Just days away from the start of the 3-city week-long festival of design that is Respond 17 (you’re booked in for Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, right?) seems an opportune moment to review the presentation delivered at Respond just a year ago by Ethan Marcotte. While this engaging and inspiring talk focuses – naturally – on […]
It staggers me that we are still – STILL – struggling with making our web and digital products and services universally accessible. In one sense, that is just a reflection of how poorly we understand and implement accessibility in the rest of the world around us. In another sense, it is both devastating and ridiculous […]
A hallmark of the relatively short history of web design and development has been the often very creative use of CSS elements meant to do one thing but made to serve some other purpose entirely. Some might find that surprising, given that this has all been invented fairly recently for specifically to design and build […]
As is often the case, our next major event – Respond 17 – is not only a two-day conference, but also has a third day devoted to a Masterclass workshop with Vitaly Friedman (in Brisbane, we’ll present only the workshop). Our roster of past Masterclass workshop leaders reads like an album of who’s who in […]
This is the tale of two products. Physical things that do something rather similar. Each prepares a beverage – one hot, one cold – that are consumed on a enormous scale all over the planet. The drinks themselves have been consumed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But each of the devices has been […]
One of the things we really like about staging conferences like Respond is that we can bring to Australia experts from around the world. Perhaps even better than that is when we can feature locals who are themselves world class in their fields. When it comes to CSS, we’re fortunate to have a thinker, practitioner […]
Some of us remember Clippy, Microsoft’s assistant in Office, now much derided as an interfering pain that never seemed to help. And for years we’ve been seeing chat boxes on home pages of sites we visit, but how often have we ever used them? And how many horror stories have we heard about them going […]
We invited some of our Respond 17 speakers to contribute an article on a topic not necessarily directly related to their presentation theme, but that would fit in with the general themes of the conference. Mike Riethmuller, who is presenting on Responsive, Progressive Fluid Typography at Respond, came up with this excellent piece about CSS […]
The ‹picture› element supplies a semantic approach to dealing with responsive images on the web, yet Matthew Kairys in his presentation at Respond 16 pointed out how little use is currently made of it. Which is odd when you consider the emphasis on responsive design and the widespread browser support for such a useful element. […]
For closer to 20 than 10 years, I’ve made the argument that the quality of the code of a website (which is relatively easy to assess, compared to any sort of binary application, where code is almost impossible to assess in any meaningful way) – whether it validates, its approach to accessibility, its adoption of […]
Our next extract from the Respond 17 Scroll magazine gives some background to keynote speaker and masterclass workshop leader Vitaly Friedman. As a regular speaker at web conferences, the Smashing Magazine head honcho is obviously a very familiar figure in our industry, but we wanted to find out how he got started and what inspired […]
Peter Wilson’s subject at Respond 16 was performance, which sits alongside security as a major factor designers and developers have to take into account on today’s web. You may have the most beautiful and useful website in the world, but if it takes too long to load, site visitors are unlikely to stick around to […]
At Respond 16, we were fortunate to bring to Australia Rachel Simpson, UX designer on the Google Chrome team, to present on finding a real balance between usability and security. Rachel’s keynote pointed out how poor some of our online security practices have been – and are still – and offered some pragmatic options available […]
Things that have crossed our desk recently, and we think are worth crossing yours, too. The Power of Experience Mapping Jared Spool I think Netflix is one of the most extraordinary companies in the world. From business strategy to devops, UI to front end development, these folks are as good as it gets. […]
Our Scroll magazine Scroll magazine contains considerably more than just profiles of the Respond 17 speakers. We look for different ways to add perspective, context and – ultimately – value to your conference experience. Sketchnotes are a terrific way of summarising conference presentations, using evocative illustrations to emphasise key points and capture some of the […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
