Sessions at Frontend United on Saturday 21st April

Jan Willem Tulp is a freelance information visualizer from The Netherlands. He works for clients world wide, such as Amsterdam Airport, Scientific American, World Economic Forum and Popular Science Magazine. During this talk Jan Willem will show some of his visualization projects, and he will detail in on the process behind creating data visualizations.

This session will give an overview how Bojhan Somers and Roy Scholten go about designing Drupal 8. We have a whole new set of challenges ahead of us and this, will give an intro into the process that we follow and the work that has followed.

We will likely cover three topics:

• Content creation experience
• Drag & Drop layout builder
• Designing in a opensource community

The audience for this session will be primary designers who work on more intense UX projects. But also all those interested what its like designing for Drupal core

The editor experience is somehow a blind spot in a lot of projects.

There might exist a great design for the “frontend”, a lot of efforts go into building a good user experience for site visitors and we also put a lot of work in functionality, but very often we are missing out on usability for editors.

There are a lot of sites that are used extensively by editors and for them the “frontend” is the “backend”. The out of the box functionality just isn’t enough, to make them love to work with Drupal for content management.

In this session I want to show, what modules and techniques you can use right now to design and build for a way better editor friendly interface.

Topics:

• Common pain points in content management
• Modules you can use to build an editor friendly backend
• Strategies for the “intuitive” interface
• Customizing the admin theme with the editors in mind

Target Audience:

• Intermediate, front-end developers

An introduction on what this thing called 'twig' actually is, how it can help you in creating extendable templates in drupal right now, and perhaps even use the same templates in the future without changing your template code.

As a UX professional you've probably found yourself forced to argue for the importance of UX in a project. You've probably heard people say that UX is of little importance. And as a designer it's not always easy to explain why UX matters. But UX needs to be justified. And it's your job to do so. In this session I will present ways to convince even project managers from hell about the value of UX.

Attend this session to learn methods to visualize and communicate the value of UX and usability. Using these tools and frameworks you will be able to convincingly argue for why UX is critical to a website delivering what its stakeholders expect.

In Drupal we use JavaScript because we have to, not because we want to. This session will be about explaining how Drupal handles JavaScript, what needs to be changed, why and how it can be changed. There will be data, lots of data.

Here is an overview of what you can learn during this session:

• How JavaScript is handled by Drupal and what is going to change for D8,
• Stepping back: what is happening for JavaScript outside of Drupal,
• The problems we have and the ones we're going to run into very soon,
• Async and on-demand loading, Asynchronous Module Definition, what is it and how can Drupal use it,
• What does it take to significantly improve perceived performance.
• A few examples:
• What are file-level closures or what does "Aggregate JavaScript files" really do,
• There is life outside jQuery, what is it like?
• Why JavaScript will soon be a bottleneck for the Mobile initiative,
• Who's faster: a script loader, putting scripts at the bottom of the page, or disabling JavaScript altogether?
• How to reduce the amount of scripts that are run on a selection of events: page load, ajax calls, scrolling.
• jQuery is great but jQuery is not enough. To be able to grow and seduce much needed JavaScript developers, Drupal has to make use of JavaScript's full potential.

If you know what Drupal behaviors are, if you ever added a script to a page or complained that the modules admin page is painful to scoll, this session is for you.

Grids are really old. From the roman camp layout to todays drupal.org layout. After the industrial revolution grids married into modern typography and design and today the we use grids when building web sites.

Responsive design is a catch phrase that you run into everywhere all the time. It's popularity is not entirely without good reason, because responsive design can indeed be a good way of presenting and adapting content from a single source for different platforms (computer, smart phone, tablet).

In this session we'll take a quick look at grids, responsive design and specifically the Less Framework 4.0: how it applies grids to the design. Then we'll try to make up our minds to whether we like this concept or if we'll keep looking for the holy grail...

The practice of design and font-end development is changing.

We have entered a world of multiple devices, multiple capabilities and multiple locations. The practice of front-end development has become one where we have to cope with endless variation and difference.

I want to propose designing in the browser as a means of navigating this new complexity and also as a method to create the beautiful and truly web like designs that the medium has always asked for.

I will argue that our current process of static comps is broken, unhelpful and limiting. Further I will argue that we should design in the appropriate medium to the task of web design. I will propose that this method allows us to create the sorts of designs that the web has always demanded.

The session will then go on to talk about the practical ways in which we can design in the browser. Like any process it has drawbacks of its own. I will talk about ways around these difficulties and tools that allow us the design in the browsers effectively and creatively.

Finally I will outline more generally the type of agile and collaborative design process that designing in the browser allows. I will argue that this approach allows us to bring clients fully into the process of design and allows the creation of beautiful design that both designers and clients can be proud of.

Slides -> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8289745/...

HTML5 video receives an incredible amount of buzz these days, fueled by debates such as MP4 vs. WebM or Apple vs. Adobe. While producing juicy headlines, these debates do add a lot of confusion to an already difficult area of expertise. This presentation therefore focuses on the practical side of HTML5 video: which browsers support which codecs, what is possible in HTML5 versus Flash today and what is coming in the near future? Coming out of this session, developers will be able to make informed decisions and get started encoding and developing for HTML5 video.

Jeroen Wijering is the creator of the successful JW Player, which has generated millions of downloads since its release in 2005. In 2007, he co-founded LongTail Video, focusing on a hosted video solution that includes encoding, delivery, syndication and advertising.

Drupal has a bad name in terms of Frontend Development. The amount of useless CSS that you need to overwrite in your theme, and the serious case of divitis might at first scare you away. However, with the right mind-set and a few simple tricks you can create Drupal 7 themes that have beautiful HTML and well-organized CSS.

Efficiency, flexibility and maintainability are the keywords for this session. We will not go into the modern techniques such as compiled CSS, of CSS Frameworks, but instead focus on a good basic approach to go from design to theme.

The following steps will be handled:

• Analyse your design: make sure it is Drupal proof.
• From design to theme: build your theme that works for Drupal's content-first approach.
• Optimize your HTML: using Display Suite and other modules your HTML will be shinier than ever.
• Write CSS that never breaks: think Drupal, think flexibility, think maintainability.
• Basic frontend performance: what does Drupal offer in this area.

After this in-depth look at the way of working for Drupal 7, we will have a sneak peak at how awesome theming for Drupal 8 will be.

'Flash is dead!' That statement was repeated too often when HTML5 video arrived. But Flash is not the only solution for cross-browser video.

It is fairly easy with Flash to create animation for the web - be it 2D or 3D. But what about CSS3 transitions, transforms and animations? And are there any other options than CSS3 (WebGL? SVG?)?

Lets re-discover animation on the web.

New web technologies are coming up every day at the moment, but are they accessible for everyone? This talk will take a look at how those technologies care about accessibility and how browsers and assistive technologies handle new stuff. We’ll look into accessibility polyfills and techniques that you can use immediately to enhance your everyday web projects.