No matter where you see yourself in the vast design/frontend/backend spectrum, one thing is for sure: there is always so much more to discover.

This edition of up.front is about people who decided to dig deeper and expand their knowledge beyond the usage of out-of-the-box solutions or the general expectations on them, their role, or their tech-stack.

We look forward to three exciting talks for the first up.front of the year. See you there!

• 

  Ilona Demidenko Beyond The Limitations of Frontend - Onto Fullstack Journey!

  As a frontend developer, there are quite a few closed doors in the house of application development for you. For example, if both of your backend colleagues are on vacation, then you might be stuck and not able to deliver full features to your customers anymore. Same goes the other way around, of course. Once you feel quite good and confident in your current specialization, it makes sense to learn more areas in your stack so that you won\’t be blocked like that, and you can do all the work required from A to Z. This will also make your skill set more valuable in companies that want to move faster. In this talk, you are going to learn what Full Stack Developer really is, and how can a frontend developer transition to being one.

  Ilona is a Frontend Software Engineer at Zenjob GmbH. Her professional interests include web development and web design, focusing on ReactJS applications. She likes to work hard for things that are worth it.

  • ilonacodes.com
  • @ilonacodes
• 

  Oscar Braunert How We Ditched iFrames and Learned to Love Video

  This talk will walk you through the infrastructural decisions and complications Oscar and his team encountered while refactoring the video experience on kitchenstories.com
  You will learn about HLS, poster images and why small gestures can go a long way (in life and opening overlays).

  Oscar is a frontend developer, lover of typography and not very talented in summing up what he his.

  • ovl.design
  • @_ovlb
• 

  Florian Stolzenhain From Content to Frontend: What Lurks Beneath the View?

  Paradigms! It’s what programmers apply when thinking up software. Florian will highlight some gaps in the popular model-view-controller pattern from a frontend perspective and how to cleverly sidestep these by verbalizing and reflecting on your work in teams.

  Florian has been called a hippie on several occassions and has since decided that Peace, Love and Understanding aren’t the worst of paradigms to work with.

  • stolzenhain.net

Our last meetup for 2018 😱 Join us for three talks and get winter-proof for all things visual trends, secure API designs, and browsers. Also, attention companies: This is your last chance to secure a recruiting slot at Up.front before we and all the talent out there go into hibernation.

• 

  Francesco Bianchi Navigating Visual Trends

  The visual design landscape is in constant motion. Every year new trends emerge shaping new visual aesthetics, UI animations, and navigation patterns. As designers we are unavoidably influenced by them –consciously or not – and often dragged into the discussion about whether to adopt or avoid them. Taking part in this discussion is not only a matter of creativity but implies a broader view that includes questions such as: what do these trends mean in terms of the user experience? How are they perceived outside the design community? And finally, what are the guiding principles while tackling and analyzing these trends?

  Francesco Bianchi is a Visual-Interaction designer at Edenspiekermann Berlin, a global design and consulting firm driven by brand, content and technology. Previously, Francesco worked also at Leftloft (Milan) and Landor (Hamburg). He graduated in Politecnico di Milano and participated in the Data-Shack Program at Harvard University. His work explores and combines different fields, from user experience to graphic design, coding and data visualization.

  • @BiaFrancesco
  • francesco-bianchi.com
• 

  Yulia Startsev RFC-Party #3552

  This will be a lightning talk about RFC #3552 and will cover security recommendations for API designs. It will be very fast, covering the most important topics, just enough to get people feeling empowered to read it themselves.

  Yulia is a developer tools developer at Firefox. She is also a representative at TC39 for Mozilla. She likes standards.

  • @ioctaptceb
  • hag.codes
• 

  Julius Sohn & Julius Gehrig Refresh – A Fresh Approach to the Web Browser

  There’s a new email client out there every other week. But there’s little to no new thought given to one of the most used apps out there: The browser. In this talk Julius and Julius walk us through how they approached their research and their process in designing and prototyping their bachelor thesis project Refresh.

  Julius and Julius met in their first semester at the university of applied sciences Berlin. Since then they have worked together on countless uni projects including their joint thesis ‘Refresh’ published in 2018.

  • @juliusgehrig
  • @juliussohn

For our October meetup we’ll go back to what upfront is all about: Being interdisciplinary and connecting designers and developers! Our three speakers will cover topics from design systems over design workshop facilitation all the way to useful frontend development tips and tricks.

• 

  Kathrin How to Rule with Design Systems

  In Kathrin’s talk the audience will learn one way to set up and work with a design system with the help of React and Storybook. The talk starts with the idea behind using a design system. It focuses on how the setup with Storybook as a development environment is working. It also shows some hands-on examples on how to build and use components with it.

  Kathrin has been working as a frontend engineer for more than 10 years. She also is a mentor for female students and wants to share her passion for frontend with them.

  • @thecakedesk
• 

  Magda Bocheńska The Art and Craft of Workshop Facilitation

  Design workshops are one of the most important assets in the designer’s toolkit, but do we give them enough credit and attention? Meetings design is a craft in itself and requires a diverse skillset - from experience design to psychology and understanding group dynamics. Magda will share a bit of a context of why these different skills matter (and why it’s not just about inviting different people and giving them the agenda) and let the audience learn from her experience (and past mistakes). If you ever struggled with making the participants involved in a co-creative design session or if you prefer to just stay at your computer and gather the feedback from others on Slack - this talk is for you.

  Since 2013, Magda has led various UX projects and processes, co-managed a digital strategy for a governmental culture institution and designed her own framework of a service design sprint for an aviation agency. With 5+ years of experience in designing digital experiences, she holds a skillset combined of design techniques, technical and programming skills and passion for psychology.

  • @m_bochenska
  • bochenska.work
• 

  Stefan Judis I didn’t know that

  Web development is a constant journey of new technologies and new things to learn. A year ago Stefan started documenting and sharing all the tiny things that he didn’t know before and stopped being anxious about others thinking that he’s not smart. In this talk he’ll tell you what he learned!

  Stefan started programming 7 years ago and quickly fell in love with web performance, new technologies, and accessibility. He is also a curator of the web performance online resource Perf Tooling, organizer of the Web Performance Meetup Berlin, contributes to a variety of open source projects and enjoys sharing nerdy discoveries.

  • @stefanjudis
  • stefanjudis.com

The days are getting shorter and the evenings (slightly) colder, so it’s time for the first Upfront meetup of this fall season! 🍁🍂🎃

• 

  Bastian Gruber Remove Your Ego From Product Development

  In his talk, Bastian will share common obstacles inside a product team. To truly succeed, without burning out along the way, but ideas and product features into focus. Let the features talk instead of you.

  Bastian is a freelance software developer and experienced a lot of pitfalls during the development process and why people get frustrated.

  • @byteadventures
  • gruberbastian.com
• 

  Michael Pieracci Communication =/≠/&//+/- Documentation

  Michael would like to share some recent insights about how our tools and ways of working facilitate Communication and/or Documentation. He hopes this might add a new awareness to our day-to-day work in keeping people and projects both peaceful and productive.

  Michael is a Californian living in Berlin since 2013. He has many years experience in project management, most often with small teams with developers and designers. On the side he photographs, travels, drinks tea, and watches Star Trek.

  • michaelpieracci.com
  • @mpieracci
• 

  Tamara Lopez Breit Establishing the UX Research Practice in a Digital Product Company

  We’ll discuss the evolution of user research within a company, and why becoming user-centric starts from inside. Tamara has been working at GetYourGuide for just over a year. She will share insights into her role, lessons learned and the constant drive within the company to put a human face on the people who use their products. According to the UX maturity level of your company, different changes and levels of expertise are required (that’s why this can last for years.) Addressing company culture is fundamental to success.

  Tamara Lopez Breit works as a UX researcher at GetYourGuide, being the first member of Research Team, she is establishing processes and advocating for research within the company. Previously, she worked as a UX consultant for agencies and startups in Europe and LATAM. She was a lecturer of UX at the university for 2 and a half years in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she is from.

  • @lopezbreit
  • lopezbreit.com

Before we’re closing our laptops, putting on our sunhats, and heading off into the summer break (of course only after swinging by at some great conferences) we’re taking a step back and take a look at the world beyond our daily business: How can we be more creative? And how we use our creativity to make a mark on the world?
Our speakers may not have all the answers but they’ll for sure spark some interesting discussions.

• 

  Lisa Passing Federate You, Federate Me

  Lisa will talk about open source, decentralized, federated social networks. Mastodon, for example, is rather new and has learned a lot from the mistakes of the past and from similar projects. Why is federation cool and what does it mean anyway? This is what this talk is all about!
• 

  Kai-Uwe Niephaus How to become a more focused, empathic, healthier, beautiful and better paid creative in only 1 step

  Analysing, and drawing parallels between the publishing trend, classic marketing, universalized process disfavor and common sense – this talk explores possibilities on how to take advantage of the everyday creative discomfort. Nonseriousness may occur.

  Kai-Uwe is a Berlin based user experience designer and strategist with a focus on digital-products and integrated communication. He can only use his powers for good.

  • @kainiephaus
  • kainiephaus.com
• 

  Christine Lariviere The Fisher King: Solving Climate Change in a Post-Truth World

  Belief in conspiracy theories, such as the idea that climate change is a hoax, suppresses a person’s feelings of autonomy and willingness to act—they’re resigned to impotency in the face of forces they deem more powerful than themselves. Now, social media is spreading suspicious thinking with user-specific filters and social exclusion, as well as exposure to increasingly extreme conspiracy content via recommendation algorithms. With an issue as pressing as climate change, we cannot afford inaction. This talk asks: how can we overcome ‘post-truth’ culture and create empowered individuals for climate action?

  Christine works with social media, communications, and data at Climate-KIC, Europe’s leading climate innovation initiative. In her spare time, she dabbles in digital media theory.

  • @cdlariviere
  • medium.com/@christinelariviere

Up.front is back in April for our 81st meetup! Yes, it’ll probably be nice and warm out, but be sure to come by for ~90 minutes of charming nerdery anyway! Summer is long, and there’s only two more up.fronts before we take another break.

• 

  Mara Ziemann Positive Communication: Designing Online Communication with Positive Psychology

  How do you lead a fulfilled life? What is a good life? What is happiness and how can we enhance it? Positive Psychology is the study of exactly these questions. In this talk we discuss how the insights gained in this field can be transferred to product design and communication.

  Mara works as product manager at DuMont and is a co-founder at Rohpost. She has a background in User Research and Design Thinking and loves to explore new tools to make great products, that have a positive impact on people’s everyday life.

  • @rohpost_App
  • rohpost-app.com
• 

  Priyanka Naik Accessibility and HTML

  Priyanka will give a quick overview about making a website accessible for all the audience including impaired people and browser. Importance and detail usage of HTML tags. Introduction and usage of ARIA roles. At the end of the session the audience will be able to develop a accessible and structured website.

  Priyanka is a Web Developer at diesdas.digital having 2+ years of experience in front-end development.

  • @priyankanaik625
• 

  Iorrah Mota Delightful UXs, paradoxes & baguettes

  At Bunch.ai we’ve recently launched an awesome AI-powered feature that correlates Slack communications & psychological behaviours and in this talk Iorrah will share their learnings on how they used data visualization technologies with JS, HTML and CSS to deliver a mind-blowing experience their users! 🙌

  Iorrah does engineering at Bunch.ai, where his team and him work in the intersection of cultural analysis, machine learning and user experiences. He has been doing frontend development for 4+ years now and currently is diving deep into the React and Node.js world, never losing his sense of appreciation for great CSS & HTML.

  • @iorrahmota
  • iorrah.com

Up.front is back in March for our 80th meetup 🎷: Wohooo! We’re excited to kick off the Up.front meetup season with three meetups coming up in March, April and May. Join us next week for Episode 1 with 2 super exciting talks! And in case you have a talk up your sleeve that will match the current line-up, please get in touch and submit your idea!

• 

  Charlie Owen A journey in Building and Publishing Static Sites

  In her talk, Charlie will show you her slow journey in building and publishing with static site generators. She will show you the practicalities and pitfalls of making sites using tools such as Jekyll and Hugo. Most importantly of all she’ll show you how easy and fun it can be to get your own static sites out into the wild.

  After contracting as a front-end developer in London, and writing code for the front page of BBC News, Charlie Owen is now happily working as a senior FED for Springer Nature in Berlin. There she helps make the world of scientific publishing a better place by constructing design systems, banging on about inclusive design, and utilising those wonderful web standards. She rides bikes, drinks beer, and quite often says the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  • @sonniesedge
  • sonniesedge.co.uk
• 

  Joshua Söhn Presenting Product Design

  In this talk, Joshua will talk about the what and when of sharing work in a digital design process, how to build a reflecting portfolio of your skills and strengthen the importance of design within tech. Joshua will present the current state of digital product design and how it reflects the technology we are using. The talk also features enough examples to give you inspiration how to build your next strong product design portfolio.

  Joshua is a Design Lead at Kontist, where he works on building an easier banking experience for freelancers in order to automate and reduce bureaucracy. He cares about iterative design, systematic thinking and having an aligned ethical vision.

  • @joshuasoehn
  • joshuasoehn.de
• 

  Thomas Lobinger Selling a Design System - 4 Times

  At Amazon Web Services we have a team that creates and maintains a Design System. I will walk you through its long history and explain how our team was successfully growing the scope, impact, and team in the last 4 years. I will tell you what worked and what not and also why. I hope this will help you stay focused on the important things in your own design and frontend adventures.

  Thomas, studied everything from advanced space propulsion systems, math, bionics, quality assurance, economics, all the way to literal sausage making and graduated as an engineer an unknown double-digit number of years later. After realizing that building rockets or sausage factories is less fun than you might think it is, he bootstrapped two startups that were sold; one of them to Amazon in 2012 sparking the Berlin based Amazon Development Center. Thomas had different roles in Amazon in the last 6 years which all have two things in common; creating better customer experiences and automation.

  • @tlobinger

Our November meetup is coming up! As always, the meetup takes place at the co.up Event Space. Doors open 7:30pm, Talks start 8:00 pm. It’s the last one of the year, so make sure not to miss it! As usual, there will be Lebkuchen. Here’s our lineup:

• 

  Viktoriia Leontieva The scientific method of product design

  For centuries, the scientific method has been used to validate all kinds of hypotheses in various sciences—chemistry, physics, geology, and psychology. Scientists from different scientific areas use the same core approach to find answers that are logical and supported by evidence. Within our life framework we too explore environment through experimentation. In this talk Vic will draw the parallel between the scientific method and product design, and how it can be introduced into our design workflow.

  Vic is an end-to-end designer who takes interest in psychology, social studies and neuroscience. After taking a psychology course by University of Toronto, she enjoys finding parallels between psychology and design, and introducing them into her work process.

  • killnicole.github.io
  • @killnicole
• 

  Radimir Bitsov What you see is faster than what you get - ways to speed up perception

  How do users perceive time? Why is it important to achieve better performance perception in comparison to the actual expectation? How can we be good to our users, and care more about their experience? Radimir’s talk will focus on these questions by presenting insights, practical techniques, and an overview of the experiential aspect of web performance.

  Radimir is a front-end engineer with a passion for web performance, accessibility, and interface animation. He is a follower of the clean, intuitive and engaging UI/UX standards and as a self-learner he is looking everyday to expand and share his knowledge and skills.

  • radibit.com
  • @radibit
• 

  Yulia Startsev Side Effects: Effects May Vary

  Handling side effects, such as async calls from a UI, is one of the difficult realities in a code base. Using react as a basis for the discussion, we will take a look at two different strategies for handling side effects, their pros and cons.

  Yulia is a developer tools developer at mozilla, debugging the debugger

  • @ioctaptceb

Mark your calendars for Up.front #78 on October 10. Invite your friends and prepare for an awesome gathering featuring three fantastic talks about design, development and everything inbetween. As always, at our community space of choice and kind supporter co.up. Doors open 7:30pm, Talks start 8:00 pm. Full schedule to be announced soon.

• 

  Florian Stolzenhain Code Less – Care Less! With Atomic CSS

  Florian’s talk covers a subjective view on changing frontend practices, their implications on team workflows and how the recent interest in functional CSS can positively impact project maintenance and team communication (whew!). Functio-what? Florian will try to explain these terms. And is it the most glorious of all frontend futures? You’ll find out in the reality check™ closing the talk.

  Florian studied design because he wanted to get away from computers. Now he memorizes Unix command listings. He is a senior frontend dev at Compuccino and co-founder of FUK.

  • stolzenhain.net
  • FUK
• 

  Charlie Owen Dear Developer, It Isn’t About You

  Charlie will give us a very brief history of the Weird Wild Web and will take a look at what has made it so successful over the last couple of decades. She’ll outline some of the super easy things that we can do to carry on making it amazing and usable by everybody.

  Charlie came to Berlin to escape the horrors of London, and found herself at home in this beautifully weird city. She rides bikes, drinks beer, and quite often says the wrong thing at the wrong time. She works for Springer Nature, helping to make the world of scientific publishing a better place.

  • @sonniesedge
  • sonniesedge.co.uk
  • github
• 

  Liv Madsen Your Team Primer on Design Systems

  Even though most of us understand that on the web visuals and code are often two sides of one coin, getting a bunch of designers and developers to work in unison on digital products can be surprisingly tricky. Isn’t there something we can lean on for help? Enter: design systems! This talk will provide a basic introduction to design systems and pattern libraries, focusing on how they can help us to bridge the gaps and optimise workflows within digital teams.

  Liv is a senior frontend developer with Edenspiekermann in Berlin. She cares greatly for design (and designers) and the stuff we all put on the web together.

  • @livmadsen
  • livmadsen.com

Summer break is coming to an end and meetup season is about to kick off yet again! So mark your calendars for Up.front #77 on September 12, invite your friends and prepare for an awesome frontend gathering featuring three fantastic talks at our co-working space of choice and kind supporter co.up. We’re so looking forward to being back for this one. Your Up.front organizer team: Kristina, Max, Alex, Katharina

• 

  Steffen Dietz Team-friendly Frontend Testing

  Visually testing a demanding design for the frontend is really hard - especially when it comes to cross-device, pixel-perfect quality management. We came up with a bunch of tricks and an open source solution to tame the beast for everyone on the team.

  Steffen is working as a lead developer for the berlin-based digital agency Taikonauten. He’s been in the web game for 18 years and he loves automation and optimization. He also randomly twitters complete nonsense.

  • taikonauten.com
  • @stffndtz
• 

  Mims Wright A Designer’s Guide to Thinking like a Programmer

  Mims will explore how coders employ a plethora of interesting tools to solve problems. In his talk he will present 5 fundamental concepts that software developers use on a daily basis and show how you can apply them to make your designs better and your life easier.

  Mims is a freelance software developer from LA living in Berlin with 16+ years of experience creating websites, games and applications.

  • mimswright.com
  • @mimshwright
• 

  Ivana McConnell Technology, Community, and Code: Building an Inclusive UX

  In this talk, Ivana will describe how we use tech to build our identities and figure out who we are. We need to be aware of our role as developers and designers in shaping identities as we build our products. It’s critical to understand how code creates communities, online and offline, and how those will be experienced by minorities and the underrepresented— does it marginalise them? Does it enable them to be successful? Let’s learn about those responsibilities, how to be aware of them, and how to build better tech in the process.

  Ivana is a UI/UX designer, born in Sarajevo to a civil engineer-turned-translator and a UN Logistics Officer-turned-software engineer. She fell in love with the web on Geocities and Neopets, and is now based in Vancouver working for Customer.io.

  • ivanamcconnell.com
  • @IvanaMcConnell

Our absolutely definitely last meetup before our loooong summer break! We’ll have 3 talks covering a broad range of design and development topics. Afterwards, we’ll move for further chats and discussions to Kremanski bar across the street. See you there!

• 

  Kristina Young I’ve Got An App For That!

  Kristina will give an overview of how different fields around the world are using technology to aid in their tasks. The talk mentions a mix of projects and aims to show the audience how their technical skills can be used in non-traditional applications as well as how their other interests and experiences can be combined with technology.

  Kristina is currently working as a backend engineer on recommendations systems. She is also a blogger with an interest in computational archaeology and some attempts at art and creative writing.

  • computationalarchaeology.wordpress.com
  • @comparch1
• 

  Andree Huk Design Is Code, Code Is Design With The New Sketch

  Sketch 43 will revolutionise software design work. The next version of Sketch will have an new file format that allows to read and write .sketch files manually or programatically.
  Andree will show what the implications for our design workflow might be, using and employing the new capabilities. He will try to lay out how it can level the playing field between design and code, how Bohemian Coding might set a new design workflow and standard through a new "design repo". Design and code are moving much closer together. This bears opportunities for designers and engineers and will likely set a new direction for workflow and collaboration.

  As founder of blended.io, Andree focuses on experience design and innovation for international clients, working for fintech and ecommerce startups, as well as corporations and the Mittelstand. Andree organises StartupDodgeball.net and writes on andreehuk.com or Medium.

  • blended.io
  • @andreehuk
• 

  Ulrike Rausch Brush, Ink and Code – The Making of a Font

  Ulrike will show how she designs typefaces and how she builds fonts. She will also demonstrate how nerdy OpenType programming adds just the right analog touch to her handwriting style. You will learn how to use pro fonts like a pro — no matter if you use layout software like Adobe InDesign or a standard word processor like Microsoft Word.

  Ulrike is a Berlin-based type designer and letterer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Design from Potsdam University of Applied Science (Germany). In 2009 Ulrike founded her own type foundry called LiebeFonts, providing high-quality typefaces and hand-crafted letterings with a charming personality and obsessive attention to detail.

  • liebefonts.com
  • @LiebeFonts

It is May, and this month’s up.front is also part of Berlin’s WWWTFest, a week (or maybe an entire month?) full of events from and for the local web tech community.

• 

  Stefan Judis Unicode, JavaScript and the Emoji Family

  We all use Emoji in our daily life, but we rarely use them in code. Are there things we have to watch out for? Do Emoji “just work” in JavaScript strings? This talk takes a look at the Emoji family and shows how Unicode works in JavaScript.

  Stefan started programming 6 years ago and quickly fell in love with web performance, new technologies and automation. He worked for several startups in Berlin and recently joined Contentful. He is also a curator of the web performance online resource Perf Tooling (perf-tooling.today), organizer of the Web Performance Meetup Berlin, contributes to a variety of open source projects and enjoys sharing nerdy discoveries.

  • stefanjudis.de
  • @stefanjudis
  • github.com/stefanjudis
• 

  Mariko Kosaka So you tell me my website is slow… the science of what makes snappy interaction.

  How do we design a website that feels snappy? When a user says “That website is slow”, what does it really mean? Let’s look at the science of user interaction. You may know the 60fps rule for animation, but how many seconds can a user wait for loading data before they feel frustrated? How can we test if our website feels snappy on a mobile phone with slow network? This talk will guide you through what to look for and how to measure user interaction for web performance so you can start the conversation with other designers and engineers about interaction design.

  Mariko is a creative developer. She uses code to help her design textiles & organize a local JavaScript meetup in New York City called BrooklynJS.

  • kosamari.com
  • @kosamari
  • github.com/kosamari
• 

  Glen Maddern The Front End Dead End

  The front end is a strange place. It’s a totally interdisciplinary field, requiring knowledge of UX, visual design, interaction design, network architecture, device hardware, browser rendering, browser bugs, software architecture & more. There’s so much to learn, and it changes so frequently, how can anyone keep up? And more importantly, if you’re expending so much energy just trying to keep up, how do you grow your skills and progress your career? In this talk, Glen will be sharing his own journey into the front end, and why he decided to start making things to help.

  Glen Maddern is an independent front-end web developer, consultant & educator. He’s the producer of Front End Center, the co-creator of Styled Components & CSS Modules and an organiser of CSSConf AU & JSConf AU.

  • glenmaddern.com
  • @glenmaddern
  • github.com/geleen
• 

  Jessica Lord Scaling Down, People Up

  Let’s loosen up the web. Let’s make it available to more people with tools we may take for granted — like spreadsheets! In this talk, we’ll cover fatigue-less ways to build things for the web with resources like GitHub Pages, Glitch and Spreadsheets.

  Jessica is an urban designer turned open source developer by way of a year as a Code for America Fellow. She was most recently at GitHub on the Electron team.

  • jlord.us
  • @jllord
  • github.com/jlord

Boo! Hah, surprise! We’re doing a sneaky late-but-intense sort of announcement! Because it’s the fourth month of the year, we have four speakers for you! No, that’s not the reason, that would become unsustainable very quickly. Anyway, up.front tonight, tell all your friends, because we haven’t really gotten around to it this time. See you all at up.front 74 on Tuesday, April 11th. Here’s what we’ve got for you this time:

• 

  L Daniel Swakman Add to home screen: Designing & prototyping a native app in HTML

  In this talk, Daniel will talk about bridging the gap between web design/frontend and designing for native iOS/Android. He makes the case that designers need to come out of their Sketch cage, and start delivering stateful & dynamic (responsive) designs. This theme will be illustrated through the case study of designing the mobile app for SME-accounting startup Paraşüt fully through prototype-ready HTML, CSS and a Github repository.

  Daniel is a ‘full stack’ web & UI designer, passionate about creating meaningful and legible content experiences through design. He is originally from Amsterdam, previously in Istanbul, occasionally London and currently in Berlin. Europe basically. Daniel believes that designing delightful experiences for digital means an inevitable link between design and code.

  • ldaniel.eu
  • @ldanielswakman
• 

  Charlie Owen Tech & Morality

  You want to make your webapp robust in this dizzyingly diverse world of devices, connections and browsers, right? What if I told you that doing so might just make you a better person? Join me as I tell you about technology, morality, and how they intersect.

  Charlie came to Berlin to escape the horrors of London, and found herself at home in this beautifully weird city. She rides bikes, drinks beer, and quite often says the wrong thing at the wrong time. She works for Springer Nature, helping to make the world of scientific publishing a better place.

  • @sonniesedge
  • sonniesedge.co.uk
  • github
• 

  Caio Donini Communicating with purpose

  Everyone is a great communicator. You just need to find your voice. In this talk, Caio will share some insights about human relations, terrible Power Point slides and awkward feedback sessions. His goal is to unlock our potential as communicators - no matter what our background, skills or struggles are.

  Caio is passionate about 3 things: learning, entertaining and helping. Having experience in the non-profit and private sectors, he has been a speaker and facilitator in more than 50 events in the last 5 years. Today he is in charge of business development at hy.am studios, a digital design agency. In his free time he is playing around with some ideas - one of which potentially includes a guitar and some embarrassing moments in the streets of Berlin.

  • LinkedIn
  • @csunights
• 

  Michael Pieracci A little bit about Awareness

  Through my work career doing project management, I’ve realized how important it is to facilitate conversation between people and teams to understand context. In this talk I’ll share some observations from my recent role as product manager at teambay, as well as share some recommendations that you can think about in your own work.

  Michael Pieracci comes from San Jose, California, and has lived in Berlin since 2013. Currently he’s doing product and project management at a startup called teambay, where our product help employees provide feedback to their management. Outside of work he watches Star Trek, drinks very nice loose leaf teas, and takes care of his houseplants.

  • michaelpieracci.com
  • @mpieracci

While we did ponder doing a meetup on whittling your own canoe or coordinating the selling of your belongings and your subsequent escape to a place where it doesn’t constantly rain, we did come around in the end and focused on the task at hand.

In the words of Stanley Kubrick: "However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light", and that’s especially true during the end of winter in Berlin. So, please join us in welcoming our luminous luminaries, our illuminatingly bright speakers who will, and please excuse us if we’re belabouring this theme, enlighten you with new knowledge from all corners of the design and tech scenes:

• 

  Vuk Trifkovic Screenshots, Sticky Dots and Sketches: Compressed Design Sprints

  In this talk Vuk will share his experience with a "shortened" version of the Design Sprint. Despite its increasingly high profile, it is not always possible to run a "by the book" version of the Design Sprint. To get around this obstacle, Vuk would like to share some of his experience of running compressed versions of Design Sprints - to gather critical insight from the team, build consensus and avoid the HiPPO anti-pattern.

  Vuk is Product Management Lead at BCG Digital Ventures. Vuk joined his first startup back in 2002, while finishing his graduate research in GIS in Archaeology. Since then he has been working in London and Berlin on the connected car app Vimcar, Rocket Internet’s real estate marketplace Lamudi, property search engine Nestoria and loyalty platform Bonusbox.

  • vuk.io
  • @vtri
• 

  Christine Lariviere Nostalgia in the Age of Social Media: Identity as Artifact

  Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, which may be expressed through certain consumerist behaviours: the collection and accumulation of memorabilia. In her talk, Christine asks: how do we satisfy our nostalgic impulses in the ephemeral digital age?

  Christine is a social media strategist with a data-driven approach. She focuses on community building and engagement, while also leveraging social media for lead generation.

  • @cdlariviere
• 

  Marie LeBlanc Flanagan Solving problems with play

  Can play be used to explore problems? In this short and probably overly personal talk, Marie will share their process for creating strange and playful experiences with interactive media.

  Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan moved to Berlin to make experimental games and experiences. In the past year she has made “Auscult”, an experience which turns your feelings into music; “Other Hands” a VR experience expressing the permanence of your virtual choices on your physical body; “Closer” a computer vision game that uses two people’s moving bodies as a shared single controller; and “TexTiles”, an award-winning game at the Wikimedia Free Knowledge Game Jam. Marie also runs Weird Canada.

  • marieflanagan.com

After a well deserved hibernation season, Up.front is finally back for a row of exciting meetups in 2017: Every 2nd Tuesday at Co.Up, the co.working space of our choice.

To set the bar for an amazing year to come, we’re very excited to announce our 72nd meetup with a great lineup of three speakers, willing to share with us what they know, how they came to wrap their head around it and maybe even what they haven’t figured out yet. Let’s listen, put our heads together and discuss frontend, game design and more.

• 

  Yoshua Wuyts Getting Started With Choo

  "Performant" and "easy" are not mutually exclusive. In this talk Yosh will explain how to go from writing plain HTML and CSS to running a clean unidirectional JavaScript app. No heavy frontend skills are needed, just a bit of knowledge in HTML, CSS and JS.

  Yosh is a creative engineer who loves all things computer, but loves hanging out even more. Current obsession is Rust and distributed systems, but he tends to do JS from time to time too.

  • yoshuawuyts.com
  • @yoshuawuyts
• 

  Valentina Montagna Design principles for everyday life problems

  If you have a friend who’s a designer, you’ve seen it in action: the 24-hours-365-days-a-year obsession designers have with how humans interact with the word. You’ve seen your friend creeping on you while you do the simplest action. You’ve seen that frown on their forehead, when they’re taking a mental note of what you’ve done; like that “explains E V E R Y T H I N G.” That’s because designers consider everything in their life and surrounding them a design problem, making design a filter to process reality. And you know what? Design principles can explain life, even to you.

  Valentina is a full stack designer with more than ten years of experience in the field. With a solid background in typography and basic design, she worked for the last four years as an independent product designer, building websites and web apps from static mock-ups to their implementation. In 2015 she joined Bandcamp as UI/UX designer, where she can support the thing she loves the most, music, doing the thing she’s best at: design.

  • @scintillaluz
• 

  Allan Cudicio What the Heck is Game Design?

  Most people have at least vague idea of what a UI or industrial designer do... but game designers? What the heck do they do? Even other designers struggle with this. In his talk Allan will explain what these designers do and how they are contributing to the current tech & media landscape.

  Allan Cudicio is Game Designer at King. Previously involved in the business side of software development, he has now switched to full time design of mobile games.

  • @ilcudi

Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes: Empathy is key in order to create great user experiences, but also to become a better frontend developer, and ultimately to keep learning and pass your knowledge on. In our November edition we’ll learn about understanding novice tech users, hear about how to make educated decisions about which framework to use, and look into how teaching helps us to learn on the fly.

• 

  Ally Long Designing Apps for Tech Newbies

  Tech newbies? Where does one find them? It’s not easy, even in the developing world, to find people who don’t use a smartphone. But they’re out there, and Ally has been making mobile apps for some of these novice tech users in various West African countries. In this talk she’ll share some of the lessons she’s learnt along the way about how people who’ve been introduced to technology very recently - usually through cheap, second-hand, car-battery-powered devices - respond to new and shiny ways of interacting with machines.

  Ally is a designer and front-end developer at eHealth Africa. She splits her time there between creating mobile app interfaces for novice tech users in West Africa, and designing data visualisations for disease surveillance dashboards.

  • @allyelle
• 

  Florian Stolzenhain Getting Over Frameworks Without Making an Ass of Yourself

  Florian knows you can only despise things you actually have some relation to. So instead of going on a rant, he’ll analyze the context of Bootstrap, and will take a critical look at frontend frameworks in general. His talk will feature opinions about: gut feeling, putting yourself in someone else’s position, and negative margins.

  Florian is a graphic designer turned frontend nerd and Drupal sitebuilder. He is a co-founder of FUK and works at Compuccino.

  • stolzenhain.net
• 

  Yulia Startsev Learning by Teaching

  How does one go about teaching someone something? In this short talk, Yulia will present her experiences of learning on the fly by helping people teach themselves.

  Yulia is a frontend developer at bitcrowd

Seventy editions of up.front not only mean a lot of new friendships but also a lot of new lessons learned.

In that spirit we invited four inspiring speakers to share with us what they learned from doing what they do: From running an agency to applying lean methodologies in side projects to very practical things like building a big CSS framework.
Our 70th edition is dedicated to the doers, their failures, and their successes.

• 

  Harry Keller Things Never Turn Out The Way You Expect

  Almost a year ago Harry and three friends decided to found a new digital product and branding studio, called diesdas.digital. They thought they had it all figured out, but then everything turned out quite differently. Nevertheless (or because of that) it’s been going rather well and Harry will share a couple of early findings, which should be relevant for pretty much everyone working in digital.

  Harry Keller co-founded diesdas.digital, a new branding and product development studio here in Berlin. He loves programming, but lately finds himself writing mostly blog posts and emails. Previously he built digital products and services at 11 Freunde, Edenspiekermann and A Color Bright.

  • @diesdasdigital
  • diesdas.digital
• 

  Mischa König Visualizing WhatsApp Chats

  In this talk Mischa will show how to use Lean Startup principles to verify concepts for side projects on the example of a web application which enables users to visualize their WhatsApp chats. While exporting chats is easy, WhatsApp makes it hard to convert the data into a standardized structured format. We will go through some technical issues and solutions implemented in the process of creating Chatvisualizer. Finally we’ll look at the challenges involved in the visual treatment of highly dynamic data such as chats and some ways to deal with them.

  Mischa is a freelance interaction designer and frontend developer educated at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam. When not working with clients, he is looking for technical and visual inspiration to built digital concepts upon – especially in the fields of social media and digital journalism.

  • @michito
  • mischakoenig.de
• 

  Noa Tamir A Trillion Levels Played: Improving Player Experience

  Combining design and data is very important at King. Noa will tell you how King uses quantitative user research to learn about player experience and make games more fun.

  Noa Tamir is a Senior Data Scientist working on live games and games in development phases. Her role at King is to break down technical and conceptual complexities in order to improve the player experience of the world’s largest player network. She likes data modelling, automating and significant results.

  • @noatamir
• 

  Charlie Owen Lessons Learned From Building Your Own CSS Framework

  In her talk, Charlie will let you know about some of the challenges associated with building your own CSS framework. What’s the best way to approach it and how can you keep it relevant? If you’re interested in writing your own personal or in-house framework, this could be the talk for to you!

  Charlie is a frontend web developer, specialising in large-scale CSS/Sass, and currently living and working in Berlin. After spending several years contracting for suits in London’s City and working for BBC News, she tasted her first Club Mate on a visit to Berlin and immediately made the move there.

  • @sonniesedge
  • sonniesedge.co.uk
  • github

We’re back from our vacation break! Summer’s leaving us, but we have a season of exciting talks ahead.

• 

  Dafna Sharabi Designers in the Lab

  Designers in the Lab is the story of a team of designers from the Wix studio, who embark on an adventure in the unknown territory of trend prediction. In this talk Dafna will explain how designers view the world, how this view effects their approach to research methods and trend prediction, and how adapting work methods from different industries can help you inspire the future of our own.

  Dafna is currently residing in Berlin, working from the local Wix Office. Previous to that she has led the Design Dev team and worked in various positions in the Wix Studio for 6 years, creating and establishing work methods.

  • LinkedIn
• 

  Alper Çugun Prototyping the Conversation

  Alper will talk about how he prototyped a conversational interface for adolescent mental health, using off the shelf front-end technologies. He’ll present the reasons why they did this, look at the technology used, and discuss other issues with creating a chat application.

  Alper Cugun is a design strategist and software engineer based in Berlin. For the past five years he was partner at Dutch-German design studio Hubbub. Alper was active in the Amsterdam startup scene, led a data visualization agency and helped found the Open State Foundation, a Dutch open government institution.

  • @alper
  • GitHub
  • alper.nl
• 

  Kristina Walcker-Mayer Mobile Trends

  It’s the year 2016 and Mobile is here to stay. What is the future of mobile in e-commerce? Kristina, Zalando’s Product Manager for Mobile Apps, will showcase the latest mobile trends from both a design & business perspective and provide concrete examples of Zalando’s approach.

  Kristina works as Product Manager for Mobile Apps at Zalando Technology, where she focuses on innovation and strategy in the mobile app space. Besides working on the product site, her passion for driving the mobile mindset within Zalando’s various departments makes her a true Mobile First evangelist. Kristina looks back at 6 years of mobile experience and has developed mobile strategies and solutions for major clients in the retail, television, NGO and automotive industries.

  • @mobilegeekgirl

Summer is coming! And it will be a long and beautiful one, we hear. So this is the last meetup before our two months summer break starts. And maybe you want to be a part of it? If so, there’s still a chance: We are looking for speakers for June and later 2016! Read about how speaking at up.front works and get in touch!

• 

  Frederic Marx Pragmatic Webfont Strategies

  Webfonts, in theory, are great. Using them responsibly though, without negative impact on the user experience, is an engineering nightmare at best, impossible at worst. In this talk Frederic will look at different typographic scenarios on the Web and discuss solutions for selecting and loading webfonts responsibly.

  Frederic is a code-driven designer with a background in media and cultural studies. He gets excited about typography, design systems, tools and the nature of the Web as an interconnected social platform. He also coaches at CSSclasses and loves co-learning and exchanging knowledge with inclusive communities.

  • @fredericmarx
• 

  Lisa Passing The Story of diversitytickets.org

  This is the story of diversitytickets.org, an app for conferences to promote and organize their diversity tickets, scholarships or opportunity grants. The rails app behind it is open source and developed by a RailsGirls study group in Berlin and supported by Travis Foundation. Lisa is mentoring a sub-group that focuses on the Front-End development of the app. In this talk she will talk about teaching beginners, developing and maintaining open source software and community.

  By day, Lisa is Queen of !important (aka Front-End Developer) at Travis CI and works to promote free and open source software. By night, she coaches at community programming workshops and organises Cryptoparties around Berlin.

  • diversitytickets.org
• 

  Michael P. Pfeiffer Traveling The World With CSS - A Talk About Penguins (and Stylesheets)

  In this talk Michael takes you on a journey of how he ended up on a small vessel heading for Antarctica and how, in the process, he discovered that the job market, just like an iceberg, has so much more to offer under the 9-to-5 surface.

  Michael is an avid traveler who sold all his belongings to travel the world with nothing more than fits a carry-on backpack. Together with @kriesse he founded CSSconf EU and has a huge passion for community driven events. He works as Lead Front-End Engineer for Continu, a fully remote company, building learning software for the modern workplace.

  • @m_p_pfeiffer

Nine days should be sufficient for Kreuzberg to clean itself up after its customary annual First of May riot/festival, so you won’t have to wade through a knee-deep mass of unconscious revelers to reach up.front number 67! And since the holiday is international workers’ day, our two talks so far are, serendipitously, about how we work! If you’ve got a third, get in touch!

• 

  Emanuele Libralato Stop looking for designers, become one! On "Why developers need to learn design"

  There has been a huge buzz in the last 1-2 years around the topic that "Everyone should learn how to code" and more specifically that "Designers should learn how to code". Why is this not happening the other way around? Can brainstorming, user research, personas and design thinking change the way we write software? Can we adopt the same army-knives used by design agencies and freelancers to speed up the development of Software or to better prioritise some features over others?

  Emanuele Libralato is a technologist, currently based in Berlin. His background is in Software Engineering and he’s interested in investigating intersections: between Art, Technology and Design. Between Analog and Digital worlds. He likes to play with technology, he’s in love with natural interfaces and believes in a future without touch-screens. Currently freelancing and co-founder at joinrs.com

  • @iamtenko
• 

  Thomas Lobinger Working Backwards

  No, NOT walking backwards - this is not a talk about the King of Pop. Working backwards is a process Thomas uses to ensure his team does the right thing. This talk is a reply – or rather an addition – to Matteo Cavucci’s talk about user stories at Up.front #65. His goal is to share one way on how to create not just a conversation starter but a document that helps you to always focus on your customer. This approach allows you to launch and drive many different types of projects. These projects can be as big as founding a movie studio, develop drones to deliver packages, or change how companies think about IT infrastructure.

  Currently Thomas works with a small team of developers and designers in Berlin and Seattle. They are working on changing how we all can create and maintain complex web applications better.

  • @TLobinger
• 

  Melanie Thewlis and Dr. Agata Lisiak Visualising Immigrant Experience with P5.js

  Agata Liask’s ethnographic research in Berlin, Munich, London, and Birmingham centres on everyday mothering performed by Polish immigrant mothers in urban space. Aside from interviews and participant observation, the project also makes use of various creative and visual methods of communicating immigrant experience.
  
  In this talk, the project collaborators discuss the research, creative andtechnical processes used to develop interactive, web based, datavisualisations that explore how child rearing involves purchases, uses, andexchanges of objects.
  
  Dr. Agata Lisiak is a researcher at Humboldt University’s Institute of Social Sciences and a lecturer at Bard College Berlin. She is the author of Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe, and writes on media representations of the city, cultural memory, gender and migration, and everyday life in the city.
  
  Melanie Thewlis is co-founder of Little Web Giants, a digital agency based in Berlin and Melbourne. She is an active member of the Berlin techcommunity, as a speaker, event organiser, teacher and hackathon winner.
  
  Fabian Bauer has qualifications in industrial engineering and is currently completing a degree in business informatics. He joined Little Web Giants as a developer in 2015.

  • littlewebgiants.com
  • @agatskil

It’s April! And as the German saying goes, April does whatever it wants. We, on the other hand, will do exactly what you expect us to do, which is organising our 66th meetup. This time we will hear talks about intercultural apsects of interface design and a thing called DesignOps. Very interesting!

• 

  Fabian Fabian What is DesignOps?

  "DesignOps connects design goals with engineering requirements by providing culture, conventions and tools"
  
  Well, there a are probably a million other insufficient ways to express its scope in tweet-length, but more importantly: DesignOps a thing now and we need your help to shape it and define it!
  
  In his talk, Fabian will share the why of DesignOps, where the term is coming from and where the whole idea could go. Maybe he can even get you excited to join the expedition.

  Fabian is an UX/Ix/UI Designer and Developer at Jimdo. He co-founded and developed things like the Agile Design Camp, the UX Camp Hamburg and Github from Scratch. He likes to do sketchnotes and is currently developing his first workshop.

  • @filtercake
• 

  Stefanie Kegel Intercultural Aspects of Interface Design

  Today it's very common for companies to design global websites and applications. This means people with many different cultural backgrounds will use your product. How can we as designers & consultants take care of people's needs & goals and business goals when creating something for a global, cultural diverse audience like e.g. China and the US ? What do we need to consider if we do not have the resources to do a detailed user research for all the cultural diverse user groups? We will take a look at Hofstede's theory about cultural dimensions which could be applied to elements in User Interface Design and which can serve as a starting point and a rough guideline when we design for people with very different cultural backgrounds.

  Stefanie is the co-founder of "The Geekettez", a small design studio with a focus on user experience consulting and interaction design. She has graduated in interactive media design and currently studies Psychology on a part time basis because of her interest in human behaviour, motivations, and social psychology.

  • @guerillagirl_
  • guerillagirl.de

March madness? Maybe! Much merriment, my mates! Marcus, Melanie, Matteo: marvellous, methinks! Many meticulously made monologues! (Please attend our upcoming meetup for the opportunity to watch us trying to do the entire introduction like this. It will be fun, and we are very much looking forward to see you on March 8th when we kick off at 8pm sharp at co.up).

• 

  Matteo Cavucci Better User Stories

  One of the biggest challenges of building things together is communicating your idea to others. Considering that humans are not so great at telepathy, the only tool we have is language. For years, the solution was struggling to collect all the requirements in big spec books that noone wanted to read. Until we discovered another way: telling stories. This talk is taking a familiar format, the "user story", and will explore it from an unusual point of view. We’re going to see how to use it, how to avoid common pitfalls and how to make real sense of "user stories".

  ​Matteo is a true web-midfielder. Developer at heart, his passion is bridging engineering, design and digital strategy. He’s motivated by both product and technical challenges, getting excited by discovering new features as well as Agile practices. After more than ten years in the web industry, he’s currently working at Edenspiekermann, where he’s helping clients and teammates to build great products and services.

  • @matteomced
• 

  Marcus Blättermann Resolution-Independent Illustrations in Pure JavaScript

  Marcus will present a system for creating fully responsive illustrations that can adapt to any resolution. In his talk he’ll point out new approaches to responsive, resolution-independent design.

  ​Marcus Blättermann studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, Germany. While always into illustration and graphic-design he focuses more and more on web design and web development with a focus on responsive, resolution-independent design solutions.

  • @essenmitsosse
  • essenmitsosse.de
• 

  Melanie Daveid Creating Your Personal Website Without Going Nuts

  It’s one of the most challenging topics creative people face in their career - the process of developing a personal website that represents professional skills on one hand but also reflects their personality and mindset on the other. It is an important experience in decision making and this talk will offer a basic guideline to approach this challenge.

  Melanie is a UX Designer and Art Director from Austria who is currently working as a Senior Product Designer at Onefootball. She calls herself enfant terrible of the digital avantgarde and enjoys nothing more than a decent "high-five".

  • @melaniedaveid
  • melaniedaveid.com

A late Happy New Year everyone! It’s 2016, and about time we kick off another year of up.front events. This meetup will be all about improving our work and work enviroments with great talks about prototyping, changing workspaces, and storytelling in branding.

• 

  Victoria Leontieva The Designer’s Guide to the Prototyping Galaxy

  In her talk Victoria will go through the current state of prototyping tools. She will outline the difference between rapid prototyping and interaction design tools, as well as pinpoint and demo best practices for both.

  Originally from Ukraine, Victoria lives and works as a Product Designer in Berlin, Germany. She is a big fan of rapid prototyping and an advocate for emotional intelligence in design.

  • @killnicole
  • Github
• 

  Robert Stulle Brave New Workspace

  Everything is changing: Our work is changing and the way we work is changing. But how about our organizations, our idea of leadership and the physical and cultural conditions at our workspace? The requirements are changing fast and I want to share what I have learned as a partner at Edenspiekermann and what I find useful, desirable and necessary to survive as a team.

  Robert Stulle is a partner and co-owner at Edenspiekermann in Berlin. He has two decades of professional experience as a designer and consultant and is am the head of Digital Products and Services at Edenspiekermann.

  • @robertstulle
  • Edenspiekermann
• 

  Nadine Bruder Great Branding Is Storytelling

  Two things that Nadine regularly encounters in her work: a lot of people presume that branding is all about the visual identity of a company, and that people strongly underestimate the impact of stories. But in a digital age both, branding and storytelling are crucial for companies to connect with their audiences. In her talk Nadine will share her experiences and insights into strategic branding and storytelling, explain how both are linked and how to create true, meaningful connections between a brand and its audiences.

  Nadine is a brand and digital business strategist consulting lifestyle and technology companies on branding, UX, storytelling, marketing and product strategy. She is drawn to people and places that value good design, useful innovation and meaningful connections.

  • @nadinebruder
  • nadinebruder.com

Our last meetup of the year is coming up. Join us for an evening of talks and discussions about accessibility & JavaScript, board games & code, designers & the startup world, and… maybe even cookies & mulled wine!

• 

  Chris Ward Why I decided to code a Boardgame (and how tools written in obscure programming languages helped)

  Just over a year ago Chris had a great idea for a boardgame where players get to run a computer company in 1980s America. As a programmer of over 15 years, it seemed obvious to him to code the game and this led him down a meandering path of obscure toolsets where he discovered some amazing gems. In this presentation Chris wants to introduce you to the why and how he did this, what he discovered, how it can help you and the digital future of cardboard.

  Chris is a developer advocate and Technical Writer. Loves to talk when given the chance and is an Enthusiastic Amateur at just about everything.

  • @ChrisChinchilla
  • github.com/ChrisChinchilla
• 

  Emanuela Damiani Being a Designer in the Start-Up World

  Being a designer in a technology start-up can be stressful. When a new venture starts with a brilliant idea, it’s up to you to guide them through a design process that turns a plan into a much loved product. You need to communicate with stakeholders, collaborate with developers, and solve problems, usually many times a day, just to turn that brilliant idea into something useful people actually need. This talk will share some practical ideas and processes battle-tested with clients to make the design process as stress-free as possible.

  Emanuela is a designer aiming to create great user experiences for digital products. Following the eight and a half years she spent working on renowned web projects at MCED, her own web firm in Rome, she took her learnings and joined Berlin’s vivid startup scene. In 2011 she was awarded a full-scholarship to study a Bachelor in Visual Communication from IED — European Institute of Design, where she graduated in 2014. As an ambassador to the user she works closely with product managers and engineers to create both usable and valuable products.

  • @brassy
• 

  Melanie Thewlis Better Accessibility with JavaScript

  Making the web accessible to people with all abilities is a key social justice issue of our era. Unfortunately, there’s still a lack of commonly adopted best practices. For developers, it can feel like a daunting challenge to sort through all the relevant technical documentation and work out how to apply it. This talk presents practical and easy-to-apply code samples that can significantly improve the web experience for people with a range of disabilities.

  Melanie is a co-founder and lead web developer at Little Web Giants, and is experienced in building all sorts of web projects, from e-commerce to CRM integrations to data visualisations. She is an active member of the Berlin tech community, speaker, front end web development teacher, and holds degrees in Creative Computing in Political Science from the University of Melbourne. Melanie has had a lifelong involvement with volunteer and activist work on issues of social justice and the environment.

  • @littlewebgiants
  • littlewebgiants.com

Our November meetup is coming up – Come join us to hear about component-oriented UX, the role of QA in product development, and how comics and web design go together.

• 

  Benjamin Kampmann Component-Oriented UX For The Win… But How?

  Understanding UI as reusable components and building it in a modular way are the new black in web development. But how exactly do you apply these latest technologies while still allowing overall themes and customization as we are used to? In this case study, we will look under the hood of beavy to understand how it uses CSS Modules and React to marry having highly complex, reusable UI-components and ensuring they can be completely customized at the same time. And what that means for the overall design process.

  Benjamin is the lead coach of the Hackership code learning retreat. In his primary line of business Benjamin Kampmann is a freelance software developer and architect building (open source) web platforms.

  • @SirDonQui
  • hackership.org
• 

  Vuk Trifkovic QA for the Rest of Us

  Quality Assurance tends to be either ignored or considered to be someone else’s job – this is what Vuk experienced and believed himself until he walked into a small startup where product quality was highly important and with no one else there to take care of it. In his talk Vuk will shed light on his experience as a product person taking lead on QA. He will highlight the importance of QA in creating products and share a few tips on how to approach the issue. The talk aims to enable designers, front-end developers and product managers to understand better what QA entails, and provide useful techniques they could apply in their own projects to deliver more satisfying experiences.

  Vuk leads product management and front-end development at Vimcar, a Berlin-based connected car company. Vuk joined his first startup back in 2002, while finishing his graduate research in GIS in Archaeology. Since then he has been working on a property search engine, a loyalty programme and content management for heritage sector.

  • @vtri
  • vuk.io
• 

  Ariel Cotton Interdisciplinary Design

  In addition to being a UI/UX designer and developer, Ariel is also an interactive artist and maker, and she draws and writes comics. Not seeing these as separate media, she integrates them in interdisciplinary ways. For instance, Ariel has made webcomics that are navigable through interfaces made from physical objects such as books and dolls, and illustrations that produce computer graphics and sounds when touched. In her talk she will review key points in her approach to interdisciplinary design, show some of her work, and discuss the tools she uses.

  Ariel Cotton is an artist and designer from New York City who is currently living in Berlin.

  • @argoncobalt
  • argoncobalt.com

Whoa! Hey there! Yeah, it’s us again, sooner than expected! We took a break from our regular rhythm due to last month’s wwwtfest, and now we’re back in our regular groove: every second Tuesday of the month. We hope you’ve taken the last few weeks to recuperate from said fest and all the conferences and parties implied by it, and are up to join us for our 61st meetup!

• 

  Philip Paetz, Kim Müller Designing for Good: How we Created walkwithme.berlin

  With the pressing refugee situation in Berlin we asked ourselves a simple question: How can we make a difference? The result is – walkwithme.berlin, an ambitious endeavour that connects Berliners with refugees in our city, bringing their individual stories to life.
  From brainstorming through ideation, to validating our idea in the real world, to engaging with volunteer organisations all over the city, interviewing refugees on the ground, UX and visual design, and finally implementation, our talk will take you through our two-week journey.

  Philip and Kim are part of a group of designers, developers and assorted collaborators, part of a creative offshoot of one of the world’s largest consultancy firms.

  • walkwithme.berlin
  • @chapati23
  • Philip on LinkedIn
  • Kim on LinkedIn
• 

  Florian Stolzenhain Scaling Responsive Spritemaps

  Spritemaps are an ancient art of managing frontend performance and design workflow. They hold up pretty well in the light of recent concepts like icon fonts, SVG’s <use> and data64-enconding, considering they are easy to adapt in a fully responsive enviroment and high-def displays. The talk discusses 2 responsive strategies with demos, pros and cons and offers some feedback on questions.

  Florian is graphic designer turned frontend nerd and Drupal sitebuilder. He is a co-founder of FUK.

  • stolzenhain.net
• 

  Mims H. Wright The sad, strange tale of the boy with only two fingers OR an introduction to how binary is used to make websites

  Most people know that computers are "just a bunch of ones and zeroes," but few understand what that really means. How do ones and zeros become numbers, words, and pictures? This talk starts at the beginning, explaining binary numbers and shows how they are used to describe basic datatypes. We begin to uncover what the statement "just a bunch of ones and zeroes" really means.

  Mims is a freelance sr. software developer from Los Angeles working with front-end, iOS, and Unity3D. Also an author, international race car driver, beer brewer, and dad. He’s living in Kreuzberg from September to December.

  • @mimshwright
  • mimswright.com
• 

  Molly Wilson Dude, Not Cool: Gender and Default Iconography

  How come, all over the Internet, the "default" user icon is a man? Compared to many of the gender/tech problems out there, this is an easy (and fun) one to fix! Let’s examine how it came to be, and look into some dos and don’ts about representing gender visually.

  Molly Wilson is a user experience designer from San Francisco, CA currently living in Berlin. She has worked on digital products in finance, health, and education. She seems friendly, but if she hears you say that good UX is “nothing but common sense” she will really lose her cool.

  • @mollyclare
  • molly.is

Our September event will be up.front’s 60th meetup – reason to celebrate! Plus, it’s WhatTheFest, Berlin’s week of awesome community tech events, and we expect an extra amazing crowd of community members from around the world to join us for up.front.

• 

  Ola Gasidlo Worker as a Service

  Service worker is the new cool kid in town. But what does it do? Why do we need it? What is a worker actually? Enjoy this introduction and make the web work for you!

  Ola does JavaScript at @Hoodiehq and is a daughter driven development advocate.

  • @misprintedtype
• 

  Lewis Cowper Modularise All the Things! (Now Including CSS)

  Recently, there's been a lot of talk about modularising UIs into components. Lewis will explore some strategies that allow you to do this, and introduce the css-modules project and how you can get started with it in your own projects. This talk will get you interested in modular UIs, and introduce you to some tools and methods that you can use to build your web applications in a loosely coupled way.

  Lewis is a Junior Front End Dev at HitFox group. He loves offline capable web apps, analysing processes, and modular design.

  • @lewiscowper
• 

  Jonathon Bellew Making Friends and Beautiful Things With Your Browser

  An overview of the wonderful tools the browser gives developers and designers right now to collaborate on creative projects. This talk focuses on concepts and opportunities rather than complex coding, and is appropriate for designers, developers, and anyone wanting to know how to collaborate across these two disciplines. It will feature real world examples from my recent work history, and is based on a talk I gave at decompress.com.au 2015.

  Jonathon is a computer programmer and designer from Melbourne, living in Berlin. He builds and deploys websites and web-based applications, and has a particular interest in creating tools that help designers and programmers collaborate.

  • @jonathonbellew

Up.front 59 is coming up – join us on July 14th for the last meetup before the summer break! We’ll keep it short and sweet with only two talks, so there’ll be plenty of time to enjoy the weather with some drinks and discussions afterwards. But be prepared for some serious thought food brought to you by Lukas Rieder who will introduce you to visualisations and D3, and Gilberto Urutea who's going to explore complex systems.

• 

  Gilberto Urueta Dealing with Complexity

  We all have experienced these: Long hours of planning and forecasting that don’t lead to results, clients changing their mind from one day to another, decisions taken that seemed illogical. How can we explain all of that? In Gilberto’s talk we will learn about complex systems in order to understand the reason behind these situations. The talk will explore why learning more about complex system can be useful in your every day work.

  Gilberto is a Berlin-based Scrum Master and Developer. He is passionate about Agile, Lean, Scrum and most of all complexity.

  • @gisasola1
• 

  Lukas Rieder Object Constancy In Visualisations

  Visualisations are the backbone of data driven story telling. In between the many ways to represent data nowadays, lies one fundamental principle of our perception to make visualisations comprehensible. The talk aims to dive into the idea behind object constancy and shows how D3.js can help you achieve this goal. Even if you are new to D3, this talk will have you covered.

  Lukas is passionate about programming, he usually writes applications for server backends in Ruby, and occasionally resorts to Javascript.

  • @Overbryd

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!

• 

  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
• 

  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
• 

  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

The month of May usually is all about good news: summer time is perceptibly close, lots of holidays (even for Berliners) and the up.front lineup is no less promising as you can read below. So mark your calendars.

• 

  Kevin Lorenz Your Nesting Is Harmful

  It’s not the preprocessor which produces bad code, it’s the developer using it the wrong way. Nesting is one of the features which, when misused, produces hard to read, and even harder to maintain code. Kevin will show you a few pitfalls of selector nesting and how to avoid them.

  Kevin is a passionate frontend developer at @hitfoxgroup, one of the organizers of @cssconfeu and a proud community member of @hoodiehq. He also likes cheese.

  • @verpixelt
  • kevinlorenz.com
• 

  Jennifer Geacone-Cruz Perfectly Portable – Looking at Japanese Mobile Culture in the Front End

  In her last talk, Jennifer presented some basic concepts that affect the current state of Japanese front-end and web concept presentation. This talk will expand on one topic that got a lot of response: keitai, Japanese mobile phone culture and its heavy influence on front-end.

  Jennifer is a freelance consultant specializing in publishing infrastructure design and all things related to fashion and Japan. She creates online media outlets, print publications, content strategy and provides regionalization services with a highly editorial approach.

  • @anomiseditrix
  • geaconecruz.net

Is it spring yet? Is it spring yet? It doesn't look to good at the moment, so we're busy preparing some ace indoor infotainment: up.front 56 is, ehm, up! We have three excellent talks for you, and we're very much looking forward to seeing you at our April meetup.

• 

  Łukasz Klis To BEM, Or Not To BEM

  In this talk, Łukasz will explain what the BEM methodology is, why is it worth using it, how you should use it and what you should avoid, based on a case study of refactoring front-end code at Wimdu.

  Łukasz is a Berlin-based front-end developer, currently working at Wimdu. In his spare time he eats burgers and organises Make Things in Berlin and the meet.js meetup in Gdańsk, Poland.

  • klis.co
  • @lukaszklis
• 

  Emanuel Jochum Brand Holism: How A Brand Becomes A Living Organism

  We live in a dynamic and highly digitalized world. The development in culture, technology and economy leads to new forms of how we connect with each other, how we communicate and how we use products and services. What does this increasing flexibility mean for a brand? Why must a brand not fight against change, but needs to be an active part of it? How does a brand become a living organism?

  Emanuel is an Austrian cosmopolitan and communication designer based in Berlin. He is passionate about holistic branding, social entrepreneurship, wonderful beaches and Mexican food. Currently he helps impact-driven start-ups and small businesses to shape their vision and identity, and does research on strategic brand leadership from a design perspective.

  • ejochum.com
  • @ejochum
• 

  Anika Lindtner Getting More Women In Open Source

  This talk is a bit of a magic trick. It will solve a problem that seems pretty unsolvable right now: Getting more women in tech. We’ve all heard of more and more women leaving the tech industry. What’s happening? How did we get here? What can we do?
  Anika will tell you a true story about 33 women from all over the world: directors, photographers, PR manager, linguists and many more that wrote Open Source code for 3 months. It’s a story about role models, community - and cat gifs. With the women focussed scholarship program Rails Girls Summer of Code we are writing history in Open Source and she will tell you how it’s done. How to raise $80k, how to build a community based project, that will keep on going and how to change 33 lives.
  With this talk we will go on a short adventure in the tech jungle and see what we can achieve as a community and where we are failing. How we can get more women in Open Source, instead of losing them.
  And why the f*ck we should care.

  Anika Lindtner was born and raised in Berlin. Since July 2013 she works at Travis CI and runs the Travis Foundation, aiming to make Open Source even better. She manages Rails Girls Summer of Code - a three months scholarship program in Open Source - and helps over 30 women each year to change their lives.
  Anika once was a poetry slam artist, a teacher and worked at an ad agency. She can also draw monsters, knit hats with pom poms and likes urban gardening.

  • github.com/anikalindtner
  • @langziehohr

Wow, it’s March already. We have of course an up.front meetup planned! We happily announce two amzing talks for the next second Tuesday, March 10th!

After our amazing and well attended meetup in February, where Johan Dettmar’s talk “Creativity How?” inspired us all, this month it is Virginie Caplet’s turn to tell us about another aspect of the matter that affects us all time and again: Creativity blocks. Danila reminds us of an old but proven mind-set for better learning. And as a last-minute surprise guest, Ben Schwarz will tell us about performance metrics.
Last but not least: Kristina is back from San Francisco and we would love celebrate this together. So tell all your colleagues and friends and join us!

• 

  Vi Caplet Moving the creativity blocks

  Creativity had become a must-have quality in most jobs nowadays. However we sometimes witness we are unable to put ideas and solutions into action. This is what we call creativity blocks. Let’s learn to identify the blocking situations as early as possible in order to finally kick their asses.

  Vi is a product designer @Babbel. She nourishes an obsession for problem solving, brain hacking, panda hugging and cookies baking.

  • helloiamvi.com
  • @cheekfille
• 

  Danila Pellicani Learn to code - The punk rock way!

  Learning is always hard work, learn to code is even harder, especially if you want to do it on your own. We’ll stage dive on the punk rock culture to understand how the DIY attitude can help you learning and can give you the freedom to do whatever you want!

  Danila is an Interaction Designer, occasional coder and open source design advocate. When she’s not in front of a screen she’s probably stage diving at a punk rock show!

  • danilapellicani.it
  • @danilapellicani
• 

  Ben Schwarz Useful Performance Metrics

  Building a super-performant front-end is far harder and more intensive than making onLoad or onDomReady happen quicker — After you’ve removed “blocking scripts”, what do you do? In this talk Ben will show you how to put best practice tools to work for you & your team.

  Ben is a Melbourne based web developer, speaker and event organiser. He’s a director of CSSConfAU, works on CalibreApp and spends the rest his time cycling and drinking unsettling amounts of booze and coffee.

  • germanforblack.com
  • @benschwarz

Rawr! We have awakened from our fluffy hibernation slumber! And we hunger for sweet new web/design knowledge! If you do too, please come by for our first meetup of 2015, on February 10th, for an evening of casual nerdery and general interestingness.

• 

  Johan Dettmar Creativity, How?

  Everyone can be creative, most of us know this by now. Thus it is a skill, that can be improved, rather than a born-with-it talent.
  But how do we get more creative? Are we putting ourselves in the right environment and mindset in order to get the most juice out of our brains? Johan will talk about methods and ideas around the topic of improving your creativity as an individual or group.

  Johan is a freelance web developer based in Berlin, trying to mix client work and self initiated projects. At Hyper Island, where Johan used to study, they work process based, focusing a lot on HOW to be creative. Johan was part of a project called Project of How where he collected and shared methods on how to be more creative.

  • dettmar.se
  • @interwebsDaily
• 

  Stefan Judis Staying In The Fast Lane - Tools to Keep Your Site Speedy & Light

  Developing a fast website is not easy. There are plenty of tools and techniques to serve a good and fast experience to our visitors. But monitoring how a site evolves and evaluating and spotting performance bottlenecks is also something everybody should take care of. This talk will give a brief overview describing which tools are available and why it makes sense to build up a performance culture inside of a company.

  Stefan has been working in e-commerce for 4 years and is just entering the world of single page applications. Mostly doing frontend stuff, he is also really into performance and fancy cutting edge technologies. In his spare time he contributes to various open source projects.

  • 4waisenkinder.de
  • @stefanjudis
• 

  Ferdinand Vogler Getting Web-Typography Just Right With Sass

  “95% of the information on the web is written language” (Oliver Reichenstein). Striving for typographic structure, hierachy and legibility across various devices should be a must in every designer’s skillset. In this talk Ferdinand will explain the basics of well-set type and how Sass can be a powerful ally to achieve that.

  Ferdinand is a communication design student in fifth semester at HTW Berlin and started his work as a design and web-development freelancer just over a year ago.

  • ferdinandvogler.com
  • @ferdinandvogler

Save the date: The 53rd edition of Up.front is coming up on December 9th! Join us for the final meetup of the year with talks by David Owens, Tania Abanina and Hany Rizk.

• 

  David Owens The Virtues of Cities and How to Rebuild Them

  The earliest human settlements were founded, and grew, thanks to the benefits of shared resources and communal ways of working. After the industrial revolution city growth exploded to produce the global megacities we are familiar with today.
  These megacities are often missing the personal relationships that were the reasons for their original founding. Cities have grown to serve the global economy before their citizens.
  Connected cities and the sharing economy point to ways that we can recover some of those lost benefits of city living. How can we as designers and developers contribute to sustainable, livable and social cities?

  David Owens works as Principal Web Developer at AKQA. He’s fascinated by cities, networks and the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds.

  • davidowens.net
  • @fineartdavid
• 

  Tania Abanina Touchable Reminder for Our Dear Community

  In her lightning talk Tania will remind us of a part of our bodies that we strain a lot in our everyday work: wrists. After a short explanation of the anatomy, she’ll share a few exercises and releasing techniques that can be helpful to keep our wrists healthy.

  Tania is a web/UX designer and front-end developer, photographer, body researcher, tree hugger. Also Siberian.

  • taniaabanina.com
  • @tataata
• 

  Hany Rizk Is UX Killing the Experience?

  Testing and optimisation techniques have become ubiquitous and common to a point where almost any use case or UI or UX element has become standardised with best practices and design guidelines. This leads to products having similar look-and-feels with no uniqueness or sense of identity at all.
  How can a product be designed with a strong identity to stand out among its competitors, while at the same time appeasing to best practices in UX and conversion?

  A UX person through and through, Hany has been working and actively involved in the UX scene for over three years now. After receiving a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Uppsala University in Sweden, Hany began focusing on UX & product strategy on which he’s given numerous talks at different conferences and events in Germany, Sweden and Lebanon. He is also on the organizing committee of EuroIA.

  • hanyrizk.com
  • @RizkHany

Up.front 52 is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, November 11th to talk all things web, design and front end.

• 

  Mariusz Ciesla Making animations make sense

  Judging by the number of animated GIFs on Dribbble, we can probably all tell that fancy animations and transitions are all the rage in interaction design. How do we make sure they add to the experience, rather than being a fancy distraction, though?

  Mariusz is a designer, developer and co-founder of Lifetramp.com. He’s a big fan of both animations and good user experience, which led him to running a Gibbon playlist about designing meaningful UI animations. Really bad at maintaining balance on a skateboard.

  • mariusz.cc
  • @dotmariusz
• 

  Bastian Albers Why Gestures Suck in HTML5 (and why not so much anymore)

  We are used to fancy touch interfaces of native apps by now. You can do a lot if not almost all of that gesture goodness in the browser as well, but it's a kind of screwed up competition. "the browser" is a million things. Let me walk you through some technical basics and ideas of what you can do and how. And how to always have a fallback, as we're still building for the web.

  Bastian is a web developer and consultant from Berlin and often found teaching workshops at OpenTechSchool.

  • bastianalbers.de
  • @bastianalbers

Join us on Tuesday, October 14th for talks by Jana, Johannes and Lu!

• 

  Johannes Ippen Breaking the Web

  Popups, Flash Intros, Preloaders – when websites start to get annoying, they will break the user experience. But why are we making the same mistakes over and over again? Johannes Ippen tries to figure that out in his talk about Mark Twain, chairs and User Centric Design.

  Johannes Ippen is a designer and author from Berlin. With his team, he is responsible for the brand and marketing design at the game developer Wooga. In his spare time, he does fun stuff at thxalot.co.

  • thxalot.co
  • @presskind
• 

  Lu Nelson Advanced Sass with Maps

  In this nerdy opinionated talk, Lu Nelson will look at the power of using ’maps’ in advanced Sass CSS. Maps are Sass’ version of hashes/objects/dictionaries, which since their introduction in late 2013 have offered new ways to dynamically drive complex CSS. Lu’s talk will look at the workings of ’maps’ in Sass and examples—drawn from his personal projects and experiments—of [what he considers to be] their most powerful features. It will show how the dynamic nature of Sass ’maps’ manages challenges such as modular and responsive layout and typography, complex css transitions, and more. The talk will also touch on performance and tooling with a look at ruby-sass vs. libsass, polyfilling maps in libsass, building with gulp.js and browser-sync, and other stuff.

  Lu Nelson is a Berlin-based designer/developer who likes to make CSS work the way he thinks it should work.

  • lunelson.de
  • @lunelson
• 

  Jana Ahrens Fashion and Tech: Emotion meets Optimization

  Fashion and tech, tech and fashion. Both industries eye each other with lots of curiosity. Lately they start to mingle. Sometimes cautiously and sometimes full-steam ahead with the power of VC-backed startups. But what does that mean for users, customers, programmers and designers? In which ways can we learn from each other? What is the current status and what needs to be done? Jana will share her insights from working in fashion and the web for many years, and shine a light on the status quo as well as on upcoming trends and future developments.

  Jana is a trained fashion designer who lately turned to writing about all things fashion. She is not so much interested in beautiful things but in the beauty of their context.

  • plique.net
  • @plique

Celebrating our 50th meetup: Join us for up.front.ug on September 9th at co.up! It’s official: we’re old! 50 years of up.front! Well, nearly. After more than four years and about 100 different speakers from all over the world and what feels like most of Berlin’s tech scene, we now reconvene for a celebratory recap with some of our veteran speakers, one from each of the past three years. So please join us on Tuesday, the 9th of September, for the 50th edition of our humble little meetup. We’re happy to welcome Emma, Tim and Tiffany as our anniversary speakers:

• 

  The up.front Team A Look Back at 4 Years of Up.front

  Charts! Maps! Numbers! Deep analytical insights into meetup demographics! Awards! And… er… ah! Historical photographs of the earliest recorded up.front meetups. They’re practically cave paintings. Ok, daguerrotypes. Also: Brownies! Prosecco! Balloons! And we totally didn’t open that Prosecco yet, we promise.

  The up.front team is a band of fearless red pandas, roaming the skies in their solar-powered meetup airship, delivering frontend fun to all sorts of tiny little islands. I may be mixing things up with TaleSpin, though.

  • @upfront_ug
  • @kriesse
  • @espylaub
  • @maxfell
  • @qate_oh
• 

  Tiffany Conroy Lions and Tigers and Handling User Capabilities

  Many applications restrict access to some features for some users for various reasons. For example: Only premium users get access to extra features. Only supervisors can edit product categories. I went on a hunt to gather patterns and techniques for handling the logic around user capabilities in client-side apps. Join me on a safari through the approaches, and I’ll tell you what I have learned.

  Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin doing front-end development and interaction design at SoundCloud. She created @weareallawesome and is a JSConfEu co-curator.

  • tif.ca
  • @theophani
• 

  Tim Lucas Let’s All Be Beginners Again

  It’s not often you’re afforded a view of your profession from the eyes of a beginner. After having recently taught an introductory course to web design and programming, Tim will share, reflect and discuss on some of the surprises and challenges that his students faced during their first foray into web development.

  Tim is a product designer and programmer from Melbourne, Australia. After leaving Berlin he co-founded @cssconfau, recently joined @buildbox, was a UI programmer at Amen, and is returning to up.front after 3 years whilst in town for jsfest.berlin.

  • http://toolmantim.com
  • @toolmantim
• 

  Emma Rose Metcalfe Erfahrung, Erlebnis & Universe time.

  From prototyping to opera singers, I’ve collected up my favourite things from the depths of Experience Design and the Experience Economy. We’ll rattle through some reasons why designing meaningful experiences with care and courage matters to all of us in a hyper social digital – wow, there’s a fainting goat – world.

  Emma Rose Metcalfe is an Experience designer and researcher. She used to head the product team at How.Do, which she also co-founded.

  • @erm___

Upfront time! We’re delighted to welcome two wonderful speakers to our short-but-brilliant pre-semifinals up.front, which, refreshingly, won’t be football-themed. Join us for two great talks, cool drinks and general milling around and chatting with interesting people. And if you’re in a footbally mood: we’ll wrap up in time for you to commute to your favourite bar / public square / Späti / Ländereck / Dönerbude in time for kick off.

• 

  Spiros Martzoukos Lessons from the FontShop site relaunch

  After having worked for months on the Front End part of the new FontShop site relaunch, Spiros has learnt a lot of lessons, solved many problems and created others. He will share how the team used BEM and never looked back at tangled styles and specificity issues, integrated OOCSS and a living style guide in the process, used Angular to quickly set up complex applications within the site and what challenges they faced with Sass loading times.

  Spiros comes from Greece, is half Japanese and works in a German agency, Edenspiekermann, as a Front End Developer. His code is as schizophrenic as that.

  • @martzoukos
  • martzoukos.com
• 

  Danielle Reid Design and the Future Interface

  As technology moves increasingly from the desktop to the pocket - or wrist, interface design must be reimagined. This talk will discuss how we design information for future interfaces and the role that different mediums can play in both creating and consuming content as we’re on the go.

  Danielle is a former art director turned entrepreneur, co-founding Capsule.fm and Sterio.me. Both Capsule.fm and Sterio.fm offer new opportunities to design interfaces in the realm of audio technology.

  • @moon_beamed
  • daniellereid.com
  • capsule.fm
  • sterio.me

It is time for our summer edition of up.front! We look forward to talks by Martin Klepsch and Mike LaVigne.

• 

  Martin Klepsch CSS, Interfaces and What We Can Do About It

  When HTML was first formulated it was strongly influenced by a documentation format used at CERN. It then often contained information about the visual appearance of documents which “cluttered” the source with secondary information not relevant to the document’s content. Soon thereafter CSS was drafted to separate these two concerns. Today the web has evolved and it’s no longer just a source for documents but provides rich interfaces to consume and create a wide variety of content. Still, the underlying mechanics to build these interfaces haven’t changed much, and complex, responsive layouts require significant effort and code that is not always easy grasp. Let’s take a look at a different approach and how we might be able to level up our toolset to build complex interfaces for the web.

  Martin enjoys eating, drinking, talking and programming. Currently developing a deep love for Clojure.

  • @martinklepsch
  • martinklepsch.org
• 

  Mike LaVigne Anti-segment Approach to Product Development

  When is not segmenting your audience the right thing to do? Mike will talk about the research that lead to an unconventional decision to ignore segmentations when creating an app for women. Clue is an app used by women to track their monthly cycles.

  Mike LaVigne is currently product manager for Clue and formerly a creative director and strategist at Frog Design and Fjord.

  • @MikeLaVigne_
  • helloclue.com

We are excited to announce our lineup for May, with talks by Burak Son and Allard van Helbergen. Join us and learn about mobile performance and how to boost the workflow in your UX design team.

• 

  Burak Son Performance Matters: Mobile Websites

  Have you ever thought whether users have smooth and fast experience on your mobile website? This talk aims to shed light on the factors that affect bad user experience on mobile web products. It will also guide you through how to get the best out of countless devices and platforms. The talk briefly covers the main practices for performance optimization in front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) as well as generic tips that need to be taken into account.

  Burak is a front-end developer, currently working at Sociomantic Labs in Berlin. He enjoys working on standalone client-side development with different technologies and environments.

  • @burakson
• 

  Allard van Helbergen Design Thinking from the Trenches - Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum

  How can you ensure that you are making informed design decisions and aren’t wasting time on building the wrong thing? How can you maximise the decision making power that UX Design has? For all the jargon flying around regarding Agile Processes, Scrum Methodologies and Lean UX, there is surprisingly little guidance available on what it means to bring Design Thinking and User Centered Design into your daily grind when working on an established app. Building off of existing concepts, Allard proposes tweaking the workflow that UX Designers have in a Scrum team so as to maximise the impact that design has for the product.

  Allard is a UX Designer at Brandwatch, ex-Googler, frontend afficionado and general process geek. As an avid wind-/kite-/snow-/skate-/everythingboarder he loves the rush of adrenaline as well as watching cartoons on Sunday morning with a bowl of cereals.

  • @vanhelbergen
  • vanhelbergen.com

The countdown is on: On April 8th, support for Windows XP will officially end! Come join us at the 46th up.front meetup and let’s celebrate together.

• 

  Loren Baxter Changing Behavior with Design

  Many of the products we make try to impact lives, from health to education, finances to entertainment. How do we help people make great choices or develop new habits? Let's talk about examples, methods, and frameworks for designing products that have a positive impact on people’s behavior.

  Loren Baxter is a freelance UX & UI designer based in San Francisco. He spent the last few years helping to build ReadyForZero.

  • @lorenbaxter
  • ReadyForZero.com
• 

  Lena Reinhard Confessions of an Alien: Attracting Non-coding People to Your Open Source Project

  Code is usually the core product of an Open Source Project. It is relevant, and coding is amazing. But there can be more than code, and this “more than code” can help you further your project. This talk will show you what you can do besides coding, the cultural setting and steps to attracting and keeping experts in those fields and why it is a crucial question which kind of commits are welcome in your project.

  Lena is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in marketing, project management and communications. She joined the Open Source project Hoodie one year ago and works for various magazines and small companies besides. She’s a traveller, surfer and she likes trees.

  • @ffffux
  • schoenaberselten.com
  • Hoodie
• 

  Lorenzo Pilia and Jerry Belich A Video Game Revolution is Happening… In Your Browser

  Browser games have existed for quite some time. A more recent phenomenon though is the emergence of browser-based game making tools, such as Twine and PuzzleScript, which are allowing people (non-coders in particular) to easily develop and share their creations. In this presentation we’re going to find out why that’s revolutionary (hint: it has to do with diversity) and get to know the Choosatron Deluxe Adventure Matrix, an interactive fiction arcade machine that provides players a tangible artifact from their unique journey through one of its stories.

  Lorenzo Pilia is a graphic designer turned product manager in love with indie games. He’s the A MAZE. / Berlin 2014 festival program manager and organises the bi-monthly Talk & Play meetup. Jerry Belich is the founder of Monkey with a Mustache, a company focused on interactive media, digital storytelling, and invention with devices like the Choosatron interactive fiction machine. He wants people to look up and use their imaginations!

  • @lorenzopilia
  • @choosatron
  • lorenzo.pilia.it
  • amaze-berlin.de
  • tinyletter.com/talkandplay
  • choosatron.com
  • monkeytheater.com

At our March meetup we’ll have talks by Jeanny Wang, Jennifer Geacone-Cruz and Bastian Albers.

• 

  Jeanny Wang Design for uncertainty

  In today’s increasingly demanding, connected marketplace with ever-changing technological possibilities, uncertainty is no longer an exception, but a norm. Whereas build first, fail fast and often is the name of the game, this talk proposes and asks whether it’s possible to apply a fail forward approach using human-centric, collaborative methods of inclusion to connect with, rather than confront, uncertainty in today’s fast-paced business landscape.

  Jeanny Wang is a seasoned product and service designer, strategist and manager with a decade of experience in the disruptive space spanning across startups, large corporations and creative design industries. These days her interests lie predominantly in looking at ways to bring interdisciplinary teams to work together in solving problems and creating new opportunities in an effective way.

  • @perhapstoopink
• 

  Jennifer Geacone-Cruz The not-so-Zen art of the Japanese website

  Oceans of text, long load times; Japanese websites are hardly minimal and often not user-friendly. But why are Japanese websites, so, well... Japanese? The answer is very much cultural and only a little bit technical. This talk will provide a foot in the sliding shoji door of the sometimes frustrating, but fascinating world of Japanese websites and frontend.

  Jennifer is a freelance consultant specializing in publishing infrastructure design and all things related to fashion and Japan. After nearly a decade in Tokyo working for Harper's Bazaar Japan and Time Out Tokyo, she relocated to Berlin in 2011. She creates online media outlets, print publications, content strategy and provides regionalization services with a highly editorial approach.

  • @anomiseditrix
  • geaconecruz.net
• 

  Bastian Albers Responsive Web Applications, Javascript and Media Queries

  Responsive Web Design has been winning the internet. For content heavy sites adding some more CSS wrapped in some media queries works surprisingly well. But in web applications there are some technical challenges you can't (yet) solve with pure CSS. After a quick walkthrough of RWD basics we discuss some possibilities how to keep the design in the CSS and use JS to help only where needed.

  Bastian Albers works as a Frontend/JavaScript/HTML5 app developer.

  • @bastianalbers
  • bastianalbers.de

Our February meetup featured talks by Vitaly Friedman, Martin Petersen, Jose Salguero, and Nico Hagenburger.

• 

  Vitaly FriedmanMartin Petersen: Vitaly Friedman: Real-Life Responsive Web DesignMartin Petersen: Self-publishing in post-digital times

  Responsive Web Design challenges web designers to adapt a new mindset to their design processes as well as techniques they are using in design and code. This talk provides an overview of various practical techniques, tips and tricks from real-life projects and discusses front-end techniques, maintenance issues and performance considerations for lightweight responsive design.

  Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. From Minsk in Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, discovered the passage a passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online magazine dedicated to design and web development. Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of all Smashing books. He currently works as editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine in the lovely city of Freiburg, Germany.

  • @smashingmag
  • @clrcrtq
  • Sova
  • Cabinet Gold van d’Vlies
• 

  Jose Antonio Salguero Listen to Your Users

  Development give us best practices to create our products, patterns on how to develop, but not what features to make, what is important for the user. We must find a way to let users drive us to create a better product for them using all the data we can gather through tracking and A/B testing.

  Jose Antonio is a software engineer with 10 years of experience, originally from Spain now living in Berlin. He’s passionate about technology, travels, music and too many random things to be able to focus on any.

  • @j_a_salguero
  • jasalguero.com
• 

  Nico Hagenburger Powerful Living Style Guides with Sass

  Create impressive front-end style guides with Sass, Compass, and the LivingStyleGuide gem and learn how to write and document your code for maintainability.

  Nico currently focusses on creating living style guides for big websites as well as designing iOS applications. Working on design and front-ends with Sass, he created Compass Sprites and works on new Sass extensions.

  • @hagenburger
  • www.hagenburger.net
  • dribbble.com/hagenburger
  • github.com/hagenburger

Did you make the New Year’s resolution to be more active in your local community? Now is the time to get started! We kick off 2014 with a great line-up: Join us on Tuesday and hear talks by Michiel Slot, Gunnar Bittersmann, Victor Mark and Ed Macovaz.

• 

  Michiel Slot Product Ownership: Captain Obvious speaks about owning and shipping

  Are you a Product Owner? Maybe not by all definitions, though Michiel believe every developer or designer involved in a project is a Product Owner. Michiel found some obvious stuff about dealing with product ownership he will share with you.

  Michiel has lengthy experience both as project manager and frontend developer on projects large and small. He likes smooth user interfaces and appreciates nerdy tricks. Besides leading a team of interactive heads at Viacom he organises WebVisions Berlin 2014.

  • @ronselling
  • WebVisions
  • IxDA & WebVisions meet-up Berlin
• 

  Gunnar Bittersmann Sassematics

  Sass + mathematics. Many web developers nowadays use CSS preprocessors, and do simple calculations like ($a + $b) * $c in them. But we can do more. Much more: sin, cos, tan, … and calculate square roots like the ancient Babylonians. A short trip into geometry. Bring your rulers and compasses!

  As a frontend developer on the whatever-first path, Gunnar aims at a better understanding between humans and machines. He helps organizing the World Usability Day Berlin and struggles not to forget how to play the guitar.

  • @g16n
  • bittersmann.de
• 

  Victor Mark Working with human beings

  Victor will share some observations about the nature of creating and working in teams gleaned from his time at Hyper Island, EyeEm, and now How.Do.

   

  • @victormarkmade
• 

  Ed Macovaz Making instruments for musicians

  What do you do when you expect users to invest as much time mastering your product you spent building it? Ed will share some stories of how Ableton’s design process has evolved to deal with making complex products for very talented people.

  Ed is a Product Designer at Ableton where he works with other designers to make hardware and software behave like a musical instrument.

  • @edmacovaz
  • edmacovaz.com

2013 flew by quickly, didn’t it? It’s already the last up.front.ug of the year! Don’t miss our December meetup with talks by Regine Heidorn, Frank Leue and Michael Pieracci, and join us for a cozy pre-holidays get-together afterwards.

• 

  Regine Heidorn CSS – Best Practices and Maintainability

  While working with precompilers and CSS frameworks one often gets to reflect about the necessity of programming language features within CSS. Looking at the CSS basics like cascade and inheritance helps to get a better understanding of writing good cascading stylesheets. We can see some artifacts remaining from the print era, but we can also put a spotlight on how great CSS can be used. Regine will discuss the following thesis: Everything that helps the browser to interpret CSS in a performant way also helps developers to write better, more maintainable code and facilitates a smoother workflow. If you ever were curious as to why the :hover in CSS works this talk will be perfect for you.

  Passionate frontend developer, author of CSS – Best Practices und Wartbarkeit (German only). Will bring some copies.

  • @BitBoutique
  • Bit-Boutique
  • CSS - Best Practices und Wartbarkeit on Amazon (german)
• 

  Frank Leue Building shapeshifting interfaces

  Building things on the web is great. Especially just now as responsive design solved lots of our problems. But taking a glimpse at the near future you’ll see not only desktops, tablets and phones. There will be watches and super large TV sets. Interaction with those devices will not necessarily include your fingertips anymore but very likely gestures and voice control. While the emerging internet of things is going to surround us with connected devices constantly providing or collecting data, we need to think about how to build consistent experiences throughout the day. This talk is about how to build frontends that adopt to contexts and provide consistent information and a continuity of your brand across devices.

  Frank is a Berlin-based web enthusiast. Crafting code for frontends and backends has been his passion since 1997. Working on the web provides him endless opportunities to express creativity, and put some bright moments in other peoples’ life. He’s currently Technical Director at Hi-ReS! Berlin.

  • @franatique
  • www.frankleue.de
• 

  Michael Pieracci A Presentation About Presenting

  Throughout his life Michael has always struggled to explain his work and hobbies in clear and concise ways. "You work where?" "What does your company do?" "You like 'tea'?" One of his favorite ways to deliver detailed, complete, and clear information is through presenting. By creating a presentation he can deliver information in a tailored way for the topic and the audience. Michael encourages others to find their niche and develop their voice through presenting too.

  Michael Pieracci lived in San Francisco for the last 8 years doing project and event management at FontShop. He recently moved to Berlin and is on the hunt for new opportunities.

  • @mpieracci
  • michaelpieracci.com

Days are getting colder, nights are getting longer and we are just getting started! Don’t miss our November meetup with talks by Jack Wild, Nico Hagenburger and Nasia Makrygianni.

• 

  Jack Wild How to be a Jack of all trades, and master of some.

  How can singing lessons make you a better graphic designer? What can a project manager teach you about Web Design? How on earth are drama classes relevant to designing great UX? Using practical examples we’ll see how skills we learn doing one thing can be easily manipulated and transferred to other areas. It’s never been easier to go out and try your hand at something new, so why aren’t we all doing it?

  After trying his hand at Journalism, Acting, TV Production, VFX, Concept Development, Graphic Design and Front End Development, Jack somehow ended up as a Digital Designer. He’s currently working with Bacon de Czar here in Berlin.

  • @isjackwild
  • www.isjackwild.com
  • Bacon de Czar
• 

  Nico Hagenburger Why You Might Immediately Fall in Love with Sketch

  Sketch is a powerful alternative to Photoshop and Illustrator when it comes to web and especially iOS 7 design. Learn how styles, effects and slice settings speed up your workflow. And know where to stop, as Sketch.app is not perfect yet.

  Nico currently focusses on creating living style guides for big websites as well as designing iOS applications. Working on design and front-ends with Sass, he created Compass Sprites and works on new Sass extensions.

  • @hagenburger
  • www.hagenburger.net
  • dribbble.com/hagenburger
  • github.com/hagenburger
• 

  Nasia Makrygianni Design and Develop Performance

  We all know that size and time matters. We live in a world where everything and everyone is moving fast. We always surf a site or open an app, seeking information while on the road, at work or in our free time. Millions are lost from sales which didn’t happen because of half a second delay. Being part of the IT community that delivers such an experience to people might be stressing. Is this a one person’s job? Let’s not drown in a sea of technical details and talk about how united forces of frontend developers and web designers can make good performance happen. Nasia will share with you her experience from improving KaufDA’s loading times.

  Nasia is a front-end developer at Kaufda - Bonial International Group who thinks out of the box and appreciates clean, reusable code. She loves cartoons and can’t wait to put them into action on browsers.

  • @nasiamakryg
  • nasiamakrygianni.com

For our October meetup we go beyond product and development techniques and learn about what it takes to manage and communicate in projects and what it takes to make your product stand out.

• 

  Rebecca Conrad & Lisa Passing Rails Girls SoC - All for one and one for all

  Rails Girls Summer of Code is a global event which focuses on bringing more women into the world of open source software and helping participants to further expand their knowledge and skills in programming. 33 students got the chance to work paid and full-time on their projects, attend tech conferences and even speak on them. This all wouldn’t haven been possible without a great team of volunteers, organizers and sponsors. Lisa (implementing the webdesign) and Rebecca (adding illustrations) will talk a little more about the organisation and their involvement.

  Lisa Passing is a frontend-developer, Rebecca Conrad is a graphic designer and illustrator.

  • @lisapassing
  • @bioshrimp
  • ejaculesc.com (Rebecca)
• 

  Behrad Mirafshar Design Habit

  Our digital life is bombarded by apps. However, we use few of them on a daily basis. This does not mean that the other apps are not well-designed, this is basically because they fail to make a mark in our life and to create a habit for us. This talk endeavors to explore what we deliver behind our apps.

  Behrad is an UX/UI designer. He always likes to partake in interesting projects. He loves cafes. He is a proud Neuköllner.

  • @BehradMirafshar
  • about.me/behradm
• 

  Lindsay Eyink Nothing is Perfect. Eveything is Hacked.

  Surprise lightning talk!

  • @leyink
• 

  Francesco Kirchhoff “That’s not what I meant”: On empathy in our work

  Besides the skills specific to our job, a huge part of building digital products is about communicating with other people. The better we understand our clients, bosses and colleagues, and the better we are at helping them understand us and what we do, the better the project will turn out and the less stress we are likely to generate. Some general thoughts on a more empathetic approach to communication and a list of specific ideas to improve understanding and avoid communication breakdowns.

  Rome-born, Berlin-based Francesco is a caffeine addict who toils away day and sometimes night as a freelance UX designer and project manager for various web agencies and startups in Berlin in order to support his tragic habit. He tries his best not to increase the pervasive ugliness and thoughtlessness, for bad design makes him weep.

  • uxd.pm
  • @francescok

September is a very exciting time for the Berlin web community: With events like CSSconf.eu, JSconf EU, NodeCopter, and Reject.js happening, the city will be packed with web designers and frontend developers from all over the world. We are happy to contribute with an awesome up.front lineup!

• 

  Leila El-Kayem How Technology Enables Greater Storytelling

  Leila loves to tell stories. Stories about journeys, city walks and people she meets. So Leila turned her love of story telling into a way for Brands to tell their story. This talk is about how the best stories start with experiences and how technology can be used to share them.

  Leila is a Creative Director at Razorfish.

  • @leilaelkayem
  • @razorfish_de
• 

  Tiffany Conroy DOM? What about the CSSOM?

  Have you read the crazy stuff in the CSSOM spec!? There is some super interesting stuff in there. Come over here and let Tiffany show you some pretty neat things she learned, and some fun things she made.

  Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin doing front-end development and interaction design at SoundCloud.

  • tif.ca
  • @theophani
• 

  Valentina Montagna Designing for Ephemeral Technology

  What happens when innovation in technology is faster than your ability to learn new skills? What happens to the design process in a world of planned obsolescence? This talk will help you to slow down things (a bit) and see them from another perspective.

  Valentina is a designer and co-founder of urli.st.

  • @scintillaluz
  • urli.st
• 

  Angelina Fabbro Firefox OS: It's coming, it's here.

  Firefox OS is a brand new open mobile platform built with web technology that front end developers are already familiar with. In this talk I will explain the benefits of developing for this platform (even if you don't reside in one of the first launch countries) as well as demonstrate how easy it is to get started from the perspective of a front-end developer. Light live demo to be provided to show the simulator in action.

  Angelina is a programmer based in Vancouver, Canada and works at Mozilla. Angelina has a background in cognitive science, building clever robots and researching what people pay attention to. Her record as a web developer is balanced with modern iOS experience and a keen sense of design. Angelina also both teaches and mentors for the Vancouver chapter of Ladies Learning Code.

  • @angelinamagnum
  • realityhacking.net

It’s the summer edition of up.front! In the summer, many of us try to take some time off and maybe reflect on the things we do. We would like to pick up on that theme, with two personal talks, aimed to help us define ourselves as professionals, freelancers, designers or developers, and maybe as humans.

• 

  Sven Ellingen Always be Building

  Sven loves to start things. And then grow them. Ideas, things, projects, products, teams. And lately: a company — after 5 years at Edenspiekermann, he decided to start from scratch, on his own. This talk is about leaving something great behind to make room for something that’s even better. It’s essentially about the beauty of building things.

  Sven is a designer bridging disciplines across business, design, and technology. Co-founder of @acolorbright. Previously: Creative Director at @edenspiekermann.

  • @se
  • svenellingen.com
• 

  Kilian McMahon Embracing what you're not

  Kilian has spent the last couple of years fumbling around as a designer trying to figure out how to become the people he admired but to no avail. This talk is about getting away from the idea of fitting yourself to others, recognising that you don't work like everyone else and understanding that being different is so much better.

  Kilian is a designer from Dublin who works on a ticketing app called Tito and a conference called Úll.

  • @kilmc
• 

  Fabian Mürmann How not to get killed as a freelancer

  Fabian spend nine years working as a freelance front- and back end, product / concept guy for a bunch of different, international, companies & startups.
  In this talk he’ll share a few things that he learned on the way: Infos on how to deal with taxes, clients from hell, working remote, that kind of stuff.

  Fabian is a Creative Technologist, working in the web since 16 years and currently co-managing an innovation lab at the Bertelsmann DirectGroup.

  • @fabianmu
  • fabian.mu

Don’t miss our June meetup with talks by Karolina Szczur (@fox), Cath Richardson (@ohrworm) and Natalia Berdys (@batalia).

• 

  Karolina Szczur Designing with Color

  “There’s more to color than a swatch in a book” – a wise man said once. Color is one of the most powerful, emotion evoking weapon in designer’s toolbelt, yet sometimes we fail to recognize its importance. From perception, psychological and cultural meaning of color to systems, optical illusions, usability restraints and useful tools.

  Karolina is a designer and front-end developer. She worked with numerous startups, curated a lesson at Hack Design course and helps out as an editor at Smashing Mag.

  • @fox
  • thefox.is
• 

  Cath Richardson Embracing the mundane

  Sometimes to make something amazing, you have to start with something boring. This talk is about embracing the mundane problems which surround us everyday. Thermostats, workflows, print infrastructure – we’ll look at how fundamentally dull, pedestrian things can turn into the most fascinating and rewarding design challenges.

  A reformed Londoner, Cath moved to Berlin this year after 2 years working in service design and customer development at Made by Many. She now leads product at ezeep, a company changing the way the world prints.

  • @ohrworm
• 

  Natalia Berdys The web experience in the autistic spectrum

  Designing with cognitively-impaired users in mind can be very illuminative, leading to a broader understanding of the role of UX/UI design in general. In her talk, Natalia will focus on Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism, the perceptual issues involved for such web audience, and how their web experience can be the most sensitive test of good design.

  Natalia Berdys develops iOS apps, plays a lot of video games and gets high on information. She’s obsessively interested in language, numbers and hardware. Pinkish hair, oddball ideas.

  • @batalia

Words are living things. We shape them with our collective usage, and we perceive them differently as we change. As people, they’re our interface with one another. And as designers, our most essential tool.
In this talk, Paulo will explore how words impact our interfaces, affect our users’ behavior, and have the power to surprise and delight, but also to annoy and frustrate.

• 

  Paulo Zoom Words of Matter

  Words are living things. We shape them with our collective usage, and we perceive them differently as we change. As people, they’re our interface with one another. And as designers, our most essential tool.
  In this talk, Paulo will explore how words impact our interfaces, affect our users’ behavior, and have the power to surprise and delight, but also to annoy and frustrate.

  Paulo designs websites. He’s working on The Manual and XOXO. That’s not his real name.

  • @paulozoom
  • paulozoom.com
• 

  Hany Rizk UX & Product: How lean can you go?

  F**k it, ship it they say — but does that also apply when you’re working on a completely new product? This talk will revolve around releasing a Minimal Viable Product and all the complications that come with it: How do you know when your MVP is ready, and is less really more?

  Hany is a UX and Interaction Designer driven by minimalism, product strategy and bringing interaction beyond the screen. As a pianist with a passion for music, design, arts and humanities, Hany mixes those sources of inspiration with the technical challenges he faces to design intuitive and innovative solutions that are fun to use, shaken not stirred!

  • @rizkhany
  • hanyrizk.com
• 

  Daniel Mierzwinski Learning through goals

  With 2 months left of a 7 months internship Daniel wondered: Did he learn what he wanted to learn? His answer was no. In this talk Daniel will give you an insight into how he decided to spend the last 2 months of his internship and maximized his learnings.

  Daniel is a frontend developer with a passion for user experience and entrepreneurial business.

  • @dnlmzw
  • danielmierzwinski.dk

At our April meetup, we had talks by Emma Rose Metcalfe, Tom O’Doherty and John Sebastian Hussey.

• 

  Emma Rose Metcalfe Social Objects - the centre of our universe

  Whether it’s photo sharing, loops or tweets, the social object reigns queen of the web. Starting with Jyri Engeström as our centre point I’ll walk through findings from our own development in seeking the balance between accessible and precious design around social objects. How can we design platforms that lower barriers to create objects with long term social value?

  Emma Rose Metcalfe is a designer and co-founder of HowDo, a mobile platform where people capture, collect and share micro guides about the world around them. She heads up the product team and has a background in service and experience design.

  • @erm___
  • www.how.do
• 

  Tom O’Doherty Zombie video

  We all know that video is changing the internet, but we don’t think very often about how the internet is changing video. A short talk about a moving target.

  Tom is a freelance design and video person, originally from Ireland. He’s interested in design minimalism and succinct storytelling. And Japanese noise-rock.

  • @tomodoherty
  • tomodoherty.ie
• 

  John Sebastian Hussey Web Performance as UX

  The mobile web audience is now huge. Mobile devices accessing the web, typically over a 3G connection, should have a lightening fast experience. This talks focuses on why web performance is more important than ever with some quick and easy ways to make sites faster and lighter.

  Full stack pancake engineer. Enthusiastic creative coder and web developer. Big hair, big ideas.

  • @js_hussey
  • Website

Just like the first rays of spring sunlight after the long, drab Berlin winter, we too are finally reappearing in full force! Join us on March 12th for up.front 34, with a range of talks that could only be broader if it included something on hydroponics or dinosaurs.

• 

  Natalie Hanke Introducing Hexels, a new kind of art tool

  Developed by Hex-Ray Studios, Hexels is a new grid-based art program for Mac and PC, which allows you to paint with shapes. Since it launched a few days ago, this short talk will show you Hexels in action, provide some examples of already existing funky artwork and give some information on the two awesome guys behind it.

  Natalie is a freelance graphic designer who drinks a lot of coffee.

  • @coffee_nat
  • coffeemakescreative.com
• 

  Alex Feyerke Hoodie - Building complete webapps without a backend

  A short presentation of a new app architecture for front-end people, and how you can use it to build web apps without worrying about the backend.

  Alex is a freelance web developer and internet generalist, and also one of the organizers of up.front.

  • @espylaub
  • github.com/hoodiehq
• 

  Momme Funda Legal issues for web workers

  A quick run-through of various relevant aspects of German internet law, covering topics like imprints, coding in order to avoid copyright violations, “Abmahnungen”, contracts with clients and employers and copyright laws.

  Momme is a freelance lawyer specializing on media law. He works in a law firm made up of various other freelance lawyers, and he won’t be wearing a suit.

  • @momme
  • www.mommefunda.com
  • www.wklegal.de

Let’s get together! We will have a little get together at Lugosi (Reichenberger Straße 152) for casual lounging and tasty, discounted drinks. Join us to discuss the latest news or talk about your ideas.

Happy New Year everybody! Up.front will kick off 2013 with a panel discussion, starting on Tuesday, January 8, 7:30 pm at our favourite coworking space co.up.

• 

  Skeumorphic Mess vs the Boring Flatlands: What’s a “Digitally Native User Interface”?

  Over the past years, we’ve witnessed a constant debate about competing trends in our field: Mimicking real world objects in user interfaces versus a revived flat approach, which the proponents label as more content-focused, digitally native and even honest.
  It’s time to put this into perspective. Is there more to this new flat trend than just a different level of polish and angry designer youth re-discovering modernism? How can a user interface be native and honest in the first place?
  We’ll look at different approaches and whether they’re relevant. To get a broader contexts of terms used in the discussion, we’ll not only discuss interaction design and usability, but also will have a look at art history and architecture.

  • A panel discussion with Conor Delahunty (@conordelahunty), Sarah Lincoln (@sarahlincoln), David Kjelkerud (@davidkjelkerud), Kristin Gräfe (@kristinonair) and Timothy Achumba (@iam_timm).

Up.front’s holiday edition will bring you talks about CSS Testing and Styleguide Driven Development. We are looking forward to ring in the holiday break with Glühwein, cookies and you! See you on December 11, 7:30 pm at co.up.

• 

  Simon Madine Make the build go #F00 — Automated CSS testing

  Even in the biggest web apps built on continuous integration servers with automated deploys, CSS is often still being manually tested. Something can easily be missed or regressions can slip in and not be spotted until production.
  As CSS is a declarative language, traditional automated testing techniques either don’t apply or aren’t sensible. This talk aims to give an overview of the techniques available for automated testing such as page render image diffs, reference-browser equality, frozen DOM structure comparisons. It will also cover some of the tools you can use to integrate automated CSS testing into your build pipeline.

  Simon makes digital toys and writes guides on web development. He’s a senior web dev and evangelist for HERE in Berlin.

  • @thingsinjars
• 

  Nico Hagenburger Styleguide Driven Development

  How to combine traditional style guides and experiences made in developing websites to living style guides and the concept of style guide driven design.

  Nico loves to combine design and development. He has designed, developed and planned frontends for a lot of web start-ups like Qype, Moviepilot, DailyDeal or MyVideo and created the spriting engine which is part of Compass now.

  • @hagenburger
  • hagenburger.net
  • dribbble.com/hagenburger
  • github.com/hagenburger
• 

  Raphael Salvadore, Philippe Brule Common sense in Design

  How do you know if your product is over designed? This talk will discuss the core concepts of common sense in design usability.

And we’re back! Our 30th meetup is drawing ever closer, and with it, our collective mid-life crisis. But fear not, Berlin’s dazzling tech scene is currently spoiling us with amazing conferences (jsconf.eu and reject.js, and there’s Javascript helicopters in there somewhere as well) and attracting smart beings from all around the globe, some of which will be speaking at up.front! This one should be excellent.
Hover into co.up’s third floor at 7:30 for talks and general interestingness, and join us later at Lugosi for casual lounging and tasty, discounted drinks.

• 

  Max Ogden Redesigning how we interact with the Government

  An exploration of experiments in reinventing the interface to government … one webapp at a time (from the @codeforamerica project). There will also be a special feature on jsforcats.com, a site designed to lower the barrier of entry for learning javascript to the level that a cat could understand.

  Max Ogden is a javascript developer from Oregon, USA who worked at @codeforamerica last year and started a company called @gather this year.

  • @maxogden
  • github.com/maxogden
• 

  Rebecca Murphey

  Surprise Talk!

  Rebecca Murphey is a senior JavaScript engineer at Bocoup, the co-host of the yayQuery podcast, a co-organizer of TXJS, a contributor to the jQuery Cookbook from O’Reilly, and the author of the open-source jQuery Fundamentals.

  • rmurphey.com
  • @rmurphey

Hi Frondendeers (that’s like a buccaneer or a rocketeer, but with markup)! Join us on Tue, August 14, for up.front meetup number 29, with talks on design, some hopefully spirited discussion, enjoyable socializing and tasty drinks afterward.

• 

  Jonas Knipper An outsider’s investigation of the Foursquare redesign

  How did the Foursquare redesign end up where it is? A curious user looks at the effects of a changing market on a popular product and the reaction of users and media. Includes a discussion of new user requirements and how Foursquare tries to answer them, as well as inspiration taken from other apps and services shaping the UI landscape in 2012.

  Jonas Knipper is a web head and business graduate. He works in the film industry in Berlin and as monthly editor for Friday at Six

  • jonasknipper.de
  • @jdker
• 

  Christoph Rauscher Self / Digital Self

  Is our digital identity different from our analog one? The digital lifestyle is somehow changing our view on ourselves, and we have to cope with these transformations. Is that me inside this machine, or is it just a distorted portrayal? How do I reflect myself when there are different versions of me online? For his bachelor thesis, Christoph wants to explore how philosophy and self-reflection are connected to interaction design.

  Christoph Rauscher is a designer and illustrator who enjoys creative itching, cyborgism and terrestrial mammals.

  • christowski.de
  • @christowski
• 

  Sebastian Sadowski Vision of Coding

  codev is a new web app that enables you to code wherever you are – at the office in Berlin, central park in NY or internet café in India. Sebastian will talk about the start-up phase and insights of some interface design decisions.

  Sebastian is an interaction designer and co-founder of codev.

  • codev.it
  • ahoi.in
  • @ahoiin

And we’re back, and I’m confused, because I’m tzping this on up.front founder @kriesse’s US keyboard, who has returned from San Francisco for a month! In other news, our central theme this week seems to be “high resolution”, with one talk about publishing a magazine, and a second one about resolution-independent front-end work in the wake of even more pixel-density diversity. On a completely different note, RailsGirls will be stopping by to tell us about their awesome project.

• 

  Kai Brach From digital to paper—publishing a print mag about pixel people

  At a time when print is declared dead and traditional media outlets struggle to make a buck, Kai decided to move from designing websites to publishing a print magazine. Offscreen is an old-fashioned periodical on high-quality paper, exploring the life and work of people that create websites and apps. It tells the less obvious human stories of creativity, passion and hard work that hide behind every interface. Kai talks about the whys and hows of his new magazine and offers insight into today’s challenges as an indie publisher.

  Originally from Germany, Kai now lives in Melbourne, Australia, though, he can be found in various places around the globe when live becomes too repetitive. He’s currently taking a break from his web design career to publish a magazine about digital creators.

  • brizk.com
  • @kaibrach
• 

  Francesco Kirchhoff The death of pixels – Designing for high-density displays

  New ultra-high resolution displays (like the Retina displays touted by Apple in their iOS devices and new MacBook Pro) are changing the way our designs get displayed, requiring us to change some of our development approaches. We’ll look back how the use of space and absolute/relative sizes in design have been translated into digital until now and how it will be done in the feature, presenting some viable solutions to make our sites and apps look good across devices.

  Rome-born, Berlin-based Francesco is a caffeine addict who toils away day and sometimes night as a freelance UX designer and project manager for various web agencies and startups in Berlin in order to support his tragic habit. He tries his best not to increase the pervasive ugliness and thoughtlessness, for bad design makes him weep.

  • uxd.pm
  • @francescok

In June we have talks by Martin Spindler, Horia Dragomir and Alex Feyerke. As always, up.front takes place at co.up co-working in Kreuzberg. NEW: For the first time we’ll use co.up’s brand new rooms in the third floor. This means more space for you and less stairs to walk.

• 

  Martin Spindler Designing for the “Internet of Things”

  Computers are getting ever cheaper, smaller and more energy efficient. This leads to an ever-increasing amount of digital hybrids — everyday objects equipped with digital capabilities. But this emerging new class of “computers”, often dubbed the Internet of Things, demands new interfaces that accommodate those new capabilities. What does it mean to design for the Internet of Things, then?

  Martin is a Berlin-based freelance consultant focusing on the Internet of Things and Smart Energy.

  • mjays.net
  • @mjays
• 

  Horia Dragomir Show Some Frontend Love

  Building amazing things for the web is becoming a lot easier than it used to be. This talk will cover some cool tools, old and new, that help Horia do what he loves without stressing out that much.

  Horia Dragomir is a UI Developer, hungry & foolish; currently working for wooga in Berlin.

  • horia.me
  • @hdragomir
• 

  Alex Feyerke Page numbering on the internet and why it’s weird

  A very short talk about how we count, sort, remember and forget things on the internet.

  Alex is a freelance frontend developer and one of the organisers of up.front.

  • whiskie.net
  • @espylaub

Up.front 26 is here! On May 8, we’ll have Tifanny Conroy, Tadas Ščerbinskas and Jakob Fricke for you. As always, up.front takes place at co.up co-working in Kreuzberg, Adalbertstraße 7-8. Co.up offers a variety of cheap drinks and the biggest beanbags we’ve ever seen.

• 

  Tiffany Conroy Design Processes, Not Interfaces

  Computers are tools that help people accomplish tasks by making the process easier, faster, cheaper, less error-prone, or just more fun. But what tasks? And by what process? What parts of the process can the computer make better? How can users interact with the computer to make it do its part of the process? Only lastly can we ask: what must be presented to the user and how?

  Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin doing front-end development and interaction design at SoundCloud.

  • tif.ca
  • @theophani
• 

  Tadas Ščerbinskas and Jakob Fricke Picpack

  Tadas and Jakob will give some insights into the development process of their product, which will be launched to the public next week.

  Picpack is a personalised printing service that turns your Instagrams into high quality magnets.

  • getpicpack.com
  • @getpicpack

It’s up.front 25! Spring is here, and so is our first Really Rather Big Number™ meetup. We’ve found some great speakers for our 25th edition, and we’re very much looking forward to both you and them.

• 

  Kelly Sutton, LayerVault From MVP to business in 9 months

  LayerVault started as a Quora thread. "What are the tools or methods to manage design files?" Allan Grinshtein sent Kelly Sutton (me) an IM, "Man it sucks to be a designer. Think you could build something?" Sutton had a prototype ready to show off the next Monday. Nine months later, they are used by the best designers worldwide.

  Kelly Sutton is a software developer from New York City. He’s currently traveling the world. In the past, he’s made HackCollege and the Cult of Less and worked for blip.tv and Gilt Groupe.

  • layervault.com
  • layervault.tumblr.com
  • @layervault
• 

  Till Wiedeck, HelloMe Big Pictures, Small Things

  Till will be talking about the development of dynamic visual systems, approaching projects from a cross media perspective, ideas led design, trusting the process and the gain of not fearing failure.

  Till Wiedeck is the founder of Berlin based design studio HelloMe.

  • www.tillwiedeck.com

This meetup will be a purely social event: Talk design and drink drinks at Lugosi, 8pm. Right, no speakers, just the up.front audience and crew. Bring yourself and let’s connect!

Join us at co.up on Valentine’s Day for our first event of 2012. co.up will be freshly equipped with the new crowd-funded megafridge of endless cold drinks, so having our speakers put new stuff in your head will be even more pleasant. Here’s what we’ve got for you:

• 

  Georgi Kobilarov and Philipp Steinacher Designing & Developing the Urbany App - What We Have Learned

  Urbany is a new iPhone App we launched last week that integrates many of your favorite location apps into one interface. Netzwertig.com called it "the ultimate location mashup". In this talk we will share our experiences designing and developing Urbany. We will walk you through the rationale of some of our design decisions (both the intentional and the incidental ones), we will talk about climbing to top of the travel category in the German App Store in just 48 hours, and we will confuse correlation with causation a lot.

  Georgi is the founder of Uberblic and loves building products with data. Philipp is interface engineer at Uberblic and also loves building products with data. Together, they build products with data, and they love it.

  • uberblic.com
  • urbanyapp.com
  • @gkob
  • @phildav
• 

  Tom O’Doherty You’re doing it wrong!

  A little adventure with grids, media queries, and designing for unknown content.

  • www.tomodoherty.ie
  • @tomodoherty
• 

  Karl Westin Photoshop blend modes on the web

  Giving designers what they want.

  • @karlwestin
• 

  Alex Feyerke The dark mysteries of the Chrome DevTools

  If you’ve never ventured further than console.log() and your general notion of DevTools and Firebug is “yeah, this is neat, but it could be a lot neater”, then this is for you. Useful functions you’d never stumble across on your own and more keyboard shortcuts than you can shake a stick at.

  • @espylaub

This month we’ll be hosting a crowd-based experiment in collaborative consumption (of cookies and drinks) in the festive atmosphere of a bar named after an actor known for playing Dracula, Santa’s arch nemesis. So it all makes sense.

On Tue, November 8, we featured Ivo Gabrowitsch, Nadine Roßa and Javier Diaz, plus a lightning talk on Usability Testing by Jan-C. Borchardt.

• 

  Ivo Gabrowitsch App Fonts – The New Web Fonts

  Though we’ve barely even had time to get used to Webfonts, the next big challenge is already looming on the horizon for font users and manufacturers: fonts for apps and mobile devices. As with Webfonts, which have already become practically indispensable, there are a myriad of special considerations involved, including technical matters and, more importantly, legal issues. This presentation aims to sensitize both developers and graphic designers to this dicey topic and to introduce possibilities for secure embedding of mobile fonts.

  Ivo Gabrowitsch is the Marketing Director of the FontFont typeface library. He was responsible for the development and introduction of the unique ‘Web FontFonts’ concept onto the market. The gratuated engineer in print and media technology studied at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin and used to work as a media designer.

  • fontfont.com
  • @gabrowitsch
• 

  Nadine Roßa How to Launch a Business Website

  When starting a consulting/agency business, there are a few things to do: Find a beautiful office, hire kick-ass developers and brilliant designers, and … get your own web site online.

  Nadine Roßa is a designer, illustrator and a co-founder of LAUNCH/CO together with Jan Schulz-Hofen.

  • launchco.com
  • @nadrosia
• 

  Javier Diaz So … What Did We Learn? A Retrospective on Design

  As mid-life crisis hit Javi hard on the head and fellow designers & friends kept on asking him the same questions about improving their technique or getting better at designing, He started wondering: “What did I learn those years that could be helpful for others? What kind of advice would I give myself as a designer if I was travelling 10 years back in time?”

  Now relocated to Berlin and looking to take the next step in his career, Javier Diaz was working in Spain as UI / UX designer for Tuenti and was the main designer for the Unhosted project in the first stages.

  • edokoa.com
  • @edokoa

On Tue, October 11, we will feature Caitlin Winner, Marco Hamersma and Malte Müller. Additionally we will hear lightning talks by Benjamin Kampmann and Patrick Hüsler.
You found a cool new tool, technology or case that fits into the web design or frontend category? Share it with us. You are always welcome to take a slot for a lightning talk. The location remains unchanged and is hosted by the co.up co-working space providing chairs and drinks for cheap.

• 

  Caitlin Winner Painting and the Art of App Design

  … including the Horror of a Blank Canvas; Pierro della Francesca Applies for the App Store; The Golden Ratio and the Amen Rainbow.

  Caitlin Winner is the co-founder of Amen, a platform for expressing the extra ordinary. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Economics and Studio Art and has worked at the MIT Media Lab, Plum and Nokia.

  • Amen
  • @caitlinwinner
• 

  Marco Hamersma

  Although we spend lots of time and money on designing our interfaces, we don’t always pay the same kind of attention to sounds. Marco’s talk is about finding out when to use sound and what sounds are good to use in your interface.

  Marco is a developer and UX designer currently working as an intern at SoundCloud.

  • Soundcloud
  • @marcohamersma
• 

  Malte Müller Changing tires on a moving truck: Agile interface design

  Agile development has long become the standard way of creating web applications. Still, many teams struggle to integrate interface design and other visual disciplines into their workflow. For the past five months, we have been one of them. As we developed a web application from ground up, we had to figure out how to keep developers and designers in sync – without slowing down the project. In this talk we’d like to share our learnings on how to set up and run a successful team with a maximum of agility – under real-world conditions. Hop the truck and keep your wrenches ready.

  Malte is an experienced web designer and co-anchorfounder of We Are Fellows, a Hamburg-based creative studio specializing in brand direction and digital design.

  • We Are Fellows
  • @electricgecko

The up.front summer break is over! On our September meetup we will have Gernot Poetsch, Max Fellmuth and Tim Lucas. Lightning talk by Georgi Kobilarov.
You found a cool new tool, technology or case that fits into the web design or frontend category? Share it with us. You are always welcome to take a slot for a lightning talk. The location remains unchanged and is hosted by the co.up co-working space providing chairs and drinks for cheap.

• 

  Gernot Poetsch Designing for Magical Devices

  Gernot will talk about how we approach developing iOS and Mac applications and about our experience founding a company around it. There will be some practical design tips, too.

  Gernot is Developer and CEO at nxtbgthng GmbH, developing Mac and iOS Applications for clients such as SoundCloud.

  • nxtbgthng
  • @gernot
• 

  Max Fellmuth Branding in App Design

  Every company thinks about how to present their app. But is it more important to present the company’s style or to make an app that looks good on its platform? Is it more important to have a light blue status bar or to have one that doesn’t break your own guidelines. That’s what Max Fellmuth wants to discuss with you. Max spends his whole day doing UI design (and school) and will give some insights to good and also bad branding in apps.

  Max Fellmuth is a 15 year old User Interface designer from Berlin. Currently he’s working on Pistachio, a service to get more social in real life.

  • maxfellmuth.com
  • @maxfell
• 

  Tim Lucas CSS3 with Railscamp Tee v7

  The world’s most over-the-top tshirt order form, featuring: HTML5 audio, animation, webfonts, and -webkit trickery.

  Designer / coder / pedaller / climber. Recently relocated from Sydney to Berlin.

  • http://toolmantim.com
  • @toolmantim

It’s summertime! From June to August, we are having our summer break, which means no regular meetup with talks – instead we meet for informal discussions and drinks at Bohnengold, Reichenberger Straße 153. See you there!

It’s summertime! From June to August, we are having our summer break, which means no regular meetup with talks – instead we meet for informal discussions and drinks at Bohnengold, Reichenberger Straße 153. See you there!

It’s summertime! From June to August, we are having our summer break, which means no regular meetup with talks – instead we meet for informal discussions and drinks at Bohnengold, Reichenberger Straße 153. See you there!

On our 15th meetup we had Gearóid O’Rourke, Frederik Frede & Tim Seifert, and Stephen Coles. Lightning talks by Karl Westin, Robb Böhnke and Johan Uhle.

• 

  Stephen Coles Cure for the Common Font — A Web Designer’s Introduction to Typeface Selection

  Now that web designers suddenly face the challenge (and delight) of choosing fonts from an ever-growing selection, it’s a good time to recommend some basic principles for making wise type choices.

  Stephen is a writer and designer living in Oakland and Berlin. After six years at FontShop San Francisco as a creative director, he now publishes the websites Typographica, Fonts In Use, and The Mid-Century Modernist. Stephen is also a regular contributor to Print magazine and a member of the FontFont TypeBoard.

  • stephencoles.org
  • @typographica
• 

  Gearóid O’Rourke Taking print design online

  Newspapers are dying. Print is dead. All hail the online revolution! It has felled the inky beasts. Oh the confidence of teenagers. Web design is a discipline in it’s adolescence — the classic teenager; all existential angst, bad fashion choices, mood swings and earnest attempts at “cool”. It has rightly rejected the mistakes, constraints and pitfalls of “fuddy-duddy” print design, but has forgotten that old-man print still has more than a few things to teach.
  Gearóid spent his teenage years in the world of newspapers. As the youngest designer at Ireland’s oldest newspaper he learned print design from the old hands. Teaching himself web design at the same time, he became fascinated by the insights a grounding in print design can offer to the web designer who is willing to listen. Gearóid will explore these insights under 3 headings – process, philosophy and practicalities.

  Gearóid is a 24 year-old Irish guy who runs a one-man design studio in London. He has worked as an editorial designer with the News of the World, The Irish Times and the Sun. He welcomes our new online overlords in “the cloud”.

  • orourke-design.com
  • @orourkedesign
• 

  Frederik Frede & Tim Seifert Freunde von Freunden

  The online format Freunde von Freunden is a showcase project that proofs how ideas can grow and develop through digital media, great motivation and a strong network of friends and producers. Producing for FvF is lots of fun in the first place and with the engagement of a creative network became a fertile ground for great client projects and new ideas in digital publishing.

  Frederik Frede is an entrepreneur, consultant, award-winning creative director and founder of the Designstudio and now Coffeebar NoMoreSleep and online magazine and production company Freunde von Freunden.
  Having studied digital communication on a master’s degree Tim Seifert finished his academic career with a thesis on networked and collaborative digital journalism and is a co-founder and manager of the magazine and production company Freunde von Freunden.

  • freundevonfreunden.de
  • @FrederikFrede
  • @timmiseifert

There will be lightning talks by Tiffany Conroy, Nico Hagenburger and Henrik Berggren.

• 

  Nadine Roßa The letter ß

  For some people it is a trouble-maker in German orthography, for some a shortcoming in typography but to Nadine it is the most beautiful letter – The German Eszett. Throughout history no other character has had to put up with so much and almost no other letter has been the subject of so much discussion. Her surname contains this rare character. That’s the reason why, in her thesis, she decided to put some thought into what could be done to place it in a better light. That was the basis of the project »Eine scharfe Type« – A sharp character.

  Nadine Roßa is a freelance designer and illustrator working in Berlin. She’s one of the publishers of the Design made in Germany Magazine and a co-founder of LAUNCH/CO.

  • scharfe-type.de
  • @nadrosia
• 

  Sven Ellingen FontFont.com – A more agile design process

  Sven – Designer at Edenspiekermann – will give some insight on the recently relaunched fontfont.com. FontFont is the world’s largest library of original contemporary typefaces. Together with Ivo Gabrowitsch and Jörg Haubrichs, head of marketing and developer at FontFont, the team at Edenspiekermann redesigned the website from scratch in a collaborative and agile way. Almost no Photoshop pixels were harmed in the making of the site. Instead, most of the design took place in the browser using tools such as Haml and Sass.
  Learn about the challenges of an “agile design process”, the latest life-saving tools and greatly underestimated budgets.

  Edenspiekermann is an agency for strategy, design and communication with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Stuttgart.

  • Edenspiekermann
  • @se

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a reputation for being shady and complicated. Hessam previously spent 4 years at Google where he worked on fighting black hat SEO techniques and webspam in the European market. He will be sharing his knowledge about how search engines find and evaluate web content, as well as the 3 key elements for optimal performance in search engines. The focus in this session will be on avoiding technical pitfalls and building an accessible website.

• 

  Hessam Lavi SEO 101 - Accessibility

  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has a reputation for being shady and complicated. Hessam previously spent 4 years at Google where he worked on fighting black hat SEO techniques and webspam in the European market. He will be sharing his knowledge about how search engines find and evaluate web content, as well as the 3 key elements for optimal performance in search engines. The focus in this session will be on avoiding technical pitfalls and building an accessible website.

  Hessam is an a SEO and Web Analytics consultant and a former member of Google’s search quality/webspam team.

  • hessamlavi.com
  • Blog
  • @hessam
• 

  Uli Schöberl Design Tools

  Whenever Tools of choice are discussed its easy to start off a heated debate. Its 2011 and Websites are still started in Photoshop. We laughed at the print people using InDesign, now it ships with pixel measures and we dream about the automatic recovery when Fireworks beachball crashed again. And of course beyond Adobe, who needs a flat demo of an interactive Design anyways, after all rapid prototyping has been around a while.
  >His talk will showcase different case of Tool combinations, how they fit in a real world workflow and the own choice always seems superior to everyone elses. A heated debate will follow.

  Uli Schöberl is a freelance designer and developer.

  • ulischoeberl.com
  • @aplusplus
• 

  Floris Dekker How to start a studio in Berlin

  Floris will talk about setting up shop in Berlin 1,5 years ago and about some of the insights they gained by doing it. He will also show some of their own projects and explain why they did them.

  Floris Dekker is a founder and designer at Your Neighbours.

  • @floriz
  • Slideshare

Lightning talks by Natalie Hanke and Peter Bihr.

• 

  Mette Ilene Holmriis 9 reasons to love animation

  Mette gives a brief animation run through, covering some of the most popular and interesting ways of working with animation. If nothing else this talk will at least give you an impression of how powerful a communication tool animation is.

  Mette Ilene Holmriis is an animator from Denmark, now based in Berlin.

  • metteilene.com
  • @metteIlene
• 

  Torsten Bergler & Thomas Michelbach Location Based Services

  The guys around the TBWA\ Digital Arts Team developed a service to make data accessible only in specific areas or locations. They are going to talk about the idea behind it, how they used it for a big coffee house and what they are planning for the future.

  Torsten Bergler and Thomas Michelbach are Creative Developers at TBWA\ Berlin.

  • @inananalogworld
  • @torstenbergler

It’s the first meetup of 2011, and we’re going to get the year started with an amazing programme. Did you make new year’s resolutions to improve your workflow, or finally learn about that helpful tool you always wanted to use in your projects? We’ve got some talks to help you out.

• 

  Tiffany Conroy How to Build a Bookmarklet

  Get ideas and learn the tricks to make your own bookmarklets, and learn how some of the popular ones work (e.g. Share on Twitter, Read Later, and Readability.)
  What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet is a way to inject a JavaScript into any web page. Don’t be intimidated! This practical talk teaches you step-by-step how to create and distribute tiny (or big!) applications that can be used on any website.

  Tiffany Conroy is a Frontend Web Developer.

  • tif.ca
  • @theophani
• 

  Alexander Lang Git(hub) for designers

  Git is many programmer’s favorite tool to manage their files and collaborate with others. Learn how you, too, can vastly improve your file workflow. Once there you don’t want to go back.

  Alexander Lang is a programmer and runs his own company, Upstream. He also runs up.front’s home, the co.up coworking space.

  • @langalex

On December 14 we are going to gather for a special Christmas edition of our meet-up. Let’s enjoy some mulled wine, munch cookies and hear a lightning talk or two. If you want to share a cool new tool, technology or case that fits into the web design frontend category in a lightning talk (~5min), you are very welcome to share it with us.
We would also like to plan the next meet-ups with you! Which topics do you want to discuss or would you like to be discussed? Do you think theme nights like the last one make sense or would you rather go for mixed evenings, etc. This is also a great chance to give us feedback about past events.

PS: Baked some tasty cookies? Bring ’em! :-)

Till Nagel gives a short introduction how interactive maps and geo visualization help to explore and communicate multivariate data, and shows a few examples on tangible and multitouch data vis applications.

• 

  Till Nagel Unfolding Data

  Till Nagel gives a short introduction how interactive maps and geo visualization help to explore and communicate multivariate data, and shows a few examples on tangible and multitouch data vis applications.

  Till is a lecturer and researcher at the Interaction Design Lab, Fachhochschule Potsdam.

  • @tillnm
• 

  Georgi Kobilarov When 1+1=3. On linking open data.

  Open data is everywhere. Institutions and companies all around us start to open up their databases, provide APIs and give the Web community the power to build applications on top. But what if we could combine all that open data to build apps no only of one open data silo, but multiple, by cross-linking all that data data? Wouldn’t that be much more powerful?
  This talk gives an intro to how this little idea - four years ago - became the Linking Open Data project, with hundreds of connected data sources.

  Georgi is the founder of Uberblic Labs, a company of data geeks in Berlin. He developed DBpedia, one of the first Linked Data projects, and helped organisations such as the BBC to use the Web as their database.

  • @gkob
• 

  Edial Dekker The Networked City

  Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life. Managed well, “big data” can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide new insights into scions and give governments to account. Meanwhile, some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers are trying to understand this data to harness it for answers to our biggest problems.
  In this talk, Edial Dekker will address the benefits of seeing cities as a platform that is able to reinvent itself. A main theme in this talk will be the role of data visualizations and a project called City Crawlers Berlin.

  Edial is part of Your Neighbours, a studio that is focussed on visualizing data and story telling.

  • @edial

Webfonts seem to be the new savior in webdesign. We are free from Verdana, Helvetica and Georgia, finally! Or actually could be. In fact, one hardly knows anything about the implementation of commercial fonts on the web. I want to give a short introduction to typekit, .woff, .eot & co, but rather want to hear about your opinions and experiences.

• 

  Christoph Rauscher Using commercial webfonts

  Webfonts seem to be the new savior in webdesign. We are free from Verdana, Helvetica and Georgia, finally! Or actually could be. In fact, one hardly knows anything about the implementation of commercial fonts on the web. I want to give a short introduction to typekit, .woff, .eot & co, but rather want to hear about your opinions and experiences.

  Christoph Rauscher, grown up in the interwebs, is a student of interface design and likes everything regarding (type) design.

  • christowski.de
  • @christowski
• 

  Alex Coles and Sven Ellingen Rebooting the Edenspiekermann website

  Alex and Sven – Developer and Designer at Edenspiekermann – will share their experience relaunching the design agency’s website in a 2-day-marathon. They’ll offer insight into the tools they used, and explain why they kicked out their CMS in favour of a mostly static solution. Learn about the roadblocks they encountered in the last few minutes, and why this rapid reboot is more than just an academic exercise.

  Edenspiekermann is an agency for strategy, design and communication with offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Stuttgart.

  • Edenspiekermann

For once, Apple may have actually gotten it right with their advertising: The iPhone 4 changed everything. At least, if you’re an interface designer. Dealing with different resolutions and screen sizes adds another dimension to both conceptual and technical interface design. My talk provides some basic thoughts and approaches concerning this issue.

• 

  Malte Müller More pixels or none at all. Designing interfaces for better screens.

  For once, Apple may have actually gotten it right with their advertising: The iPhone 4 changed everything. At least, if you’re an interface designer. Dealing with different resolutions and screen sizes adds another dimension to both conceptual and technical interface design. My talk provides some basic thoughts and approaches concerning this issue.

  Malte Müller runs electricgecko.de by night and serves as Digital Director at fischerAppelt, furore by day.

  • @electricgecko
• 

  Jan Lehnardt Minimal templating with Mustache.js

  Jan will give a designer-friendly introduction to minimal templating with Mustache.js in JavaScript and explain why {{mustaches}} are awesome.

  Jan Lehnardt is Cofounder and Vice President of CouchOne. He’s also a drummer, cyclist and likes living in Berlin.

  • @janl

This talk is a bit of the anti-thesis to Alex Feyerke’s Talk at our may meetup. Sebastian will tell us why he thinks that Alex sees Flash’s future a bit too bright and why the new tools around HTML5 will succeed over Flash.

• 

  Sebastian Kippe On the future of Flash Pt. 2

  This talk is a bit of the anti-thesis to Alex Feyerke’s Talk at our may meetup. Sebastian will tell us why he thinks that Alex sees Flash’s future a bit too bright and why the new tools around HTML5 will succeed over Flash.

  Sebastian Kippe is a freelance web developer with a focus on Ruby/Rails projects.

  • Sebastian Kippe
  • @skddc

A short, opinionated introduction to grid systems, how they should be used in contemporary web design and their role within the creative process. Contains pretty pictures.

• 

  Malte Müller Have no fear of perfection. Grid systems in web design

  A short, opinionated introduction to grid systems, how they should be used in contemporary web design and their role within the creative process. Contains pretty pictures.

  Malte Müller runs electricgecko.de by night and serves as Digital Director at fischerAppelt, furore by day.

  • @electricgecko
• 

  Kristina Schneider CSS layout frameworks

  Are they pure evil? Do we need them at all? This talk will anticipate some common prejudices and identifies possible use cases for CSS frameworks.

  Kristina Schneider is a freelance art director with a passion for CSS and all things frontend.

  • @kriesse
  • kristinaschneider.com
• 

  Urs Kleinert Blueprint and Compass

  The Blueprint framework is one of the most popular CSS frameworks. Not only does it offer a customizable grid, but also a typographic baseline. In his talk, Urs Kleinert will give a short introduction to Blueprint with a focus on its customization tools, especially when combined with COMPASS.
• 

  Claudine Brändle YUI grids CSS and OOCSS

  This talk covers the YUI grids framework and also introduces Nicole Sullivan’s OOCSS.

  Claudine Brändle is a freelance web developer spezialised on Drupal and frontend scripting.

  • @gipsyx
  • nolocation.net
• 

  Simon Perdrisat 960.gs

  3.6 KB which can simplify your coding life. 960.gs gives us what we want from a framework. It allows you to improve your workflow without spending time learning to use it. With 960.gs you will never be a slave to your framework.

  Simon Perdrisat is a Drupal Developer.

  • @gargarine

Lightning talk by Nico Hagenburger.

• 

  Wolfram Kriesing App vs. Widget, The mobile web taking over?

  Wolfram Kriesing picks up the current hype around apps and HTML5. Is the app store only a temporary thing? Most apps can be built using web technologies. More and more APIs are coming to the browser. Will a native app still be around in the future, do we need them or just the company that gets the 30% share off of every app? He will show you what web technologies can do where you maybe thought only an app could go, and will also show an outlook of where we are heading.

  Wolfram Kriesing is a co-founder of uxebu.

  • @wolframkriesing
• 

  Alex Feyerke On the future of Flash

  In the light of the current discussion about Flash vs. HTML5 and Canvas, Alex Feyerke is searching for Flash’s place in the web, exploring where it went wrong, where it got better, and where it’s surprisingly awesome. Followed, hopefully, by a fruitful debate on Flash’s relevance and future (one that goes beyond “Steve Jobs said it’s terrible and has to die”).

  Alex Feyerke is a Freelance Flash developer.

  • @espylaub
  • Presentation

Our third meetup!

Our second meetup!

Our very first meetup!