border:none 2013

Designing the web can be very cumbersome. Things tend to get out of hand when more advanced visual techniques such as those known from classic media are to be applied. Add in a variety of viewport sizes and you are either lost or doomed. Now, new CSS features allow us to treat the web as a first-class design surface: wrap and clip text around custom shapes, blend together background images and gain much better layout control for your responsive design. Let's take a look at CSS Shapes, CSS Regions and background blend modes!

Web developers use private & open device labs mainly for RWD testingon a plethora of devices. Few developers configure devices to offer debug output & even fewer attempt to retrieve real performance data from devices.

Yet, when site performance is poor, only a fraction of visitors will wait for a site to finish loading: bounce rates soar to more than 70% after only four seconds of page load time.

While mobile carriers promise improved mobile web performance by offering higher bandwidths, the physical limitations of connection latency deny significant page load time improvements beyond 5Mbps.

To help developers optimize web performance and thus improve user satisfaction & conversion rates, we will explore proper mobile performance testing using real devices & networks.

Learn how to connect iOS & Android devices with WebPagetest, apowerful open source performance monitoring solution, to test website performance & retrieve detailed data.

The web is growing fast. Every other week new proposals, specifications and implementations pop up - being developed concurrently. It is getting harder and harder for developers to grasp specification and implementation details across the various rendering engines.

We'll be discussing how developers can familiarize themselves with a new topic and thereby find browser bugs and shortcomings in specifications as well as how they can provide invaluable information to the web development community by doing this and thus, help the web move forward.

The web is weird. We don't know what size the browser of our visitors will be, and we don't know how they will control our work. This requires a flexible kind of thinking, which seems to be unnatural for many designers. In this talk I will take a look at some other disciplines that have been working with flexible canvases or unclear environments, to see if we can learn some things from them.

Responsive Web design challenges Web designers to adapt a new mindset to their design processes as well as techniques they are using in design and code. This talk provides an overview of various practical techniques, tips and tricks that you might want to be aware of when working on a new responsive design project.

In times of total observation we must ask ourselves in which direction we want to move the web in the coming years. With the current political situation there's a huge chance to change something. It's time for convincing, open and distributed alternatives to Facebook, Google, Twitter and Co. We need to save the free web – let's do it!

We're working on increasingly complex websites. There's a tempting to match this growth with increasingly complex solutions. But there's a real value in keeping things simple ... or at least starting things simple. If you can build a solid robust foundation, there's a good chance that your work will be future-friendly.