Pre-conference Workshops

Mobile is our immediate challenge, but it’s just the beginning of an even bigger content shakeup. To meet the needs of everything from smartphones and tablets to read-later services and web-enabled appliances, we need content that can go more places, more easily. Yet most content is still being created in fixed pages and documents, locked into just one format and designed for just one destination.

That won’t cut it. As devices get more diverse, powerful, and ubiquitous—and as our users continue to expect more—we need content that can keep up. But our organizations can’t afford to create more content for every new device and channel. Instead, we need content that does more: content that’s structured so it’s meaningful to both humans and machines, and stored so it can be reused and reconfigured however we want.

In this workshop, you’ll gain critical skills to make your organization’s content ready for mobile today—and for the unknowns of tomorrow.

What you’ll learn

• Why mobile is just one part of an even bigger shift—for content and for business at large
• What you can do today to start preparing content for more flexible destinations, from responsive websites to APIs to personalized content
• How to start breaking content into mobile-friendly, flexible, modular chunks
• Who you’ll need on your side to make this happen (and how to talk with them)
• How your CMS, your workflow, and your business need to change to make all this stuff stick

How we’ll do it

We’ll mix examples and case studies from major media, government, and business with plenty of hands-on exercises to help you:

• Analyze your content to understand its key messages and underlying elements
• Break content down, turning pages and documents into mobile-ready modules
• Create simple, useful content models to share with your team
• Prioritize and plan how content appears on different devices and channels
• Have useful discussions with everyone from top-level executives to the IT team

This workshop will be designed for all levels, and is for anyone looking to make content mobile-ready and future-friendly—including both content professionals and those from other web fields.

Visual design is not magic, or the result of some God-given talent. Anyone can achieve it by applying rules, techniques and practice.

Mark’s workshop will cover the basics of visual design. From collaborative idea generation and visualising ideas, to the fundamentals of typography, grid design, composition and colour theory. Good visual design is like good jazz; it’s about having the chops to improvise around the constraints. That’s what this workshop will do: it will give you the chops. All you will need to do afterwards, is practice.

During the workshop

This is a workshop. Meaning: you do work – Mark will not be standing and talking all day. Mark starts the day by introducing a project you’ll be working on throughout the day. Following presentations on typography, colour theory, layout and composition, you’ll be working – hands on – on designing a project. After a couple of hours, we move onto critique. In small groups, you’ll present your work and together together talk about how to progress them. Following lunch, you continue working punctuated by more applicable theory.

This workshop will cover

• creating moodboards and Styletiles
• everything you need to know about Typographic, Colour and Layout theory as applied to the web.
• how to effectively critique design work
• how to communicate design work to your team

Why would you do this workshop?

There are three reasons you’d do this workshop:

• You work on the web – maybe as a developer, or an editorial
• assistant – and sometimes you design. You’d benefit from some simple,
• applicable theory.
• You’re a web designer who’d like to brush up on their skills.
• You work with designers and you want to communicate better with them.

Required equipment and knowledge

This is a practical workshop. You will need a laptop and very basic skills in a graphics package (Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator etc).