Reasons London

This a quick write up of my experience at Reasons:London this weekend (Friday 20th February).

The venue was beautiful and at lunch time we went to Whitecross Market for some great street food (it’s worth a trip in itself).

We drove from Swansea, so we parked in Hounslow West NCP. It’s really cheap and easy to drive to, but beware… some of the car park becomes a market on Saturday morning. We found this out the hard way.

Harry Roberts

Harry opened with a fairly technical look at Sass techniques for building modular CSS. Specifically for when building websites that allow certain levels of customisation and theming. He looked at ways to balance performance with pragmatism.

Stefanie Posavec

Stef is a data designer who has worked on some really beautiful projects for clients like Facebook and the Southbank Centre. She opened by talking about an old episode of Newsnight where they covered infographics. Weirdly I remembered this exact episode… I even blogged about it at the time.

She called for designers to move on from infographics… using her amazing work as an example of what is possible when you push yourself to come up with original work based on data.

James Hall

James Hall had a rather sobering (but really entertaining) round-up of security issues. TLDR:

  • Don’t use public wifi
  • Don’t use internet banking
  • Don’t build websites

… all these things are just too insecure.

Anna Dahlström

Anna had a really good round-up of thoughts regarding designing for new devices, especially when looking ahead to wearable tech and internet of things things like the Apple Watch. She introduced me to the idea of data rash — a kind of eruption of notifications that is becoming more visible and distracting, the more devices we have.

Andrew Clarke

Andy called for web designers to take inspiration from advertising, by reviving the role of the art director. He argued that the recent focus on process and tools had lead teams to overlook the kind of creativity that can often lead to truly original designs. Oh yeah, there were apes too.

Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot’s talk was a bit of a retrospective of his work, mixed with tips on designing with grids and running an ethical business. It was a lot to cover, but very entertaining and one of my favourite talks. He recommended the experience of working with friends (and even loved ones) and the virtues of always paying your contributors.