This is absolutely wonderful!
There’s deep dives and then there’s Marcin’s deeeeeeep dives. Sit back and enjoy this wholesome detective work, all beautifully presented with lovely interactive elements.
This is what the web is for!
Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!
Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:
Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.
It is now exactly five weeks until Patterns Day—just another 35 sleeps!
Everthing is in place for a perfect day of deep dives into design systems. There’ll be eight snappy 30 minute talks—bam, bam, bam!
Here’s the schedule I’ve got planned for the day:
| Registration. | |
| Jeremy introduces the day. | |
| Jina delivers the opening keynote. | |
| Débora talks about the outcomes, lessons and challenges from using design tokens. | |
| Break. | |
| Yolijn talks about the relay method for design system governance. | |
| Geri talks about her journey navigating accessibility in design systems. | |
| Lunch. | |
| Richard talks about responsive typography in design systems. | |
| Samantha talks about getting buy-in for a design system. | |
| Break. | |
| Mary talks about transitioning from a single to a multi-brand design system. | |
| Vitaly delivers the closing keynote. | |
| Jeremy wraps up the day. | |
| Have a drink and a geek pub quiz at the Hare And Hounds pub. |
I assume you’ve got your ticket already, but if not use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get 10% off the ticket price.
See you there!
Patterns Day is exactly six weeks away—squee!
If you haven’t got your ticket yet, get one now. (And just between you and me, use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get a 10% discount.)
I’ve been talking to the speakers and getting very excited about what they’re going to be covering. It’s shaping up to be the perfect mix of practical case studies and big-picture thinking. You can expect talks on design system governance, accessibility, design tokens, typography, and more.
I’m hoping to have a schedule for the day ready by next week. It’s fun trying to craft the flow of the day. It’s like putting together a set list for a concert. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and it really doesn’t matter because all the talks are going to be great anyway.
There are sponsors for Patterns Day now too. Thanks to Supernova and Etch you’re going to have bountiful supplies of coffee, tea and pastries throughout the day. Then, when the conference talks are done, we’ll head across the road to the Hare And Hounds for one of Luke Murphy’s famous geek pub quizes, with a bar tab generously provided by Zero Height.
Now, the venue for Patterns Day is beautiful but it doesn’t have enough space to provide everyone with lunch, so you’re going to have an hour and a half to explore some of Brighton’s trendy lunchtime spots. I’ve put together a list of lunch options for you, ordered by proximity to the Duke of York’s. These are all places I can personally vouch for.
Then, after the conference day, and after the pub quiz, there’s Vitaly’s workshop the next day. I will most definitely be there feeding on Vitaly’s knowledge. Get a ticket if you want to join me.
But wait! That’s not all! Even after the conference, and the pub quiz, and the workshop, the nerdy fun continues on the weekend. There’s going to be an Indie Web Camp here in Brighton on the Saturday and Sunday after Patterns Day.
If you’ve been to an Indie Web Camp before, you know how inspiring and fun it is. If you haven’t been to one yet, you should definitely come along. It’s free! If you’ve got your own website, or if you’re even just thinking about having your own website, it’s a great opportunity to meet with like-minded people.
So that’s going to be four days of non-stop good stuff here in Brighton. I’m looking forward to seeing you then!
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
The line-up for Patterns Day is complete! You’ll be hearing from eight fantastic speakers on March 7th 2024 here in Brighton.
I really like the mix of speakers we’ve got…
Half of the speakers will be sharing what they’ve learned from design systems in their organisations: Débora from LEGO, Mary from the Financial Times, Yolijn from the Dutch government, and Samantha from University College London. That’s a good spread of deep dives.
The other half of the speakers can go broad across design systems in general: Vitaly on design patterns, Rich on typography, Geri on accessibility, and Jina on …well, absolutely everything to do with design systems!
I’m so happy that I could get the line-up to have this mix. If you have any interest in design systems at all—whether it’s as a designer, a developer, a product manager, or anything else—you won’t want to miss this. Early bird tickets are £225.
But wait! That’s not all. If you really want to dive deep into interface design patterns, then stick around. The day after Patterns Day, Vitaly is running a one-day workshop:
In this in-person workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating enterprise grade tables, this workshop will give you the tools you need to excel at your work.
Places are limited. There isn’t room for everyone who’s going to be at Patterns Day, so if you—and your team—want to learn design pattern kung-fu from the master, get your workshop ticket now! Workshop tickets are £445.
A century of sci-fi book covers.
On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!
Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml
That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.
That’s the version that is two decades old today.
The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.
In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.
What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.
I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.
What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.
I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.
The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).
I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.
I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.
A people’s history of copying, from art to software.
Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.
It was a few years before I realized that worry stones had a name, that they were borrowed from cultures other and older than mine. Heck, it’s been more than a few years since I’ve even held one. But in the last few weeks, before and after launching the redesign, I’ve kept working away at this website, much as I’d distractedly run my fingers over a smooth, flat stone.
I feel like my problem with design in general today is that folks want to burn everything to the ground and start again all the time. Whether that’s with a website, or a new web standard, or a political policy. They don’t want to fix what’s wrong with things bit by bit, everyone wants Thing 2.0 whilst jumping over all the small improvements that are required to get there.
I was sad to hear of the passing of Syd Mead last week. Here’s a sketchbook of his remarkable work for Blade Runner.
If only our digital social networks were to exhibit this kind of faded grandeur when they no longer exist.
The Buckminster Fuller Institute has put together this collection of resources which explain the ideas behind “comprehensive anticipatory design science.”
Seems especially relevant in light of the first issue of the Journal of Design and Science from MIT.
The legacy of the Black Mountain College lives on.
We better get used to them…
A fascinating project to document markings from 1939—designed to be visible from the air—placed all around the Irish coast.
I wish to cover the entire Brighton Pavilion in Bakelite for my own amusement.
A cute idea: see how signs (mostly in Brazil) would look if they were set in Helvetica.
A lovely little ode to the manicule.