Workshops

On Thursday 13th of June we organised two workshops:

• CSS Day basics, by Eric Meyer
• Responsive Web Design, by Peter Gasston

CSS Day basics, by Eric Meyer

Fascinated by the topics for CSS Day but afraid you'll be in over your head? Let veteran CSS expert Eric A. Meyer be your guide to the basics of the conference topics:

• Variables and Conditionals: live the dream as we find out how to assign color values to named variables and other useful capabilities; take it further with a look into a future where browsers can tell you what they do or don't support, and then let you act based on that information.
• Selectors and Media Queries: explore some of the more obscure Level 3 selectors and chart out their proposed Level 4 brethren; find out how media queries work (and what they can't fix); find out what you can query and how it can help you.
• Fonts: we'll cover the best way to use your own custom font family and how the construction of @font-face rules both is and isn't like writing CSS font properties.
• Borders: find out how to round corners with the best of them as well as things to watch out for when you do; why images and borders make a fascinating combination; and how border and outline compare and contrast.
• Flexible boxes: flexbox is ALL the rage now, and we'll take a look at how and why (or why not!) to make boxes flexible, what being flexible means, how to blend flexible and fixed boxes, and how to distributing and aligning boxes.
• Animations and transitions: there is a great deal of power in the ability to define transitions from one animation state to another, as well as creating keyframe-based animations. We'll look at both, including tips for deciding when one is a better choice than the other, as well as how the use of transforms can make or break a change of state.
• Filtering and compositing: CSS does very, very limited compositing now: when two semi-opaque elements overlap. Right now, a simple blend is conducted, but in the future you'll be able to say how those two elements should be blended together, as well as define truly powerful filters that can distort, desaturate, and anything else a computer can compute.

Buy a workshop ticket

Responsive Web Design, by Peter Gasston

Peter Gasston will give a Responsive Web Design workshop. He'll teach you the key techniques of RWD, both on the design and on the development side, concentrating on practical, implementable skills.

As well as looking at the impact RWD has on the design, build and testing process and the creation of assets, he'll also teach some advanced tips and tricks.

This workshop will cover:

• Identifying problems with the current development process, and suggesting a new, modern way of approaching responsive builds
• Planning a responsive build strategy using wireframes and rapid prototyping
• New tools and methods for designing in a responsive way while creating deliverables for engaging the client
• Using media queries and other modern web platform technologies to create sites that work seamlessly across multiple devices
• Dealing with media elements so that they adapt to many different devices and contexts

There will be hands-on examples in the workshop so please bring a laptop or tablet with access to a text editor or IDE.