Design systems help us scale components and patterns across our digital products. But happens when the solutions we're scaling are exclusionary or even harmful? In this talk, Amy explores the ways in which we inadvertently build systems of harm, and what we can do to avoid it.

Yeah, accessibility tools and plugins are great, but have you ever actually seen people with disabilities scrolling a social media feed, ordering pizza online, or buying a concert e-ticket? During this talk, you’ll learn how to involve visually impaired users in testing your digital product and how much more you can learn by walking through realistic scenarios with them.

Few developers enjoy debugging, and debugging can be complex for modern web apps because of the multiple frameworks, languages, and libraries used. But, developer tools have come a long way in making the process easier.

In this talk, Jecelyn will dig into the modern state of debugging, improvements in DevTools, and how you can use them to reliably debug your apps.

Design systems can be complex beasts, so in this talk, we’re going to start with how we might audit, select a layout and break it down until we get to our design tokens. This journey allows us to look at systems thinking, collaboration, and how the details and the macro picture of ‘the people bit’ have much in common and are important in their own ways.

Language models feel like squishy, alien minds we've organically grown inside a GPU cluster. They are unlike any of our existing computational tools. They're predictably unpredictable and break many of our pre-conceived notions of how computers work. How are we supposed to design with these messy, unwieldy, Shoggoth-like creatures?

In her talk, Maggie will cover how to balance squish and structure, why compositionally matters, and explore the potential of treating models as small, single-purpose reasoning engines.

This talk peels back the curtain on the process of reimagining Shopify Polaris. José will share how his team sought inspiration from the real-world to create a design language that is not only functional, but also provides joy and feels highly satisfying.

Throughout the talk, you can expect to learn about the challenges and triumphs experienced along their journey, from ideating to securing stakeholder buy-in, and finally, launching the new design language in record time.

Beyond the process of coming up with a design direction, José will discuss the efforts that preceded this work that enabled a rapid and effective implementation in just 10 weeks. This talk will cover the smallest details, because they aren’t just details. They are what makes your product, and give your users superpowers to achieve their goals.

Dogs and doodles! Do we need to say more?

"If only designers and developers would understand each other better!" Design and development can be perfect together! Yes, designers and developers must understand each other's tools and engage in constructive dialogue, but modern tools make their life so much easier.

Lately, we have seen incredible advancements in CSS that have the potential to revolutionize the way we approach web design, and Figma — with all its recent updates — has made it much easier for designers to understand and design for all these new things possible.

In her talk, Christine will take you on a Figma tour where she shows you how you can use container queries, variables, and grid, and bring modern CSS to its full potential. So let's be perfect, together!

Christine will also give a workshop on Wednesday on everything Figma.

Yes, okay, ES2015 rules, and ES2017–2022 brought about a lot of cool things (most notably async/await, async iteration, optional chaining, private members), but a ton of cool stuff is expected to land in the next few years, too… and we can play with it already!

Christophe takes you through a whirlwind tour of the upcoming features he’s most excited about, due to become official in 2023, 2024… or 2025 ;-)

The things we can do with type on the web these days are pretty amazing, but are you making the most of the features contained in your fonts, and the smarts inside your browser?

In this quick-fire talk, Elliot takes us through the opportunities offered by variable fonts, colour fonts, optical size adjustments, and fluid type scales. He also covers the headaches often caused by misunderstanding line height, and how all of these factors can help us when it comes to choosing typefaces in the first place.

How did container queries go from ‘impossible’ to ‘shipping’ after so many years? How do we use them, and what hidden powers do they have? What are CSS containers, and what queries can they respond to? Let’s find out!

While the basics look a lot like media queries – and can work as a drop-in replacement for many existing @media rules – there are some key differences to understand, and a lot more power than you might expect. Along the way we’ll encounter CSS fundamentals like normal flow, intrinsic and extrinsic sizing, value resolution, and more. Join me to learn all you need to know about using container queries in your web projects.

Miriam will also give a workshop on Wednesday on everything CSS.

Receiving and providing feedback is an integral part of the design process. It plays a vital role in how we can expand our thinking and deliver innovative solutions.

Learn how a few simple steps around facilitation can foster meaningful conversations around design in your organization as we move into hybrid working environments.