There is more emphasis on learning frameworks (JS et al) than learning HTML.

HTML is fantastic. Semantic by nature. Choose the right element to mark up content and you’re on the way to an accessible website.

But HTML is not sexy.

• You don’t need compilers – but of course you can.
• You don’t need fancy software – but of course you can.
• You don’t need flashy frameworks – but of course you can.
• You need common sense and a willingness to make an effort – but that is hard work.

Fall (back) in love with HTML. Every website user will reap the benefits. But most won’t realise it. And that is OK.

Above all we acquired written language. A way to preserve our thoughts and ideas for many generations going forward. We have learned so much from the writings of previous generations. Glimpses into lives no longer living.

It’s not that we are slowing down in producing content. Far from it. But more and more of it is being produced in digital forms like video and sound. The art of the written word is dying. Especially hand writing. I wrote this by hand and my writing is looking worse with ever day, because of a lack in practice.

Digital content requires supporting software and electricity. You can lose it by switching a button. Paper can burn. Stone, wood etc. can meet an ugly end too. But they seems safer somehow.

I worry we are on the road to becoming illiterate.

El Lissitzky was born in Russia as Lazar Markovich Lissitzky —you can call him El— and lived life to the full. He became accomplished and influential in painting, architecture, photography and graphic design. Most of his work uses geometric shapes and a strong grid. Often with a limited colour palette, asymmetry, diagonals and sans serif type. In some ways a lot of his work is a forerunner of the Swiss International style.

From a young age he shows a talent for drawing, and by the time he is 15 he is teaching other students. Unable to study in Russia, he goes to Germany to study architectural engineering. This marks the start of a well travelled life between East and West. After his studies he explores architecture and landscape art in Italy. In Paris he becomes interested in traditional Jewish art.

On the invitation of Marc Chagall he returns to Russia to teach at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk. There he meets Kazimir Malevich, a radical artist and founder of Suprematism —a movement rejecting natural shapes, and favouring distinct geometric forms.

Lissitzky abandons traditional Jewish art and explores the possibilities of Suprematism. His most famous work in this style is “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge”. A propaganda poster created during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922).

As he goes deeper into Suprematism, he creates a series of works under the name Proun. A Russian acronym for “project for the affirmation of the new”. With Proun he combines the visual language of Suprematism with that of architecture. Geometric shapes on the one hand, and volume, mass, colour, shape and rhythm on the other. The works evolve from flat two-dimensional paintings to three-dimensional installations. Later he describes Proun as the midway station between painting and architecture.

Meanwhile the Russian Revolution is in full swing. With the Empire defeated, Communism takes over. Artists in Russia have to come to terms with a system where art has to be collective and public. Lissitzky embraces this.

For him art and design are a communication tool to reach the uneducated. It can prompt social and political change. A view held by Constructivism, which sees art as a practice for social purposes. As opposed to Suprematism which sees art as spiritual purity. At this point Lissitzky abandons the Suprematist movement.

He returns to Europe and meets many of the leading figures of De Stijl, the Bauhaus and the Dadaists. He also develops his career as a graphic designer.

Especially his work in book design challenges traditions. He applies his Proun principles to page layout, giving words meaning and energy. He sees the pages of a book as a movie, with each page being a sequence in the film. The words and typography become the protagonists on the page and play out the narrative.

Lissitzky was born in the Russian Empire and died in the USSR. He leaves behind an impressive body of work and an endearing fondness for a little red square.

(Image from MoMA)

Rachel Andrew: When using CSS grid @support is your friend.
Alla Kholmatova: The right design system for you is where you are able to manage the downsides effectively.
Michael Riethmuller: A media query does a hard change of a setting at that point. This causes stress points to the design just before and after the media query.
Emanuela & Matteo: People don’t know what they want, until they are using it.
Mathias Biilmann: Nevermind full stack. This talk introduced JAM-stack (JavaScript, APIs and Markup).

Day 2:

Yiying Lu: Be ready to capture ideas everywhere.
Christopher Wright: In order to successfully experiment we need to do it wrong.
Alma Hoffmann: Harness your creative mind. Use it or lose it.
Sara Ramos & Tiago Pedras: Plan, but be ready to improvise and iterate.

Laura Elizabeth: Design systems are hard, that’s why they are only useful to create if the need exceeds the effort.
Ellen De Vries: The story is what holds everything together.
Sarah Heidani: When adding a new pattern variation to your CSS, ask yourself if that is really needed. To keep your CSS manageable keep your variations to a minimum.
Rachel Andrew: If a pattern library is not a living thing, you might as well not have it.
Paul Robert Lloyd: Ask yourself who your design system serves. Is it an internal thing to keep the owners happy, or does it look to the future?
Alla Kolmatova: The right [pattern library] system for you is not someone else’s.

For the sake of this analogy lets keep it simple and divide “making a website” up in two groups: expensive and cheap. I am in the mildly expensive camp. Judging by the gasps of some enquiries possibly the very expensive camp.

But here is my analogy.

Cheap web design is like high street fashion. It’s made for the masses. It’s of the shelf. It looks good. An and it fits – for the most part.

What I do is haute couture. It’s designed and tailor made to the clients requirements and measurements. It takes time and skill to complete. It’s one of a kind and fits like a glove.

I learned to code and build websites years ago, but every now and then it’s good to take stock and read a book about it. One such book that is a very good read is Adaptive Web Design by Aaron Gustafson. It’s all about progressive enhancement in web design.

The web should be a medium where anyone, anywhere can access websites. And this regardless of ability, device used or method of connection. Progressive enhancement goes a long way in having a good experience viewing the web.

A website contains several elements and each one is available for progressive enhancement.

The content

Words are the core of almost every experience on the web. Write for real people. Be clear and deliberate. Speak to your audience as they speak to you.

The markup

Markup adds semantic meaning to your content. Choosing the right element is the crucial first step to enhance a web page. Avoid unnecessary markup as often as possible to keep your pages smaller and faster to load.

The design

Content is the foundation of design and needs to be the starting point of your design work. It needs to be central to every design decision you make. The purpose of design is to solve problems, not to make things pretty.

The interaction

Start with a website where users are be able to get what they came for without the need of JavaScript. From there detect features and elements you want to work with and enhance the experience.

Adaptive Web Design is a book suitable for designers, developers or anyone interested. It contains good solid advice and a common sense approach to building websites. You should read it.

Buy the book

That said, it’s been a great experience, and one I would like to do again. If only to get better and iron out all the bits I think I could have done much better.

Code First: Girls is a not for profit social enterprise with the aim to increase the number of women in tech. They do this by teaching women to code. Simple. They approached me last summer to teach their beginners course at Loughborough. Not having done any teaching before I was a little apprehensive at first. But CF:G is a solid organisation. And teaching would be an opportunity to give something back to the web design community. (Also, it’s very flattering if you get asked to do something like this. How can you not blush and say yes?)

CF:G provide the course curriculum covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, Git and Bootstrap. I am pretty comfortable with HTML and CSS. I know enough of JavaScript and jQuery to use it when I need it. I am not an expert in Git, but I use it and I have not had a merge conflict for at least six months. I was familiar with Bootstrap, but had never used it. I felt confident enough with the course material. If nothing else it would give me an opportunity to learn some things along the way as well.

It took about ten minutes into the first class for me to realise that teaching is not the same as presenting. Seeing people not paying attention when you present – or even falling asleep – is annoying. Maybe even upsetting. But you ask yourself why that person is present if they’re not interested. With teaching it’s different. Students attend a course because they want to learn something. If you notice one of them looking puzzled or distracted at what you’re saying you get worried. Because it means you’re not doing it right.

The challenge with teaching is to understand something well, before you can teach it. Despite using code every day, I found I had to brush up my skills quite a bit. There are so many things you take for granted and you forget you had to learn them once upon a time too. But this was also the most rewarding part. Helping people to learn something new. Seeing them make the same mistakes you did all those years ago. Explaining the mistakes and give them tips to avoid them in the future.

Teaching is thirsty business. Thirsty in the sense that I want to do it again. But also, it made me so thirsty I could drink an ocean.

After taking a break for a few years the 10k Apart competition was back this summer with a new challenge. Build a compelling web experience, delivered in 10kb or less and make it work without JavaScript.

Having taken part in the two previous editions I went to work straight away on my entry for this year. I created a little game called Country Hopping. It’s a bit like Pokemon Go, but without all the walking. The aim is to link as many bordering countries as possible before running out of neighbours or making a mistake. You get three lives, but if the last country picked has no neighbour left, you lose no matter what.

To make it work without JavaScript, I used PHP for the game functionality. PHP is a server side programming language. There is no need for downloading anything extra on the users end for it to work.

The main challenge I faced was the amount of buttons I needed on a page. I compiled a list of all countries with neighbours and there are 162. Creating a html button for each one, on a plain web page without styling, takes you over the 10kb download limit. I needed a clever solution.

First, I split the world in two: east and west (of the Atlantic Ocean). This solved the problem for the west, but the east was still too big. Next I used a .htaccess file with compression rules to make the files as small as possible. This did the trick. And it left me with enough kb to style the experience with CSS.

Like the previous 10k challenges this was a fun little project to do alongside client work. Useful too. Page speed and making websites work in all conditions are important for any website. Finding ways to build a good website that loads fast is challenging, but worth the effort.

I am delighted that my entry is one of the Notable Projects. I browsed through the other entries and there are plenty of good ones. It’s amazing what you can do with just 10kb if you put your mind to it.

The next challenge is yours. Play Country Hopping and see how many countries you can link together. If you would like to see the code, you can check it out on Github.

The  theme of the day was about doing something you love and keep doing it. Not a revolutionary idea, but an important one to remember every now and then.

Mr Phil

How to change your career to something you want to do:

• Start something
• Be inspired
• Say yes to stuff (worry about it later).
• Keep going.

Sarah Parmenter

This was Sarah’s “Designing for Social Behaviour” talk. If you have not heard it yet, try and catch it somewhere. It’s a good talk, and the “Let’s get social” song alone is worth it.

The two main things to remember with social media contributions are commitment and authenticity. You need to strive for at least one of these. But both is better.

Mike Brondbjerg

Using data and code Matt creates amazing works of art. Including a logo designed using maths and Processing (a programming language for visualising design). Who needs Illustrator?

Linda Brownlee

Linda is a photographer and she showed us a curated collection of her work. The pictures were great, but what I enjoyed most was all the stories behind the photographs.

• The circumstances in which she had to take the photograph;
• What the people in the photograph were like;
• The limitations of the surroundings she had to deal with.

Knowing about those things can turn a good picture into a great picture.

Eva-Lotte Lamm

Keep a small notebook on the go to collect small snapshots during the day. You can use those later to make more detailed sketch notes of them.

Emily Forgot

Emily is a generalist and likes to discover and collect things. She is a self confessed generalist. And that’s a good thing. It keeps her focused and interested in things.

Tom Muller

Another Belgian!

(Next time you have to come up with 10 famous Belgians in a pub quiz, you can include Tom Muller. Speaking at a conference qualifies for being famous. Also he’s worked on the marketing material for the Wolf of Wall Street)

This was an interesting take on working for free. If you can afford it you should do it. Working for free is about trust, respect and setting terms. As Bill Cunningham once said:

“If you don’t take money no one can tell you what to do kid”.
— Bill Cunningham