up.front will be back on June 9th! This edition will teach you how to create SVG icons, and we’ll discuss how technology influences our design process and, in the best case, helps to extend our visual vocabulary and solve the problems we face in our work. Mark your calendars now! You can stay in touch on twitter and meetup.com. See you there!

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  Andrey Kuzmin Creating Bulletproof SVG Icons

  Any website may face the problem of how to prepare and effectively deliver icons to the user. At Zalando, we have been using CSS sprites and icon fonts. Neither solution is perfect, but both get the job done to a reasonable degree. In my talk I will try to evaluate existing solutions, decide upon using SVG, and then introduce building tools and a fallback for old browsers.

  Andrey has been alternating between front- and back-end worlds, doing full stack web development throughout his career. Yet, when he noticed that the back-end was gradually turning into a database with API access, he decided to settle for the front-end once and for all. Now he is working as a front-end developer at Zalando with a focus on building well structured and maintainable code. With every new project, he challenges himself to learn something new and be more productive. Andrey has contributed to open source dev tooling, most notably with his gulp-svgstore and gulp-postcss projects.

  • @unsoundscapes
  • unsoundscapes.com
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  Giacomo Vergnano Randomness – How Open Source and Machines Help a Lazy Designer

  Nowadays collective knowledge, open-source programming tools and connected community are widely spread and easily reachable. In this talk Giacomo will tell the story on how all of these resources helped him, a “lazy” designer, to create many experimental graphics and generative typographic visuals. He will show how it’s possible to create astonishing and complex compositions with few lines of code and random() values, And how experimenting with accidental compositions can help the creative process.
  Software used: NodeBox and Processing

  Giacomo is a Berlin based visual and web designer. He is the Head of Design of remerge.io, founder of givedesign.net and member of thype.it Always experimenting with typography, visual design and coding.

  • @GiVeDesign
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  Valentina Montagna Coding As A Design Tool

  Designers need to know the shocking truth: they should include code in their design toolbox. Valentina will show how designers benefit from a change of mindset, and how engineers can make things easier for designers to get on board.

  Valentina is a full stack designer with ten years of experience in the field. She work as an independent product designer, building websites and web apps from static mock-ups to their implementation. She believes in design as a problem-solving process, where creativity is the ability to find simple answers to complex issues.

  • @ScintillaLuz
  • github.com/ScintillaLuz