Doors Open
Registration, with complimentary donuts, juice, and coffee
Clarity 2016
Schedule for
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Welcome
Hello from the organizer (Jina Anne), along with logistical announcements, and an introduction to the emcee.
Emcee (Chris Coyier) will give some insight and thoughts for the day, before introducing the first speaker.
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The Thing is Design Systems. The Time is Now.
Modularity has been around for a long time now; concepts like object-oriented programming predate the Web by a long shot. So why the sudden interest in pattern libraries and design systems on the Web? We’re tasked with creating experiences that look and function beautifully across a dizzying array of devices, browsers, screen sizes, network connections, locales, and environments. That’s a tall order in and of itself, but once you factor in team members, clients, stakeholders, and organizational quirks, things start looking downright intimidating. Style guides and design systems provide solid ground for us to stand on as we tackle this increasingly-diverse Web landscape. This session will discuss considerations and best practices for creating and maintaining effective interface design systems.
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Building Empowering Style Guides with Practical Research
As builders and makers in tech, we strive to create useful, empowering products for our users. A style guide is no different. Done well, it’s a product that all of its users — e.g. developers, designers, customers, partners, and more — find useful and empowering to use. Where should a team start? It begins with understanding your users and the different things they need from style guides. Whether your team is small or large, we’ll share practical research methods for gathering and translating these different needs into building useful and empowering style guides.
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/ddonnachan/building-empowering-style-guides-with-practical-research
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Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products
A design system is made up of parts: visual style, UI components, code, editorial, and often more. We know how to design, build, deliver them is like any other digital product development process. And there’s the rub: your system is a product in and of itself, applied to an enterprise's ecosystem of other products built by autonomous teams of designers and developers.
Your strategy needs answers to “What products will use it, when and to what extent?” “Who’s our audience?” “Who participates and contributes?” “What groups must we align with?” “Who wants it, and — really — who doesn’t?”
We’ll explore ways to identify and prioritize how to engage your enterprise’s people and products as you spread and sustain a system over time.
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Lunch
Included with ticket cost.
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After Lunch Announcements
Come back for giveaways and announcements.
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Code Patterns for Pattern-Making
Style Guides and Pattern Libraries are great tools for documenting the relationships between code and design, but beautiful docs and consistent UI are only half the battle. Somewhere, behind the scenes, those patterns have to live in our code, and hopefully make life easier for developers. We can go beyond “living” style guides to find tools that encourage and document pattern-making from the ground up, across projects, without adding developer overhead. From Sass maps and Jinja macros, to front-end architecture and style-guide generators — let’s talk about the code patterns that make our UI patterns possible.
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Crawl, Walk, Run — the Evolution of a Design System
If change isn’t built into the process, a “Living Design System” can’t evolve. In this talk we'll discuss the lessons learned, and the challenges faced, as our system went from crawling to running. Refactoring, versioning, and deprecation are but a few of the growing pains we've experienced on our journey to build a stable but incredibly flexible Design System.
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Being Human, Being Slack
When your brand is known for having a very human voice — like, say, talking to a real, consistently toned voice — how do you keep that consistent as you grow a team (and grow it fast)? How do you make sure everything said in the voice sounds convincingly like The Voice, while allowing people to bring their talents and strength to the work — and not just sounding like a hollow impersonation? How do you create a voice that people can share?
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Closing Commentary
Emcee (Chris Coyier) will wrap the day with some insight and thoughts from the day.
Goodbye from the organizer (Jina Anne), along with logistical announcements, and details on evening events.
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in Eventbrite HQ (Eventbrite)
Happy Hour
Come hang out with to decompress from Day 1. Meet your fellow conference-goers and Clarity speakers.
You must RSVP separately on Eventbrite to attend.
