help us scale this transformation. We’re creating a global culture of design, the world’s largest design team, and a large global network of studios. This transformation is enabling us to deliver delightful user experiences founded on world-class front end engineering. We’re building design into everything we do, changing the way we work.

Since 2013 we are proud to have nearly doubled the number of our designers and front end engineers into our studios worldwide and into fulfilling and challenging careers. This effort continues at full speed today. I’m happy to share with you how we’re building scalable design and front end development programs within one of the world’s largest technology companies.

Paul has over 18 years of graphic design experience with brands like Subway, New Balance, Harrah’s Casino, and Facebook, and then some other brands you’ve never heard of, nor would remember. Currently, he is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of ChoreMonster (though he does not carry a badge), where he designs the overall brand experience on the web and all mobile platforms, helps craft words, illustrates monsters and draws farts.

Many of us are visual learners. Charts and graphs display data in ways that benefit retention and comprehension. How can we build graphic representations of information that creates a better experience for our users? What are things we should worry about when designing and implementing data visualizations in our web applications? These graphs are innately visual, but it's our responsibility to make them accessible as well! First, we'll go over traditional formats for charting then dive deeper into more customized situations.

In order to reach our goals in the upside-down world of graphic design, you need to be a rogue. A misfit. A renegade. James White from the Signalnoise Studio has based his career on doing things outside of the ordinary, turning his back on boardrooms and creative briefs in order to chase his design dreams with vengeance and rock n’ roll. He will be telling his story while discussing personal projects built from love and ambition in his small home office in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. These led to him working with respected people all over the world, from his favourite metal band to film juggernaut Kevin Smith. James will talk about chasing your creative path, building your personal body of work, the value of supporting friends, and never forgetting the artist inside.

Katie is a designer at Sparkbox. She is the 2014 Net Awards Young Designer of the Year, a teacher for Girl Develop It, and a writer for various publications. She strongly values collaboration with her teammates, performance in design, and beautifully smart design systems. She loves her dog and iced coffee more than anything formerly mentioned.

Whether you call yourself a designer or a developer or a strategist or something else, the work we do is creative work. Many teams are now doing this work from multiple locations, spread out across cities, states and even countries.

In this session we’ll look at the fundamental building blocks for creative work, and how you can create and nurture these things whether you’re working together in the same room, or in teams spread out across the world

With the current state of CSS and JavaScript the web has seriously stepped up its animation game. As web designers and developers we’ve never had to understand animation principles like we do now. Smart animation comes from thinking like a motion designer when adding animations and transitions to our web work. There is a huge depth of knowledge we can pull from while we design and build the new UIs of the web.

In this session we’ll cover key animation principles like timing, offsets, arcs, and others as they apply to UI work on the web. And we’ll demonstrate how to pull off common animation tricks of the trade in CSS. This is your one-hour crash course into becoming a web animation pro!

We can all agree that web performance is a serious problem that warrants our time and effort. Recent reports indicate that the average website is now over 2MB, with images accounting for over 70% of that weight. But fear not, there are many approaches to alleviating our image problem. We'll look at several real-world examples of how to deal with image overload, as well as some recent additions to modern browsers that will help us in our fight against one-size-fits-all image bloat.

While SVG isn’t exactly new, browser support is just getting to the point that we can use the SVG format without much worry. And even if we do need fallbacks for older browsers, we now have modern tools that make creating these fallbacks easy. All this makes right now the perfect time to learn about SVG and how it can help you in everyday web design. Perhaps the most compelling reason of all, though, is that SVG images look sharp at any dimension with tiny file sizes—which is great for making responsive websites responsibly.