Sponsored Workshop: Hacking Lizard Brain — Improving Visual Experience on the Web

Your instructor: Cloudinary

Full-day workshop • Thursday, June 27
Web Performance is the art of hacking lizard brain. Users unconsciously disengage when a website is slow, unresponsive or unintuitive. Unfortunately most of the beautiful designs of our sites that are attracting users are also at the root of our performance ailes.

Animated Gifs, hero videos, fly out animations, single page navigations, web fonts, and a/b injected content. Our sites would be so much faster without this beautiful content. Yet, it is this very design that is also attracting and engaging your audience.

To complement our typical development and operations focused strategies for web performance we can also focus on the design strategies. How do we balance the visual engagement without the performance tax? How do we embrace the next generation of designs, components and experiences without causing our performance budget to suffer? How do we balance our emotional experience of the web without adding bytes and compute?

This workshop is sponsored by our wonderful sponsor Cloudinary and costs only 10 CAD.

What you will learn

This workshop focuses on the design and aesthetics part of web performance. You will learn about many of the common metrics for measuring performance, what design decisions impact performance the most, and the techniques that we can use to focus on improving design and layout while improving these metrics.

You will learn how we can embrace wide gamut displays, animations, responsive video, transitions and graceful degradation and enhancement of the user experience.

Particular topics we’ll cover include

Browsers fundamentals for visual layout and paint performance
How to measure engagement and performance for each design component
Strategies for Hero images & hero videos
How to implement brand elements, fonts and style guides
Next generation design challenges include wide gamut colours and responsive video
How to compensate for slow or flaky network, devices or components

Target Audience

UX designers and Front-End devs who love beautiful designs and have some knowledge of html, css, and javascript.

What Hardware/Software do you need?

You will need a laptop with Chrome installed and a text editor.

About Colin Bendell

Colin Bendell is co-author of High Performance Images and part of the CTO office at Cloudinary. He is passionate about performance, design and data.

Colin is no stranger to coding and refactors regular expressions while imagining three impossible things all before breakfast. He also starts at least 5 sentences a day with the phrase ‘What if…’.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will be hosted at the Ivey Tangerine Leadership Centre and will take place the day after SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30am to 5:00pm on Thursday, June 27.

Schedule for Thursday, June 27

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:00 PM – The End

This workshop is sponsored by our wonderful sponsor Cloudinary and costs only 10 CAD.