• Aral Balkan & Laura Kalbag

    Aral Balkan

    Aral Balkan is an experience designer and developer working to change the world through better design. He recently won Voice of the Year at the Critter Awards for his talks at international conferences and gave a talk at TED@London which has him in the running to present at TED Global 2013. He is currently rebooting. You can follow his personal reboot narrative on his hand‐crafted blog, Breaking Things.

    Laura Kalbag

    Laura Kalbag is a designer easily excited by web design and development. Among her list of ever-changing pet subjects are mobile web, semantic web, web fonts and design theory, but she's really fascinated by anything in the areas of web, mobile and design.

    Laura has been a freelancer for the whole of her professional life. She revels in working with small and meaningful clients, creating websites, apps, icons, illustrations and the odd logo.

    Hand-crafting a web site

    Sala dell'Alcova, Palazzo Isolani

    Have you ever wanted to start with a blank canvas? No blogging engines, no CMSs, no templates, no jQuery, and no server-side processing. Aral Balkan is doing just that as part of his ongoing personal reboot narrative, Breaking Things, and he’s having a blast.

    In this hands‐on workshop, we take an empty file and hand-craft a web site in pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Join us in a return to simplicity and craft as we evolve a site together where you write and understand every line of code. Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag will take you on a journey to explore the joys of simplicity, pragmatism, and design via the medium of the latest web technologies.

    Level: Beginner/Intermediate

    Topics covered

    • Applying pragmatic craftsmanship to design and development
    • Typographical considerations in web design
    • Vertical rhythm and grids
    • Media queries and designing for high-resolution displays
    • Designing for content
    • HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript
    • Simplifying CSS with REM-based designs (with Sass and Stylus mixins)
    • Evolving build systems
    • Evolving dynamic features
    • Modern development and deployment tools and processes with CodeKit, Amazon Web Services, Heroku, etc.

    Prerequisites:

    • Bring your own computers. We will be using Macs, so bring one if you can as we cannot offer technical support for users on other operating systems due to time constraints. If you’re not familiar with a Mac, please take a few moments to get to know at least the basics as we will be making things together.
    • You should be a designer or developer with at least basic knowledge of how to develop a site using HTML and CSS. This workshop isn’t an introduction to HTML, CSS, or JavaScript but an introduction to a philosophy of making things using those technologies. We hope you will learn and take away lots of practical design and development‐related knowledge, but moreover, we hope that you will take away an approach that you can use when making anything along with the inspiration to get started doing so.
    • Sublime Text 2 or your own favourite editor. If you will be using Sublime Text 2, please make sure you have Sublime Package Control installed.
    • CodeKit (trial available)
    • If you want to follow along with the deployment bits, get an Amazon Web Services account and activate your S3 account.
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  • Lea Verou

    Lea Verou

    Lea works as a Developer Advocate for W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, which she fulfills by researching new ways to use them, blogging, speaking, writing, and coding popular open source projects to help fellow developers. She is a member of the CSS Working Group, which architects the language itself. Lea studied Computer Science in Athens University of Economics and Business, where she co-organized and occasionally a cutting edge Web development course for 4th year undergrads. She is one of the few misfits that love code and design equally.

    CSS3 not just for designers

    Salone dei Senatori, Palazzo Isolani

    CSS3, in essence, is about creating web applications that download faster and are easier to develop, maintain and edit. Less HTTP requests, less Kilobytes to download, less presentational JavaScript. All those are mostly developer goals, rather than designer goals. And that's why developers should care about CSS3, perhaps even more than designers do.

    Starting with the basics, we'll dive deep uncovering the nitty-gritty details of the CSS3 features that help you achieve those goals. You will get the chance to test everything yourself in the process with small, easy to understand examples designed to keep the learning process fun and enjoyable.

    What you will learn

    • How you can integrate CSS3 in your daily workflow to produce better results more quickly
    • How to get rid of external images and when it's wiser to keep them
    • How you can use CSS3 to offload presentational tasks to CSS instead of bloating your JavaScript code
    • How CSS3 interacts with JavaScript, to allow you to do even more
    • How to think about detecting CSS3 feature support and how to create your own fallbacks and polyfills, instead of depending on others to write them for you

    No matter your experience with CSS3, you will walk away having learnt a ton of new things you can immediately apply to your everyday work. You will also get an exclusive web application where you can experiment with everything taught, even after the workshop has passed.

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  • Remy Sharp

    Remy Sharp

    Remy is the founder and curator of Full Frontal, the UK based JavaScript conference. He also runs jQuery for Designers, co-authored Introducing HTML5 (adding all the JavaScripty bits) and is one of the curators of HTML5Doctor.com.

    Whilst he's not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he's about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!

    Mobile Web Apps

    Sala del Cardinale, Palazzo Isolani

    Building rich interactive web sites...dare I say web apps - is a reality with the smart phone browsers shipping with all the latest JavaScript and CSS technologies.

    This day long workshop will be a mix of introducing the latest technology & tricks on the mobile device and hands on practical exercises where you'll get to play with what you're learning.

    Although this workshop will have an iOS focus, a lot of the technology we will look at applies to most new WebKit based devices (Android, Playbook, etc) and smartphones running Opera Mobile.

    What you'll learn

    • How to take advantage of unique properties of the mobile device, using some of the latest technologies
    • Handling and working with touch and other mobile specific events
    • Debugging approach: going way, way beyond the bad old alert
    • Working offline: storing application assets and all it's data locally to the device
    • Looking at framework and libraries to speed up development and time to release
    • Deployment optimisations: getting your mobile app to your user real quick

    Prerequisites

    • Bring your mobile device, preferably an iPhone or iPad with the latest OS
    • A little knowledge of CSS and JavaScript will help
    • The latest install of Google Chrome or Safari
    • Installation of Node.JS
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  • Steve Krug

    Steve Krug

    Steve Krug (pronounced “kroog”) is best known as the author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, now in its second edition with over 300,000 copies in print. Ten years later, he finally gathered enough energy to write another one: the usability testing handbook Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.

    The books were based on the 20+ years he’s spent as a usability consultant for a wide variety of clients like Apple, Bloomberg.com, Lexus.com, NPR, the International Monetary Fund, and many others.

    His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based in Chestnut Hill, MA.

    Steve currently spends most of his time teaching usability workshops, consulting, and watching old episodes of Law and Order.

    Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing

    Salone del Settecento, Palazzo Isolani

    After I finished writing Don't Make Me Think, I spent five years teaching a workshop about basic usability principles.

    A lot of people who took that workshop suggested that I also do a full day just about usability testing. I thought it was a great idea, but I couldn't figure out how to do it all in one day.

    Finally, after a lot of pondering, I realized how to structure a day that included everything I think people need to get started doing testing on their own, including some hands-on practice.

    In this day-long session, I'll teach you how to do your own low-cost/no-cost testing that's simple enough to make it a routine part of your design process.

    The day will include...

    • A complete explanation of how Steve recommends doing testing (Hint: very simple, very fast, and very cheap)
    • A live demo test on an attendee's site, so you can see the whole process in detail
    • A chance to practice doing a test on your own site
    • Plenty of time to answer your questions about testing or any other aspect of usability

    Who should attend?

    Anyone involved in publishing a Web site. Designers, programmers, writers, editors, project managers, sole proprietors, and VPs can all benefit from this session.

    Whether you already do testing and want to know more, or have never tested and want to start, or even if you don't ever intend to do your own testing but are responsible for hiring, managing, or paying other people to do it, this session will prove valuable.

    Some of the topics covered

    • What “do-it-yourself” usability testing means, and why it always works
    • What kind of people--and how many--to test with
    • What to test, and when to test it
    • The art of specifying test tasks
    • How to facilitate--when to listen and when to probe
    • Why you shouldn't use exit and entrance questions
    • How to decide what to fix
    • Why you should avoid writing test reports, and what to do instead
    • Remote testing methods and tools
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