What’s the best way to learn? By observing designers and developers working live. For our new conference in Toronto, expect interactive live sessions, showing how web designers design and how web developers build — including setup, workflow, design thinking, naming conventions and everything in-between.
What’s a SmashingConf like? We’ve prepared a little elevator speech with photos and videos from past events. Also, here’s a Convince Your Boss PDF (1.1 Mb) to convince you-know-who to send you to the event. Obviously.
Designing at your desk with Photoshop or HTML and CSS is easy, but getting your bosses and clients to give your work their stamp of approval is often quite a feat. In this webinar, Dan will share some stories of tools, methodologies, and non-traditional deliverables that can help you get the buy-in you need. Follow along to learn how to make everyone you work with say “please” and “thank you!”
This talk will show how CSS Variables are much more powerful than static preprocessor variables and can be used today without compromising progressive enhancement.
Building an SVG Animation from Start to Finish
In this talk, Sarah will start with only an Illustrator document and by the end, make it move! It's not clear what exactly will move and how- this is something she and the audience will discover together.
In this “this-is-how-I-work” session, Tim Kadlec will conduct a performance audit on the fly. You’ll get a feel for how to analyze the performance of a site using a few different tools, key issues to zero in on, and how to prioritize the results of your analysis.
Applying Psychology And 13 Years Of UX To Get The Details Right And Leapfrog The Competition.
Mr Joe will take you on journey, showing how to take an average website and make it exceptional. Joe will talk through a framework for looking at the interactions you design everyday and making them as good as they can be. Then we'll look at how to take your site to the next level 💥, redesigning the experience live based on psychology and UX theory.
Over the past 10 years, Australian designer and artist, Gemma O’Brien, has taken her passion for typography and built a flourishing career around drawing letters. Her bold type and detailed illustration can be seen in work for advertising and editorial clients or painted large-scale onto the walls of galleries, offices and interiors around the world. At SmashingConf 2017, Gemma will tell the story of her big break in the design world, explain how an Australian outlook shapes her work, and consider the importance of analogue craft in the digital future.
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.
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.
In this “this-is-how-I-work” session, Marcy Sutton will conduct an accessibility audit on the fly. You’ll get a feel for how to detect and resolve accessibility issues and a strategic roadmap on things to keep in mind when improving accessibility.
You Can Sketch (You might just not know it yet)
In this hands-on session, Eva-Lotta will show you some basic techniques to start sketching your ideas. You'll get some hands-on practice on how to sketch simple pictures to inject into your everyday notes and work. She’ll show examples of how easy-to-do sketches can help make your thoughts clearer, your notes more structured and your communication more engaging.
Creating An Effective & Beautiful Data Visualization From Scratch
In this session, Nadieh will show you how to create a unique, effective (& even beautiful) chart using d3.js, which has become the main “tool” for doing (interactive) data visualization online. Starting from an empty white browser window she'll code & take you through all the nuts and bolts that go into creating a chart with d3, and how, with a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking you can use SVG in the weirdest ways to get what you had envisioned.
Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS
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.
Seb loves to strip down ding classic machines from the 80s, and give them an extreme make-over with cutting edge technology. You may have seen the hacked Nintendo light gun with laser, lights and a built-in smoke machine that became a viral sensation on the internet in 2016.
The CSS+SVG Power Combo is where you(r team) will learn about the latest, cutting-edge CSS and SVG techniques to create creative crisp and beautiful interfaces.
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.
Every day, billions of people around the world use the web to work, to find information, and to be entertained. When they come to your site, they trust you to provide them with a good experience. They expect a site that loads quickly, that works in their browser, and that is well designed. And though they may not vocalize it, they certainly expect that experience will be safe that any information they provide will not be stolen or used in ways they did not expect.
In this workshop, Dan will share insights into his tools and techniques for integrating design thinking into your product development process. You’ll learn how to craft powerful design approaches through collaborative brainstorming techniques, and how to involve your entire team in the design process.
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.
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.
Being able to sketch is like speaking an additional language that enables you to structure and express your thoughts and ideas more clearly, quickly and in a engaging way. For anyone working in UX, design, marketing and product development in general, sketching is a valuable technique to feel comfortable with.
With so many tools available to visualize your data, it’s easy to get stuck in thinking about chart types, always just going for that bar or line chart, without truly thinking about effectiveness. In this workshop, Nadieh will teach you how you can take a more creative and practical approach to the design of data visualization.
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.
In this workshop, Seb will demonstrate a variety of beautiful visual effects using JavaScript and HTML5 canvas. You will learn animation and graphics techniques that you can use to add a sense of dynamism to your projects.
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?
Our conference venue, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, is located within the center of Toronto, and is well-known as the location where the Toronto Film Festival takes place — needles to say that it’s one of the most iconic cinemas in the world. We are thrilled to be hosted at the venue!
Toronto’s premier meeting centre, the Ivey Tangerine Leadership Centre, will play home to our workshop series. Located in the Exchange Tower in the heart of downtown Toronto’s Financial District, this centre offers a unique experience, coupled with onsite catering and attentive staff to make sure everyone is well taken care of during these immersive days.
Hurry up: Super Early Bird Tickets are only available until the end of January.
We reserved 20 student tickets, too — just send your ID to Mariona.
(Ah, tickets are cheaper with a Smashing Membership, you know.)
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 Toronto International Film Festival (tiff. Bell Lightbox), a wheelchair accessible, cinema located on King Street at 350 King St W, Toronto, ON M5V 3X5.
The Workshops will take place at the Ivey Tangerine Leadership center at 130 King St W, Toronto, ON M5X 1K6. The building is on multiple levels, but fully wheelchair accessible with reserved seating in the front and rear of the classrooms.
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.
