New York Smashing Conf 2016
I was absent from the office for two days last week, but it was for a good reason: I was volunteering on the event staff for New York Smashing Conference! Smashing Magazine, a digital publication for web designers and developers, puts on multiple conferences around the world every year to spread innovative ideas in the realms of art, technology, design, and development.
This conference is an amazing opportunity for people in creative occupations to get together, discuss their newest ideas, and explore ways to improve our industries. Speakers showcase products and the process it took to make them successful, live-code to demonstrate new technologies, and provide insight about how we can move forward to keep making great work as the world evolves. Attendees are very connected and can contribute questions for the speakers via Twitter, and are often given time to network with everyone else involved in the conference.
We had some pretty awesome designers, developers, and content creators present their work, process, and ideas at the event. Being a designer myself, I found a lot of these talks pertinent to my work. These six talks were the ones that jumped out to me as my personal favorites! If you would like to see a full recap of all the talks of the conference, there is a full version available on my website.
Innovative SVG Animations
Sarah Drasner — a web animation genius — gave a talk on all of the experimental SVG animation work she’s been doing. She focused primarily on GSAP, better known as Greensock, a timeline-based animation building tool. The timeline sets this tool apart; you can set the timing of events to be depending on one another, instead of having to calculate all the values yourself. It’s really powerful, and it was amazing to see all of things you can accomplish in action.
Sarah also talked about removing some of the stigma associated with SVG, and how it’s very widely supported nowadays, making it a viable option for your next project. A big advantage to using SVG is their much smaller file size, as well as the ability to scale the graphics really big without experiencing pixelation (because they’re vector-based).
The Future of Preprocessors
Roy Tomeij is a literal wizard when it comes to SASS. He was doing all kinds of crazy stuff with it in his demos, including mapping animation with ASCII characters (seriously). Would this be practical for the average SASS styler? Probably not. Was it cool as heck? Absolutely.
But on a more serious note, his talk explored whether or not — one day in the future — normal CSS could adopt all of the features we see in preprocessors, making them obsolete. He explained that the role of SASS thus far has been to develop new ways of styling elements without having to wait on the lengthy process of getting those methods adopted formally through the W3C. He concluded his talk on a really bright note:
The Secret Life of Comedy
Espen Brunborg touched on some pretty serious topics, such as the synthesization of the web, in a fun way. He started out his talk with an web design-themed version of the Genesis Creation Narrative. I really liked Espen’s talk because, unlike many discussions on how the web is looking more and more the same, he stopped to observe the necessity and the useful aspects of that.
Yes, we do want to make web content that is unique to our brands and that have personality, but there is merit to using cues that users understand. There needs to be a balance between the common cues that make our user’s experience better and the the things that can make our sites more interesting and identifiable.
He came to the very elegant conclusion that every website, no matter how big or small, tells a story. And as web designers and developers, we are storytellers. Yes, most stories have basic constructs that we use to make them easy to follow, but there are many different stories out there. The layout of a site should be coming from what its content is, not what your template tells you to.
Adapting to Input
Jason Grigsby discussed the design principles necessary to create sites that adapt to new, unknown forms of input. Jason believes that, when the web industry started to see a need for responsive web design, we went about it the entirely wrong way.
We’re coming to a point where input is becoming just a complex as screen size. We have gone from having just keyboards and mouses, to having touch screens, shake detectors, and even gyroscopes incorporated into our devices. We can use these new methods to our advantage, but we also can’t assume any one type of input is always there. (For example, there’s currently no surefire way of detecting if a user is navigating using a mouse, touch screen, voice control, or even an Apple TV remote.)
One effective way to adapt sites for new or unconventional inputs is by designing for accessibility. If you design a site to work well with voice control for assistive technology, someone who doesn’t need assistive tech will still be able to navigate your page using the voice control options on their Xbox Kinect.
The Features of Highly Effective Forms
Aaron Gustafson has a background in making online forms more usable, and getting more people to actually fill them out and submit them. He honed in on UX concepts that could make the form experience better. He explained how the language of a form impacts how successful it is, and how important it is to ask questions like you would in an in-person conversation.
He also discussed using ARIA labels to make the form better for users on assistive tech, but also the users who are not. If a field isn’t “required,” it may be good practice to ask yourself why you’re bothering to include it; it’s easier to place one sentence at the top of the form that says all fields are required instead of asterisks on a few of them. He also believes we should be working with the warnings built into browsers that notify users a form is filled out incorrectly before they try to submit it.
Performance Under Pressure
Mat Marquis talked about issues surrounding performance. While performance is so often forgotten, it’s an integral part of creating an inclusive web. For example, this talk discussed the importance of considering the experience that someone using a 5-year old Android phone might have on our sites; when we don’t consider people using older or cheaper tech, we make the web a place only the wealthy can really use or enjoy.
Mat presented ideas about how to load pages more efficiently and improve the performance of our sites. A highlight for me was his idea of inlining the CSS of all the elements that are “above the fold” on a page, so the user can see everything styled before all the styles on a page have actually loaded. Maybe this idea could be improved upon — inlining styles is not considered a “best practice” — but it may be a sacrifice worth making for your users.
I absolutely love this conference! Out of all the events I attend in New York, this has to be my favorite. I find the attendees and speakers here are very well connected, and conference-wide communication is highly encouraged thorough Twitter and and the conference Slack channel.
The Q & A section after each talk is really well done. Anyone in the audience can Tweet their questions during the talk, and then a moderator uses those questions to interview the speaker after the talk. If your question isn’t asked, you can either Tweet at the speaker, send them a Slack message, or just walk up to them on a break. All of the speakers seemed really interested in engaging with the audience and getting feedback.
The overall atmosphere is very friendly, and everyone running the conference is passionate about what they’re doing. There’s a lot of room for fun and laughter in between all the learning and sharing that is going on. This was my second year in attendance, and I definitely want to be back next year!
Originally published at www.evolvingmedia.net on June 24, 2016.
