Front End Design Conference 2017 – Clemson Attendees
A group of five Graphic Communications students, Anna Kremer (senior), Jennifer Hill (senior), Rivers Hiller (senior), Melissa Thompson (junior) and myself, were given the privilege to attend the Front End Design Conference along with our web professor, Dr. Walker. Front End Design Conference (FEDC) was held by Unmatched Style in St. Petersburg, Florida from April 19th-21st. The goal of the conference was to foster learning and community for people who work in some facet of front-end web development. As a student attending this conference, I can hardly express just how much I learned from both the instructional time during the conference and the networking time in the evenings after the conference.
On the first day of the conference, we had the choice of two different all-day workshops to attend at The Iron Yard’s campus in St. Petersburg. You could choose between Introduction to Usability Testing or Build Right: Modern JavaScript. I, along with Anna, Rivers, and Melissa, chose to attend the JavaScript workshop given by Daniel Flynn and Ryan Cromwell from Sparkbox. In the JavaScript workshop we learned about the history of JavaScript, recent changes in the language, and how to implement that into coding websites or web apps. We completed many short exercises that allowed us to practice using the new syntax in the language. The workshop was certainly not a beginners course so it was challenging for our group to follow along completely, but the speakers were patient and I learned immensely about the JavaScript ecosystem in just a couple of hours. I left the workshop with a list of things to continue to research and a hunger to improve my skills in the language.
The second day of the conference was held in a neat theater called The Palladium. The format of both the second and third day were six one-hour long talks given by different speakers on a topic within their expertise. The talks given on the first day were The State of the Industry Report, Scope Creep – The Project Killer, Web Applications are Real (and Designing Them is Hard), A Return to HTML, Everything is a Prototype, and Borrowing from Math Class. Each of the speakers were great and I appreciated how diverse the different topics were throughout the day. My favorite talk was Scope Creep by Tera Simon who is the Director of Client Engagement for Atlantic BT.
FEDC Attendees in front of The Palladium, St. Petersburg
Her talk was mainly about the different type of clients you can experience, how to deal with those clients, and how to have a web project go as smoothly as possible. From my internship experience, dealing with clients and keep a project on time are the two most difficult things a developer faces during the web project. So, I greatly enjoyed hearing her advice for dealing with clients and how to make sure I can best avoid scope, effort, hope, and feature creep. The best quote of the day came from Matt Griffin when he said, “To be a designer means that you want the world better than it will ever actually be.” I think any designer or just someone who dabbles in designing can completely agree with what Matt said. Overall, I left the second day feeling I was better equipped to start a web project in terms of dealing with clients, designing, prototyping, and good semantic code.
The final day of the conference was full of more great talks about the web. The line-up was Building a Human Centered Culture, Cut Down the Work in Making Website Responsive for Mobile, Staying Sane (Dot) JS, The Junior Developer and You, The Real World, and Punks Not Dead. My personal favorite talk of the day was Staying Sane (Dot) JS given by Sergio Cruz who is an instructor for CodeSchool. After the workshop, I had so many questions about JavaScript and hearing it explained a second time helped tremendously to answer some of my questions and help me to feel less lost. I thought Sergio did a fantastic job of speaking so that someone with any level of knowledge could learn something from his talk. In addition to Sergio’s talk, the closing talk Punks Not Dead was certainly notable. This talk was less instructional and more storytelling and industry advice from Josh Higgins who is the Creative Director for Facebook. Josh calmly spoke about how he transitioned from a punk musician to a designer. He told the story of getting chosen as the Design Director for President Obama’s 2012 campaign and then the Creative Director at Facebook. Josh did not speak about his titles and their impressive weight, but about how he used design towards social and political issues he is passionate for. His view of design was inspiring to say the very least. When he concluded the conference, I was sad to see the end of the conference come, but I also was ready to get started doing something meaningful with my passion for web development. The entire conference pushed me out of comfort zone, challenged me, but most importantly inspired me. I now have so many ideas of what comes for me next after graduation in December.
List of Resources from the Conference:
Workshop | Introduction to Usability Testing or Build Right: Modern JavaScript
Day 2 | Conference Talks
Day 3 | Conference Talks
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