Design systems are maturing across organizations, as are the component libraries they contain. Atomic buttons, icons and inputs are a solved problem. Now, expectations of design systems are rising: offer bigger and bigger configurable things, empower contribution, and enable autonomous, flexible composition. These are tough challenges that create uncertainty, tensions, and conflict.

During this session, Nathan will share experiences working across design systems as a consultant. Informed by interviews, planning, and leading teams, he’ll explore questions that evolving design systems encounter like:

• How many components are too many?
• What else might we do that’s more valuable than adding yet another component?
• When and how do we incorporate “organisms?” When don’t we?
• How do we foster composition when tools and platforms drive us towards configuration?

Whether you make one or use one, this session will challenge you to reconsider what you want, need, and may actually get from your design system.

Nathan will also give a workshop on Design Systems.

CSS layout has moved along in leaps and bounds in the past few years. Beyond flexbox and Grid, there is aspect-ratio, min, max and clamp functions, custom properties, and logical properties, all of which can help us solve common layout challenges. Plus a whole new range of features on the horizon (with some already landing in browsers!), including subgrid, container queries and the :has() pseudo-class (or “parent selector”).

As developers, the challenge is no longer whether something can be done in CSS, but which of these tools to reach for in our CSS toolbox! This session will aim to bring you up to speed with modern CSS layout, and demonstrate some creative use cases.

React 18! Concurrent features! Perhaps you’ve just heard about this release. Or maybe you’ve already tried the new APIs like useTransition. But do you know how React 18 achieves the performance wins it brings with itself?

In this talk, let’s peak under the hood of React 18’s performance features:

• How React 18 lowers the time your page stays frozen (aka TBT) and how Chromium 87 helps in this
• What’s the catch with the improvements (there’s no free cake!), and when they are unhelpful
• What exactly happens in the browser when you run useTransition()
• And why Vue and Preact straight refused to ship anything similar

We look at how we can hint the browser, rather than micromanage it by leaning into progressive enhancement, CSS layout, fluid type & space and modern CSS capabilities to build resilient front-ends that look great for everyone, regardless of their device, connection speed or context.

Software is a significant emitter of carbon emissions, and it’s growing fast. However, a piece of software is not a physical thing. So measuring software for carbon emissions in the same way you measure physical things often fails. We need to completely re-think how we measure emissions for software from the ground up.

This talk will discuss a methodology for carbon scoring your application called the Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) Specification. The SCI is an effort by the Green Software Foundation to reach a cross-industry consensus on carbon scoring for software, for those in the data center space think of it as “PUE for Software”. We’ll also discuss the three types of actions you can take to improve your score.

By the end, you will understand how to calculate a score for your application as well as some pointers on how to improve it.

In this talk dina will share how tinkering and taking things apart was the beginning of her career as a stop motion artist and a maker. She will share how it all started, what she has learnt so far and the biggest mistakes she has made.

This carpenter has been building for a while ✨

Building HTML newsletters doesn't have to be frustrating. Let Rémi be your guiding light in the dark and make you fall in love with newsletters (again). Really? Yes, really!

Design systems have vast scopes and complexities—and no two are the same. That’s why establishing a collective vocabulary around design systems is key to unifying a team that can develop and mature a design system for long-term success. In this talk, Ben will present a perspective on how to gain real value from your design system based on years of research and experience. He'll offer a way to create a shared understanding inside your organization leading to a healthy systematic design practice.

In this talk, we’ll explore what it takes to implement virtual scrolling in the browser from scratch, with vanilla JavaScript and some HTML and CSS hacks that are necessary to work around existing constraints. Come along as we explore this together, and come away with a richer knowledge of and appreciation for the web.

You’ve done the research. Presented prototypes. Triple checked your color contrast. Everything’s coming together, until someone tries to create an account using the new site. “LOG IN ERROR! Operation Failed,” the field shouts, with no hint of a potential solution.

UX writing communicates what visuals cannot, adding clarity, credibility, and consistency. In this talk, we’ll discuss ways to think strategically about the words in your designs, from onboarding flows to field labels. You’ll learn what makes great writing great—and ultimately, how to design words that create a seamless experience.

A frontend developer’s job is to look at a design, interpret it, and translate it to HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, information often gets lost in translation because we rely too much on visual aspects of a design, rather than its semantic meaning.

In his talk, Manuel Matuzović uncovers the invisible patterns we should recognise in a design, and how they affect accessibility.