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2 episodes with clearleft
2 episodes with clearleft
2 episodes with clearleft
2 episodes with clearleft
In a new episode of 'This Much I Know,' Carlos hosts Andy Budd, a veteran UX/UI designer and one of our venture partners, to discuss his latest book, 'The Growth Equation: How Early Stage Startups Can Build a Powerful Engine for Growth.' Andy shares his journey from being a tech enthusiast to launching the UK's first UX agency, ClearLeft. The discussion rich with anecdotes and actionable insights explores key themes to help founders navigate the complexities of startup growth. These include: founder-led sales; creating a go-to-market strategy, and the importance of customer retention and onboarding. He emphasizes practical, incremental approaches to building a customer base, crafting effective sales emails, and leveraging community-driven growth. Andy advocates for positioning and language-market fit as critical aspects of early-stage success, suggesting that a focused effort on understanding and connecting with the target audience precedes establishing a strong brand. Show notes: Andy Budd - linkedin.com/in/andybudd Carlos Espinal - linkedin.com/in/carloseduardoespinal Seedcamp - seedcamp.com Andy Budd - andybudd.com/book The Growth Equation: How Early Stage Startups Can Build a Powerful Engine for Growth by Andy Budd is available in bookstores and online.
In this episode of Nodes of Design, we sit down with Andy Buddy to explore his fascinating journey from being a designer to thriving as a venture capitalist. Andy shares how his design and product expertise shape his investment strategies and help founders build impactful startups. We dive into the seven key factors that drive growth, the common mistakes founders make with their early products, and the challenges of being the first design or product hire in a startup. Andy also unpacks where growth design fits in today's landscape and sheds light on why most early-stage growth advice misses the mark. Plus, he tackles one of the most misunderstood strategies in the startup world product-led growth (PLG) and reveals the mistakes he sees founders making time and time again. Whether you're a designer, product enthusiast, or aspiring founder, this episode is packed with insights to level up your understanding of design, growth, and venture capital. About Andy Budd Andy is a Design Leader turned investor, advisor and coach. He's a Venture Partner at Seedcamp, one of the top ranked seed funds in Europe. His new book "The Growth Equation" aims to help startups land their first million in revenue and reach Product Market Fit. A product person at heart, Andy previously founded Clearleft (the first UX agency in the UK), Leading Design and UX London. He's a founding member of the Adobe Design Circle and has appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists. Andy once worked as a shark diver and recently qualified as a pilot. Andy Budd Book: The Growth Equation: How Early Stage Startups Can Build a Powerful Engine for Growth The Growth Equation is the new book by design founder turned startup investor, advisor, and coach, Andy Budd. In it he explores the challenges most early-stage founders face; from launching your product, finding your first customers, and figuring out what to charge; to improving acquisition, onboarding, and retention; in order to land your first million in revenue and beyond. Thank you for listening to this episode of Nodes of Design. We hope you enjoy the Nodes of Design Podcast on your favorite podcast platforms- Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and many more. If this episode helped you understand and learn something new, please share and join the knowledge-sharing community Spreadknowledge. This podcast aims to make design education accessible to all. Nodes of Design is a non-profit and self-sponsored initiative by Tejj. #design #creativity #ux #vc #business
Mastering venture capital and ethical growth is essential for startup success. Today's guest, Andy Budd, shares insights from his journey as Founder and CEO of Clearleft, Venture Partner at SeedCamp, and Founding Member of Adobe's Design Circle. Andy has evolved from a designer to an investor and advisor, bringing a focus on ethical growth practices and high-impact startup development.As the author of The Growth Equation, Andy draws on over 20 years of experience to help companies achieve product-market fit and sustainable growth. His work with SeedCamp and other startups focuses on behavioral science and ethical growth strategies to build resilient, user-centered businesses.In this episode, host Barry O'Reilly explores Andy's approach to venture capital, leadership, and how his design roots influence his support for founders.Key Takeaways:The Transition from Design to Venture Capital: Andy shares his journey from designer to venture capital partner, highlighting the unique insights that his design background brings to his work with startups.The Importance of Humility in Leadership: Andy emphasizes the value of hiring individuals who excel in areas beyond one's own expertise, fostering a team culture of shared growth and continuous improvement.Supporting Startups Through Challenges: Known for working closely with startups facing obstacles, Andy describes how his collaborative approach helps companies pivot, adapt, and ultimately thrive.Ethical Growth Over “Growth Hacking”: Andy discusses the significance of ethical growth practices, contrasting them with conventional “growth hacking,” and focusing on strategies that promote sustainable and user-centered growth.Additional Insights:The Influence of Behavioral Science in Product Development: Andy explains how understanding human behavior enhances product design and growth, encouraging founders to integrate behavioral science for more meaningful user engagement.The Role of Patience and Empathy in VC: Andy reflects on his approach to venture capital, prioritizing empathy and patience with founders to cultivate trust and strong, lasting partnerships.The Changing Landscape of Startup Investment: Andy shares his views on how venture capital is evolving, especially as design-thinking and user experience become increasingly vital for high-growth startups. Episode Highlights:0:39 - Introduction to the Episode: Barry introduces Andy Budd, Startup Advisor, Investor, and Coach. “Andy has extensive experience in design and startup advisory.”03:31 - Transition from Design to Venture Capital"I've always been inspired by others...there was an agency that really inspired Clearleft back in the day called Adaptive Path."06:58 - Unlearning Practitioner to Leader“The main thing I had to unlearn was moving from a practitioner to a leader, where you need to let go and trust others.”15:56 - Emphasis on Character and Integrity in VC“If you're rude to the driver
Summary: In this conversation, Richard Rutter, co-founder of Clearleft, discusses the evolution of UX design, the importance of typography, and how design can influence business strategy. He emphasizes the need for a deep understanding of user experience and the role of research in effective design. Richard also shares insights on building a successful design consultancy and integrating design thinking into organizational strategy, while addressing the impact of AI on the design landscape. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Clear Left and Richard Rutter 03:38 The Importance of Typography in Design 07:57 Evolution of UX Design Over the Years 13:44 Understanding User Experience vs. User Interface 19:57 Design as a Business Strategy 25:53 Keys to Success in Design Consultancy 31:55 Integrating Design into Organizational Strategy 37:48 The Future of Design in the Age of AI www.linkedin.com/in/richardrutter www.clearleft.com
Andy Budd co-founded pioneering UX design agency Clearleft. After leading and growing that company, he became an advisor, VC, and coach. He's now written a book on how early stage startups can benefit from good design. That is the focus of our conversation.See full show notes:https://theinformed.life/2024/11/03/episode-152-andy-budd/
Ben Sauer shares why designers need to be better presenters, how to keep stakeholders awake and engaged, and what to do when disaster inevitably strikes. Highlights include: Is how design is presented more important than the design itself? How do you help stakeholders to relate more powerfully to design work? What is the Goldilocks Zone and how can designer's find it quickly? Why can it be useful to show stakeholders design work bit-by-bit? How do you deal with difficult people when presenting design work? ====== Who is Ben Sauer? Ben is an independent product and design strategist, coach, and trainer, helping companies to craft the vision for their products, and to inspire better internal processes and practices. Drawing on over 20 years of experience, he has written and spoken about strategic storytelling, voice UI design, and how slowing down can help organisations to speed up. And his insights have been put to use at organisations such as NASA, Amazon and the BBC. Ben's most recent mission is helping designers to become more influential by becoming more confident communicators of their work. That's why he's recently published a book called “Death by Screens”, a practical how-to guide for presenting high stakes design work. Before becoming an independent consultant, Ben worked at Babylon Health, where he was first a Director of Design and then a Director of Product. There, he led a large team of over 100 designers, clinicians, data scientists and engineers. He has also been a Senior UX Designer at Clearleft, the world-renowned and perhaps first UX design consultancy in the United Kingdom. ====== Find Ben here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensauer/ Website: https://bensauer.net/ X: https://twitter.com/bensauer Death By Screens: How to Present High-Stakes Digital Design Work and Live to Tell the Tale - https://bensauer.net/deathbyscreens/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/
As a well-known agency founder and design leader, Andy helps companies like Virgin Holidays, John Lewis and Penguin Random House with issues of customer experience, product strategy, and digital transformation. Andy's role at Clearleft was to set strategy and vision, promote the value of design, and help their clients realise their digital potential. Andy was very active in the company's day-to-day running, managing the leadership team, setting company culture, and looking after the happiness and well-being of 30+ staff. Andy is a designer at heart, having spent over 20 years in the field. He loves using his design, technology, and human behaviour knowledge to influence product strategy. As such, Andy is in his element when working alongside board members and their management teams. In his early career, Andy helped pioneer the field of Web Standards through his work, his blog (one of the highest trafficked in the UK at the time), and the publication of his best-selling book, CSS Mastery. Later, Andy helped popularise the field of UX design, setting up the UK's first dedicated UX agency, along with its first and arguably best UX conference. When he's not running the company or managing our creative output, Andy can be found sharing his wealth of knowledge at conferences around the world like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. He also curates the UX London and Leading Design conferences. In 2011, Andy co-founded the Brighton Digital Festival, a citywide celebration of digital culture attracting 40,000 visitors and over 190 events. He currently runs an online community of over 1,500 Heads, Directors and VPs of Design, and is a founding member of Adobe's Design Circle. These are just some of the reasons his company has won Netmag Agency of the Year several times, and he's appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists. Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler. With a degree in Aeronautical engineering, Andy is currently learning to fly. In this episode, Andy discusses the essential qualities and skills a successful design leader should possess. He also shares his insights on building and managing a design team, fostering collaboration and creativity, advocating for an organisation's design, and the importance of empathy in design leadership. Andy also provides tips on how to navigate through various challenges while growing on the ladder as a designer leader and how to approach feedback and critique to help your team grow and improve their design skills. Finally, Andy shared his vision for the future of design leadership and the most important skills or qualities for design leaders in the coming years. Thank you for listening to this episode of Nodes of Design. We hope you enjoy the Nodes of Design Podcast on your favourite podcast platforms- Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and many more. If this episode helped you understand and learn something new, please share and join the knowledge-sharing community Spreadknowledge. This podcast aims to make design education accessible to all. Nodes of Design is a non-profit and self-sponsored initiative by Tejj.
Mike Monteiro is a designer and the author of Ruined By Design, You're My Favorite Client, The Collected Angers, and the newly-revised Design is a Job. Listen to learn about: Mike's book, Design is a Job Ethics in design Designing society so that ethical behavior becomes the norm Our Guest Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design. He mostly writes these days. His latest book is the second edition of Design Is a Job. Show Highlights [00:39] How Mike got into design during graduate school. [03:54] His first job in desktop publishing and printing taught him to measure work in 30-minute increments. [06:04] Moving into writing books. [07:32] Mike's book, Design is a Job, was written to help designers with the ins and outs of being a professional designer. [10:57] Why Mike felt it was time to revise the book. [13:23] The “revised” edition changed so much, it's basically a different book. [14:33] Mike talks about some of the new ideas in the revised edition. [15:12] Designers moving from contractors to employees. [18:02] The importance of ethical behavior and ethical decisions. [18:15] Mike's butcher metaphor. [24:35] What companies and society can do to create an environment that encourages ethical behavior. [26:52] The first steps on the path to a more ethical world. [30:58] Finding his place in the semi post-pandemic world. [34:13] Knowing when it's time to get off the stage. [35:48] Speaking only if you can improve the silence. [37:05] Getting older and realizing the value of listening. [38:34] How do we redesign power so that it can inoculate itself against power's darker aspects? [42:14] The messiness of the world today, and how should designers work within that world to make it a better place? [45:07] There is always a cost to the ethical choice. Links Mike on Twitter Mike on Medium Mule Design Mule Design on Twitter Ruined By Design Creative Mornings Podcast, F*ck You, Pay Me with Mike Monteiro Creative Mornings HQ: Let's Make Mistakes Intercom: Mule Design's Mike Monteiro on responsibility in experience design Invision: Mike Monteiro: Design is Political Creative Bloq: Why designers need to stick to their guns Webstock ‘13: Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World Interview with Mike by Clearleft Books By Mike Monteiro Design is a Job You're My Favorite Client Ruined By Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It The Collected Angers Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like Designing Culture at Work + Social Innovation + Necessary Disquiet with Lauren Currie — DT101 E29 Design for Good + Gut Checks + Seeing Power with George Aye — DT101 E50 Cognitive Bias + Ethics + Dreaming the Future of Design with David Dylan Thomas — DT101 E112
On the latest episode of 20 Minute Playbook, we interview one of the world's leading design thinkers, Clearleft founder Andy Budd, to decode what he's mastered and what he's learned along the way. From his design principles to his favorite books, superpowers, biggest lessons learned, we cover it all in 20 minutes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On the latest episode of Outlier Founders, we sit down with iconic design studio Clearleft's Founder Andy Budd to learn the approach to designing and building products he's honed over decades. We go deep on everything from the design process to what makes a product great, and how Andy approaches managing and building design teams. It's a masterclass in product design from one of the world's best at it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andy Budd speaks frankly about designers' limiting beliefs, the siren song of perfection, and how to start playing business better. Highlights include: How does one wrangle sharks at the Great Barrier Reef? What is the best way to ensure design is valued? How many designers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Why should designers start playing poker and stop playing chess? What is the most limiting belief that design leaders have? ====== Who is Andy Budd? Andy is an independent executive product & design leadership coach and a venture partner at Seedcamp, Europe's most successful seed fund, investing in over 450 companies who have gone on to raise over $7 Billion. Before joining Seedcamp, Andy was the founder, managing director and then CEO of Clearleft, arguably the United Kingdom's first User Experience consultancy. During his 17 years there, Andy relentlessly promoted the value of design and founded two product businesses - FontDeck and Silverback. The latter a popular usability testing app for Mac. In 2008, in the midst of the GFC, Andy founded UX London, Britain's first major user experience conference. It would become the longest running UX conference in all of Europe, and it was an event that he lovingly curated until 2021. Andy is also the founder and curator of dConstruct, which was the first digital design conference in the UK and Leading Design, an annual event and 2,000 strong community that brings together some of the world's best design leaders. ====== Find Andy here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andybudd/ Website: https://www.andybudd.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/andybudd Medium: https://andybudd.medium.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andybudd/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/
Clearleft is the design transformation consultancy. But what does that actually mean?
Tom Willmot has been a WordPress pioneer and leader in the agency space since co-founding Human Made in 2010. Just in the past year, Human Made has more than doubled its size with a team of 100. Tom is also CEO and co-founder of Altis DXP, Human Made's enterprise WordPress digital experience platform. I caught up with Tom this week to find out what he's thinking about the challenges and opportunities of the enterprise market for WordPress agencies today.Sparked by Magne Ilsaas's ideas in The WordPress Enterprise Paradox, Tom started a Twitter thread and hosted a live discussion this week about the challenges of not having a well-defined brand and market for enterprise WordPress. In the minds of clients beyond the WordPress and open-source community not to mention unhelpful tech industry analysts, "WordPress" is something you can buy, and it's often confused with any number of related brands: Automattic, WordPress VIP, and managed WordPress hosts that support enterprise clients.After getting an outline of the problem as it stands today, I asked Tom what might help differentiate "Enterprise WordPress" as a collective or entire ecosystem of agencies operating within it. Can open-source values of sharing and cooperation shape a unique global identity for enterprise WordPress agencies? Is it time for an inter-agency association or "guild" to take on these challenges? (Human Made has an internal "guild" structure of cross-functional teams — what could it look like to extend them across the whole agency space?)And how might that look within the WordPress ecosystem and others adjacent to it? Are more inter-agency gatherings needed along with greater participation in existing tech and design conferences? Will agencies like Human Made resume hosting conferences like their Day and Week of REST events in the past? Can the larger WordCamps cater to an enterprise track? Does Enterprise WordPress need its own conferences? I like Jeremy Keith and ClearLeft as a model for agency thought leadership. Magne has pointed to the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) as a model for organized peer collaboration and North Patrol as a model for a research and advisory firm that connects agencies with clients and reports on regional enterprise webtech markets.This is an open, ongoing conversation. If it piques your interest, connect with Tom on Twitter: @tomwillmot.
A message from our sponsor Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. Go to Skiplevel.co and use code OKIP75 to get $75 off the program by 15th June, 2022. About this Episode An interview with Andy Budd. Andy is the founder of Clearleft, one of the UK's original design consultancies. He's now an in demand speaker, thought leader and advisor on the topics of design & entrepreneurship. We speak about a lot, including: The story behind his departure from day-to-day operations at Clearleft, how he believes that startup founders have a shelf life as CEO, and the importance of bringing new blood into the company as you scale The problems with getting design practices changed in established companies and why he's focusing now on going back to basics with early stage startups and working with founders to instill good design practices from the beginning Why it's important to get design into the startup as early as possible to apply structure and rigour, but how many founders have done more product discovery than we give them credit for How early product managers in founder-run startups are often brought in as the equivalent of short order chefs and the folly of trying to turn McDonalds in to a Michelin starred restaurant The common situation when early founders being people into the company to help apply process, get frustrated when everything slows down but how it's fair enough for founders to feel this since it's ultimately their business on the line How most companies should probably do more research but how most product designers should be more pragmatic and realise that ultimately they can help to sustain the business with less-than-perfect designs The trouble that product & design people can have getting to the top table, the things they might need to do to get there and how product & design teams are playing chess while the rest of the leadership team are playing poker And much more! Contact Andy You can find Andy on Twitter or check out andybudd.com
In today's episode, I speak with Andy Budd. Andy is a design leader, conference speaker, start-up advisor & coach. He co-founded Clearleft, the first dedicated UX consultancy in the UK, along with the Leading Design and UX London conferences. He's a member of the Adobe Design Circle, and has appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists of influential leaders in tech. He's currently helping start-up founders make the most of Design in his role as an Expert in Residence at Seedcamp, Europe's most successful early stage venture fund. We dive into what you give up and what you gain in the shift from a designer role to a design leader role – and how to navigate common pitfalls. This episode is full of honest and actionable insights to guide you in choosing a path that's most meaningful to you.The book Andy references is Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager. Find Andy on Twitter at @andybudd.
In each episode Ian introduces the guest before discussing their awareness of the BBC Human Values. We will talk about the human values workshops that BBC R&D has been running in conjunction with DesignSwarm, and in some cases the collaborative work we have done together. We will finish with thoughts about how they will be taking the knowledge forward in their work. We hope you enjoy the conversation. If you would like to know more about our work you can find it on the project website at humanvalues.io Please note that the conversations were recorded during the pandemic when audio equipment was limited, so please expect variable quality from the typical BBC standard and quality. And the views shared by our guests do not reflect the views of the BBC or BBC R&D. Series 2 Episode 3: Richard Rutter Richard is a designer living in Brighton, UK. In 2005, he co-founded Clearleft, now one of the world's leading digital design consultancies
Jason welcomes Andy Budd back to the Businessology Show for an insider look at what navigating inevitable transitions in agencies entails. They broadly discuss growth challenges and decision-making as leaders. While Andy also shares his personal decision to sell his company, ClearLeft, to his employees and how to think through these leadership moves.
Jeremy Kieth is the cofounder of Clearleft, a design agency specializing in building resilient, future-proof, backwards compatible, and just super elegant web experiences. He is also the author of "Resilient Web Design," which he has made available for free to all of us through Creative Commons licensing, as well as many other books on super-geeky topics like DOM Scripting, Ajax, and HTML5. In this episode of the podcast, Sophia and Jeremy discuss how responsive design made the truth about the Internet apparent, why the invisible is hard to prioritize, and what a bad design system means for our end users. Enjoy! LINKS: Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @adactio Listen to "Resilient Web Design" via Google Podcasts Listen to The Clearleft Podcast on Google Podcasts Book your tickets to UX Fest (June 1-3, 2021) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ooux/support
Rachel McConnell In Rachel McConnell's world, if content strategy is the engine, then content operations is the oil that keeps it running smoothly. Rachel leads one of the biggest content operations in the world, a team of 100 content designers and editors at BT, a large communications services company in the UK. Her team is a mix of content professionals from both UX and publishing backgrounds who work across a variety of products. This gives her plenty of opportunities to optimize their internal systems and plenty of ideas for both formal training programs and informal knowledge sharing. As her team increases its capabilities and design maturity, they also help raise the digital maturity of the whole company. Rachel's bio Rachel McConnell is a content designer, strategist and consultant who's used to building and leading content teams. She's worked with brands such as Deliveroo, M&S, John Lewis and Virgin Holidays and also trains UX professionals in UX writing. She's currently content strategist at BT and was the content strategy lead for Clearleft. Rachel is the author of "Why You Need A Content Team." Follow Rachel online LinkedIn Twitter Medium RachelMcConnell.me Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBIBwhWwiYA Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 93. Rachel McConnell leads a big team of content designers and editors at BT, the huge British communications services company. Her content operations include about 100 folks, spanning UX practice, editorial publishing, and content management. She focuses on creating and optimizing efficient business systems and helps her team members execute on BT's content strategy with regular trainings as well as structured opportunities for team members to learn from each other. Interview transcript Larry Swanson: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 93 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Rachel McConnell. Rachel is a content design manager at BT, and a lot of our listeners are in the U.S. and BT would be like the British version of Cox or Xfinity or any of those big... What is it, like phone, internet? Whatever the batch of services that you provide. Rachel McConnell: Yeah, telecoms and broadband. Yeah. Cable, that kind of thing. Larry: All that kind of stuff. Welcome, Rachel. Tell the folks a little bit more about what being a content design manager entails. Rachel: Thanks, Larry. Yeah. Hi, everybody. I am a content design manager at BT. That means I'm responsible for the content designers within a specific alliance. My alliance, which is a group of triads and squads, they have a particular focus on capability. My role is I specialize in content operations, which means I'm essentially responsible for looking at how the whole of the content team is operating from always a working point of view and also from a process point of view, capability point of view, and helping improve how everybody's working and how they're delivering work essentially and improving efficiency and effectivity. Larry: Right, and that implies a large organization. How many folks are you... How many content designers do you have there? Rachel: Our team is quite big. I'm pretty sure it might be one of the largest content design teams in the UK actually. We have about 99, 100 content people. About 60% of that is content designers and the other 30% are content editors. They're more like traditional content managers working within the content management system. Larry: Great. Content design is one of those fields where... In content strategy in general it seems like everybody comes from some kind of publishing or media background, but in content design you're as likely to have design-oriented people as you are editorial folks. Are there different considerations when you're managing a hybrid team like that?
Rachel McConnell In Rachel McConnell's world, if content strategy is the engine, then content operations is the oil that keeps it running smoothly. Rachel leads one of the biggest content operations in the world, a team of 100 content designers and editors at BT, a large communications services company in the UK. Her team is a mix of content professionals from both UX and publishing backgrounds who work across a variety of products. This gives her plenty of opportunities to optimize their internal systems and plenty of ideas for both formal training programs and informal knowledge sharing. As her team increases its capabilities and design maturity, they also help raise the digital maturity of the whole company. Rachel's bio Rachel McConnell is a content designer, strategist and consultant who’s used to building and leading content teams. She’s worked with brands such as Deliveroo, M&S, John Lewis and Virgin Holidays and also trains UX professionals in UX writing. She’s currently content strategist at BT and was the content strategy lead for Clearleft. Rachel is the author of "Why You Need A Content Team." Follow Rachel online LinkedIn Twitter Medium RachelMcConnell.me Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBIBwhWwiYA Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 93. Rachel McConnell leads a big team of content designers and editors at BT, the huge British communications services company. Her content operations include about 100 folks, spanning UX practice, editorial publishing, and content management. She focuses on creating and optimizing efficient business systems and helps her team members execute on BT's content strategy with regular trainings as well as structured opportunities for team members to learn from each other. Interview transcript Larry Swanson: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 93 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Rachel McConnell. Rachel is a content design manager at BT, and a lot of our listeners are in the U.S. and BT would be like the British version of Cox or Xfinity or any of those big... What is it, like phone, internet? Whatever the batch of services that you provide. Rachel McConnell: Yeah, telecoms and broadband. Yeah. Cable, that kind of thing. Larry: All that kind of stuff. Welcome, Rachel. Tell the folks a little bit more about what being a content design manager entails. Rachel: Thanks, Larry. Yeah. Hi, everybody. I am a content design manager at BT. That means I'm responsible for the content designers within a specific alliance. My alliance, which is a group of triads and squads, they have a particular focus on capability. My role is I specialize in content operations, which means I'm essentially responsible for looking at how the whole of the content team is operating from always a working point of view and also from a process point of view, capability point of view, and helping improve how everybody's working and how they're delivering work essentially and improving efficiency and effectivity. Larry: Right, and that implies a large organization. How many folks are you... How many content designers do you have there? Rachel: Our team is quite big. I'm pretty sure it might be one of the largest content design teams in the UK actually. We have about 99, 100 content people. About 60% of that is content designers and the other 30% are content editors. They're more like traditional content managers working within the content management system. Larry: Great. Content design is one of those fields where... In content strategy in general it seems like everybody comes from some kind of publishing or media background, but in content design you're as likely to have design-oriented people as you are editorial folks. Are there different considerations when you're managing a hybrid team like that?
Oh, you're good at design? Congratulations! You're now leading, managing, scaling, and hiring. Hear about the challenges and rewards of design leadership from Temi Adeniyi, Jane Austin, Hannah Donovan, and some of the Clearleft crew.
User Experience Designer and co-founder of Clearleft, Andy is a best selling tech author, curates the UX London and Leading Design conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, Awwwards and The Next Web. He currently runs an online community of over 1,500 Heads, Directors and VPs of Design, and is a founding member of Adobe's Design Circle. Andy has appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists, as well as winning agency of the year several times running. Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.ATTEND EVENTS CURATED BY ANDY BUDD:UX LondonSofaConfLeading Design ConferenceCONNECT WITH ANDY BUDD:Follow Andy Budd on TwitterConnect with Andy Budd on LinkedInIf you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or share the episode with a friend. Thank you!
Special guest Andy Budd returns to the program. He's one of the founders of UK-based design agency Clearleft, and we discuss the firm's recent shift to being employee-owned.
Special guest Andy Budd returns to the program. He's one of the founders of UK-based design agency Clearleft, and we discuss the firm's recent shift to being employee-owned.
Resources:cassie.codestwitter.com/cassiecodesAmelia's TwitterNate's TwitterKurt Vonnegut and Narrative ArcsSara Soueidan's Post on SVG Filters: The Crash CourseWelcome to the newline podcast. Our show is a conversation with experienced software engineers where we discuss new technology, career advice, and help you be amazing at work.I'm Nate Murray and I'm Amelia Wattenberger and today we're talking with creative coder Cassie Evans.In this episode we talk about something often neglected in web design today: how to bring whimsy and joy to your usersIn our chat we talk about how the old web had entry points to programming and where we might find find that today.And open with a story about how she, as a child, sold animated cursors for donuts, which felt like magic - and how even today snippets of code feel like magic spells.We loved our conversation with Cassie, and think you will too, let's dig in!Cassie Evans PodcastAmelia: [00:00:00] Welcome to the newline Podcast. Nate: [00:00:08] Our show is a conversation with experienced software engineers, where we discuss new technology, career advice and help you be amazing at work. I'm Nate. Amelia: [00:00:17] And I'm Amelia Wattenberger. Today, we're talking with creative coder, Cassie Evans. In this episode, we talk about something often neglected in web design today, how to bring whimsy and joy to your users. In our chat, we talk about how the old web had entry points to programming and where we might find that today. Nate: [00:00:35] We open with a story about how Cassie as a child, sold animated cursors for donuts, which felt like magic. And how even today, snippets of code still feel like magic spells. We loved our conversation with Cassie and we think you will too. Let's dig in. Cassie: [00:00:53] We're not Nate: [00:00:54] live and so we just it to be fun. One of things is I really love your talks and you talked about how the web needs more whimsy. I just love that so much. In one of your talks, you mentioned that you sold neopets pages for donuts. Cassie: [00:01:11] Yes. Nate: [00:01:11] Like when you were a child. Can you tell me more about that? For context, I think you and I grew up with some of the similar early web stuff. For example, when I was younger, I once got on the Internet for hours and then my parents were furious, because my dad had gotten an accident at work and his boss was supposed to call. I'd been tying up the Internet, because I was on dial-up for hours. Yeah, I just love the old classic web style, like Myspace and neopets. We can get into that some, but can you tell me about how you sold neopets pages for donuts? Cassie: [00:01:40] Yes, definitely. Yeah, firstly you mentioned dial-up. I missed that so much. It's so close to my heart, because I remember we had one computer at home, that was our home computer and I was only allowed to use it for educational things for a lot of times. I used to wait until my parents were asleep and then I'd creep downstairs with blankets and I'd have to wrap the whole computer up in the blanket, so that it wouldn't make the noises, so that I could dial-up to the Internet. I just sit there clutching it to my chest, trying to dampen down the noises, so they wouldn't wake up. Why Nate: [00:02:15] were modems so loud, right? Cassie: [00:02:17] So loud. Nate: [00:02:18] Yeah. Cassie: [00:02:21] Even that noise now gives me anxiety, because it sounds like being downstairs, terrified that my parents are going to wake up at any moment. I love that. Yeah, the donuts. I didn't have money for the tuck shop when I was younger. I got school dinners. I didn't have packed lunch boxes and they weren't really into giving us sugary snacks. They were quite healthy. I got quite jealous about all of the other kids having donuts from the tuck shops. Around that time, everyone started making Myspace profiles and neopets pet pages. My one was really good and lots of people asked me whether I could make them sparkly cursors and stuff. I started up a little side hustle and swapped sparkly cursors for donuts. It was excellent. Amelia: [00:03:11] What is the deal? Is it one cursor for one donut? Cassie: [00:03:15] Yeah, I think it was something like that; a cursor for a donut. This Nate: [00:03:19] is amazing. I don't actually understand how this would work. How much programming was it? Were you finding GIFs? I'm interested in particularly one, for the entrepreneurship side, two, because it's on-brand that you're adding sparkles. Then three, is the learning programming aspect. I love this idea, for example, that some of the best ways to learn are just when you're self-motivated and you're just trying to do stuff. I learned how to program, because I was tweaking web pages this similar way and I worked my way down. I'm interested. I didn't actually use neopets necessarily, but what were these cursors and how did that work for as much as you remember? Cassie: [00:03:53] As much as I remember. I think it was very much accidental. I don't think that I realized that I was coding at the time. I didn't really have much of an awareness of what coding was. I used to play The Sims me other early games as well and they had cheat codes that you could type in. I saw it as the same thing. It was Internet cheat codes that you went to some websites and they had pictures of different sparkly cursors, or different backgrounds, or different CSS effects and you just copied a cheat code and then you put that cheat code onto your – and I didn't really know that that's what the building blocks of the web were. I didn't understand that at the time. I thought that they were a little magical snippets that you just – I mean, they still are. Nate: [00:04:42] Right, they still are. They still are Cassie: [00:04:43] magical snippets, aren't they? I still feel like that nowadays. Some new CSS comes out and I'm just like, “Wow, another magical snippet. Amelia: [00:04:52] This is amazing.” They keep making them. Cassie: [00:04:54] Yeah. Nate: [00:04:56] I learned some early programming, we would play these old games, they were called MUDs. You'd Telnet in. It's before SSH, you Telnet. It's like SSH, but insecure. You Telnet into these servers and play these text games, where you're go to the sword shop or whatever and you buy a sword. Then I remember that what we would do is we were like, “Oh, we could host our own server.” It's the same thing. We didn't know we were We were just copying and pasting these codes, make our own server and then we're like, “Oh, we can give ourselves our own items.” We're copy this snippet and then you realize now you have these God-like powers of playing this game that you enjoy and then realize like, “Oh, shoot. What else could I do with this power?” That was actually one of my entry points to programming too. I think that's really special. One of the things that you've talked about too is well, I don't know. What are some of these entry points that people have now? What could we do to give this, serendipitous entry point into coding for kids today? Cassie: [00:05:46] It's really difficult, because I've looked around and I haven't found anything that has that same accidentally educational aspect to it. There's some really amazing things that have the same sense of community, because neopets for me and Myspace to a degree had this community aspect, where there were lots of other young kids who were all hacking around and changing things and you learnt things from each other. I think that we definitely got that in platforms like CodePen and Glitch. They're really great, because they lower the barrier to entry. They abstract away all of the fiddly setup and build tools and all of that stuff and they allow people to just jump in and start making things and remix things that other people have made and fork things that other people have made. I think that's really great, but I don't think we already have any of those accidentally educational things around anymore, which is a shame. People have to be a lot more intentional. They have to want to learn and know what they're there for in order to start off. I Amelia: [00:06:58] also think about this with cars. I think it's a little bit related. When I first started dating my husband, he had a – it was 69 Mercury Cougar, a really old car. He could work on it, because there's no computer, you can understand what the parts are pretty easily. You can just look at them and be like, okay, this turns and it turns this other thing. I think the Internet today is so much more complicated. The bar for what's cool on the web is so much higher that when we were kids and we made a sparkly cursor, even our parents would be like, “Oh, wow. How did you do that?” It's hard to make something impressive now and it's just so overwhelming. I think that's also part of why Glitch and CodePen can be so helpful, because they take care of the nitty-gritty for you, so you can focus on being creative. Nate: [00:07:51] I'm optimistic. I think that I've seen some movement there with Minecraft maybe, Roblox is interesting. Yeah, there's some interesting ideas happening there. There's even some interesting, like more deliberate code for kid tools. There's one called Microsoft MakeCode Arcade. It's like Scratch, but it's designed for building games. Even that, board is on educational. I think there's something special, where it's not deliberately educational, but you learn from it that it's important. Cassie: [00:08:19] Scratch is so cool. I really love Scratch. The Harvard computer science course, the first thing that they get you to do is a thing in Scratch. When I started that, I was like, “Oh, I bet this is really – it's really hard. It's that like Harvard computer science course.” Then they were like, “We're going to build a game in scratch.” Wow, it's Nate: [00:08:39] cool. You're like, “I can do this. Yeah.” I hope that there's more tools that come out, particularly on tablets, because one of the things I notice with my kids is that they're using an iPad a lot more frequently than they're using a computer. I think just the ethos and the ecosystem of tablet apps is it's a lot more locked down. You can't necessarily look under the covers, like you would with Vue source on a webpage. I think any tools like that that let you learn are really interesting. There's a scratch junior that my kids use just to build little stories and little animations and I love that, but there's not too many tools yet, but I'm hoping we can create more. I Cassie: [00:09:15] feel there's some stuff in the hardware hacking, crafting worlds. I think that coding and crafting, the intersection of that, there's some quite interesting stuff happening, because I think you can fall into that accidentally as well if you're interested in hacking around with things. You can end up, “Oh, well. I want to make these lights flash and oh, I'm going to have to learn Python in order to do that.” I think that that's still yeah, accidental gateway Amelia: [00:09:51] into things. Yeah, I love that. I think some of the people I used to work with, they would spend time with their kids making a Halloween skull with an Arduino that makes its eyes flashed. It's such good bonding time, and because it's fun for everyone. I enjoy doing that. Cassie: [00:10:05] I was Amelia: [00:10:06] like, “I need a kid, so I mean, Cassie: [00:10:08] I can have an excuse Amelia: [00:10:09] to do Nate: [00:10:10] this.” Right. Yeah, I know. Right. But our kids are doing that now with cosplay stuff, is they first were doing little paper craft creatures. They would print off a template and they cut it out and they'd be like, “Oh, we want to make our own,” so then they're learning how to use blender to do their own 3D modeling. Then use, there's this tool called Pepakura, which you can use to slice 3D models down into a little papercraft, like Minecraft creature or whatever. Then they're learning computer skills for using Figma to edit the templates and they're using Blender to learn 3D modeling. They're not good at that yet, but you can see the progression. They're going to take over the world. Yeah. I recently watched one of your talks on CSS filters and it totally blew my mind. I've been programming for since we talked about since dial-up, and I didn't even know that SVG had filters. I thought that was so fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about your recent work on doing paintings with SVG? Cassie: [00:11:05] Yes. I've really been loving SVG filters recently. I got into a little bit of a slump at the beginning of lockdown, where I wasn't feeling creative at all. The idea of programming, coding sounded not so much fun. I wanted to do something a little bit more relaxing. Yeah, I find SVG and SVG filters really fun to play around with, because it's more declarative. You have some filter primitives and filter primitives they work – well, filters they work a lot like audio programming, where you've got inputs and outputs. You can chain things together. You have different filter primitives inside a filter element and you can feed the output of one into the input of the next one and the output of the first two into the input of another one. That means that there's infinite possibilities. Ultimately, all you're doing is just changing a couple of values and some attributes. It feels like putting Lego blocks together. You don't really have to think through any intricate logic. You can just put some filters together and see what happens. Yeah, I find that really fun, the randomness that you get not being able to predict the outcome. I've played around and I accidentally ended up with something that looked a little bit like a pencil line. Then I just riffed on that and made some things that looked a bit like hand sketched paintings, which was a lot of fun. Nate: [00:12:42] It's gorgeous. It is one of the most beautiful SVGs I've ever seen. We'll put a link in the show notes. It was just delightful and mind-blowing. I think that yeah, your talks on SVG are really a Cassie: [00:12:55] delight. That's so lovely to hear. When you have the chance to play with these things, is Amelia: [00:12:57] that all through just side projects? I know when my – at least my job title was developer, most jobs you don't get to play around or do something super creative. Is this something you get to do in your day-to-day job, or is it mostly just side? Yeah, what is Cassie: [00:13:16] your day job? My day job, I am a front-end developer at a company called Clearleft in Brighton. I'm lucky, because my job we have a mixture of client projects, but we also – well, not so much right now, because of the pandemic, but we also do events. The event sites are a chance to flex your creative muscles a little bit, try out new things. I get to explore things creatively through the event sites and then focus on building accessible, solid front-end websites for Amelia: [00:13:55] my day job. Oh, that's a nice balance of the more focused and the more creative. Are you usually working with designers? Cassie: [00:14:02] We have a lot of really good designers at Clearleft. It's hard, but we try to avoid pigeonholing people into just one role. If people want to explore a little bit more design, but they're a developer, then they try to give people space to do that. I'm currently working on a little side project site at work. I'm getting to do design and stuff on that, which is really nice. Nate: [00:14:28] You mentioned that you used to draw a lot and I feel that , experience in your work. Your chameleon, for example, is just adorable and obviously done by someone who has art skills outside of programming. What does your process look like? Are you sketching out ideas for what you want to see on paper, or do you just go straight to SVG? How does that work? Cassie: [00:14:48] It's very much technology-driven, rather than aesthetics first, actually. I tend to get ideas, because I'll be looking at a particular technology and then I'll think, “Oh, how could I demonstrate that? Or how could I play with that in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, or fun?” The chameleon, I wanted to play around with getting colors from a webcam. I did that and it was just changing Amelia: [00:15:16] a rectangle Cassie: [00:15:17] on the screen to different colors. I was like, “Well, that's fun, but it would be so much more fun if it was a chameleon.” Nate: [00:15:25] I love that in your work. Amelia does this too, I think, in that you build something and then it's like, okay, that's fine, but how do we make that more fun? Then you'll take the time to put in those details and it's really delightful. Cassie: [00:15:38] Yeah, I am such a huge fan of Amelia's work. Your article about the SVG viewBox, I have directed so many people at that. I had a whole lengthy explanation in a workshop that I did about the viewBox and then I was just like, well, actually just look at this wonderful article, because it explains it a million times better than I could. That's so Amelia: [00:15:59] good to hear. I feel like I do these things for myself. I'm like, okay, well I need a little toy example. Then I'm like, well, I might as well make it into a telescope. Might as well just let other people use it, I think the way you described your processes, it's very just like, playing around for your own personal benefit. Then just like, “Well, if I enjoy this, other people may also enjoy this.” You released your new website recently and I feel like it got a lot of attention, especially for the bottom. You have a little SVG of yourself and the eyes follow the cursor around. It's just really delightful to play around with, because there's so many websites out there. It's nice to even stumble across one, where you're like, “Oh, this person didn't just make a nice looking well-designed website, they took the next step to make it delightful and take a chance to connect with the user.” Cassie: [00:16:56] I love that so much. I'm not a huge fan of really whiz-bang websites, so websites that you land on and just everything animates and your cursor gets hijacked and your scroll gets hijacked and all of that thing. I find that really overwhelming. I absolutely love it when I'm navigating around a website that looks on the surface, like it's just your average website and then you hover over something, or you click something and it does something unexpected and joyful. It makes you smile. It makes the website feel a lot more human. Amelia: [00:17:32] I think you have to really understand how the web works to create a website that's both really easy to read and accessible and also has that next level. I feel it's easy to do the scroll-jacking, or just animations everywhere, but to have a little bit of restraint and to make it so that people with slower connections, or using screen readers can even navigate it as well. I think that's really awesome. Cassie: [00:17:58] Yeah. I think I had a head start, because I was using 11T. You get out of the box just a lot of performance benefits there. It's a static site generator. I think the tagline is it's a very simple static site generator. Nate: [00:18:12] On the tooling side, I've noticed that you use GreenSock for a lot of your animations. I've never really used GreenSock, but I've seen that a lot of CodePen people use it. Can you just talk about GreenSock a little bit, like what you about it and explain to me why it's so popular? Cassie: [00:18:29] Yeah. I have to start with the disclaimer that I don't work for GreenSock and GreenSock don't pay me any money. Because whenever I get really excited about GreenSock people are like, “She's got to be selling something.” Yeah, I love GreenSock so much. There are a whole bunch of different animation libraries out there, like JavaScript animation libraries. I think if you're doing things with HTML DOM, or say you're using a JavaScript animation library to trim some 3JS stuff, you're mostly just concerned with changing some numbers and a lot of the animation libraries handle things exactly the same way. The problem with SVG land is different browsers handle SVG transforms differently. You can end up with things moving around in unexpected ways in some older browsers and GreenSock, they have gone above and beyond to iron out all of these browser inconsistencies. You can be very sure that your SVG animations are going to work the way that they should do. They Amelia: [00:19:31] a lot more. They'll make really nice animations between things. They have this new scrolling library, right? Cassie: [00:19:39] Yeah. This is another really cool thing about GreenSock is that they've got the core GreenSock library. Their licensing model gets a bit misunderstood, because they're one of the only JavaScript animation libraries that aren't open source. But their core animation library is free for the majority of use cases. I think if you're selling an end product to multiple users, then you have to pay for it, but for 99% of people, it's free. Then they have these additional plugins. The core library does everything that you would need it to do and then the plugins are extra fun and some of the plugins are free and then some of them are behind a membership fee, but they've got a whole bunch of different SVG-specific plugins. They've got ones that help with SVG stroke animation and they've got ones that do morphing. Yeah, they've just released scroll trigger, which is amazing. I've played around with it a little bit. It uses one event listener behind the scenes, so it's really performance and just really intuitive as well. I think that's, yeah, another thing that I really love about GreenSock is the docs. They're just really good. They've got so many good animated examples in there and the forums are really, really friendly. It's like the opposite of stack overflow, can I say that? People are nice there. You post a question and I think as a newbie, I started off doing banner ads animation. That was my first job. I didn't have anyone to learn from and I had no idea what I was doing and I'd post on the GreenSock forum and someone would just jump in and help me out immediately. Yeah, it's really good. That's a Amelia: [00:21:22] really interesting business model. Cassie: [00:21:23] It's difficult to explain to people, but I understand why they do it, because it means that they don't have to rely on any external sponsors. They can just focus their time purely on updating it, which is why a lot of the other animation libraries don't have the time to put in the effort to make sure that things work with SVG cross browser, whereas GreenSock do. Oh, Amelia: [00:21:45] and it also looks like you can use any of the plugins on CodePen? Cassie: [00:21:50] Yes. It's super cool. That's the coolest thing. I think that's why so many people on CodePen use GreenSock, because everything's available to use on there. Amelia: [00:21:58] Yeah, that's super cool. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it seems like it's – just a really great way to lower the overhead of if you're like, “Oh, I want this button to have a particle system and explode, or I want it to morph into this other thing.” It might just be too much work Cassie: [00:22:13] to do. We all have deadlines at Amelia: [00:22:14] work. If anything, even haves that effort, it might just make it worthwhile. Yeah, definitely. I think there's been quite a few times where people have gone, “Wow, that's Cassie: [00:22:23] a really cool animation that you've done.” Then see that it's five lines of green top coat. That's all Amelia: [00:22:32] it takes Nate: [00:22:33] sometimes, though. Yeah. It's Cassie: [00:22:35] also a lot easier to tweak your animations with green chords, or just an animation library in general. I've struggled with very complex animations with CSS, because you can't chain them together. It's really nice to have a timeline and all that. Amelia: [00:22:54] Yeah, are there any other tools like GreenSock that might be really useful for someone who is new to the more creative coding Cassie: [00:23:02] space? I don't Nate: [00:23:03] know. I'm curious on how to learn how to do SVG animations as well, because I feel the things that actually both of you create just feel like black magic to me. I don't really understand SVG super well, or particularly CSS animations. Golly. I am not good Amelia: [00:23:18] at Cassie: [00:23:19] that. Golly. Amelia: [00:23:21] I thought of one, which is similar. I've always felt like I've seen 3D stuff on the web. I don't know what wizard you have to be to have this 3D scene in a web page, but I will never be there. Then you discover 3JS Cassie: [00:23:38] and it's like – A frame as well. A Amelia: [00:23:41] frame. Cassie: [00:23:41] Yeah, A frame is really cool. It's a web framework for building virtual reality experiences. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Amazing. Amelia: [00:23:51] I love it. I love how these libraries make even, just you have three lines of code and you're like, “I have no idea how I did this either.” Cassie: [00:23:59] I remember when I made my first Taurus knot in 3JS and I was so excited about it. I think pretty much out of the box, you have to import Amelia: [00:24:10] a plugin, but you can rotate it, you can zoom in and out, you can pan around. It's definitely magic. Cassie: [00:24:16] What's the D3 version of that? Is there a good entry point into D3? I Amelia: [00:24:23] have this spectrum in my head of things that are really complicated, but down to the metal. You can do whatever you want with them. Then the other end is a chart library that'll make a chart for you. You say, do a line chart with this data and it'll make a line chart. D3 is definitely on the former end, where it's like, it gives you tools you need. There's a lot of tools and you have to dig into each one of them. I feel if you want that oh, my God. This is magic feeling with D3, a lot of people, especially at the beginning, they'll just look up, there's so many examples online. They'll copy the code and then they'll paste it and then over two years, they'll understand what each line is doing, which I think everyone who learns D3, this is the way they learn it, just because those end examples are so cool and you're like, “I want this. I'm going to have it.” Then you take it and don't really understand all of it. Then there's also the chart libraries that make it super easy to do a really fancy chart really easily. Nate: [00:25:23] We talked a lot about this when we were working with React and D3. I mean, D3 is like React, in that it's a ton of different little modules that all work together. If you try to use for example, D3 with React, it's obnoxious, because D3 also takes over rewriting the DOM for you. One of the things that I would complain to Amelia when she was teaching me this is that to use D3 with React, you basically use React to form all the SVGs and you almost don't need D3, except for the utility functions. I don't actually know what is a good tool that's magic for D3. There's Amelia: [00:25:55] React chart libraries that you'll get something really amazing and be like, “I did this.” We're all on the shoulders of giants. Cassie: [00:26:04] I remember looking into D3. We got a solar panel installed on the roof of our work and I wanted to hook in. Well, you could hook into the API, which is really cool. I wanted to do that and see what we'd saved. I looked into D3 and it terrified me. Then I ended up making an illustration of our office building in SVG. I've set it up, so that with every certain amount of CO2 we save, it grows another plant out of a rooftop garden. Amelia: [00:26:44] I love how this was easier. Nate: [00:26:46] Yeah. Cassie: [00:26:49] It's like reaching for the tool that you understand. It's really difficult to make yourself learn new things. I was like, this is a great opportunity to learn D3. Then about 24 hours later I was like, “I'm going to make an SVG.” I think about this a Amelia: [00:27:05] lot where the flow state is in between something that's really boring and something that's really challenging. If something's too challenging and overwhelming, your brain will just shut off. You'll be like, “I can't learn this.” Then if it's too boring, your brain also shuts off and it's like, “I can just do this in my sleep.” I think a lot of people when they first look at D3, the needle goes all the way and they'll like, “This is overwhelming. I don't know where to start direction.” Then I think even with SVG, that was probably not in the boring area for you, even though you know SVG it was in the middle flow state of this is a good challenging. Cassie: [00:27:45] Yeah. Nate: [00:27:45] Cassie, in one of your talks you mentioned this idea that limitation breeds creativity. Could you talk a little bit more about that and your thoughts there? Cassie: [00:27:53] I have quite bad anxiety. I'm quite bad with procrastinating as well. I overthink things and I procrastinate. When I was learning how to code, there were lots of times where I'd sit down and stare at an empty VS code screen and just be like, “Right. I need to make something.” Then not knowing what to do. It felt a lot like when I was younger. I really loved drawing. At a certain point, I started doubting myself a little bit and overthinking it. My mom started what we called the scribble game. The scribble game was great. She'd take the paper from me and she'd draw a scribble on it, so that the paper wasn't blank anymore and then she'd hand it back to me and I had to make that scribble into something. It was a challenge, but there was a starting point. I think that that's so important when you're trying to make some things, to have a limitation and a challenge and a starting point. If you've got those three things, I think it's a lot easier. Amelia: [00:29:02] I love that. I Cassie: [00:29:03] love the scribble game. Yeah, it's wonderful. How Amelia: [00:29:07] can we apply this to code? How can we do a code scribble in order to lower that barrier? Cassie: [00:29:14] I guess, that's what you're saying about D3 having examples that you can copy and paste and start with. CodePen as well, like other people's pens that you can fork and Glitch has things that you can remix. I think that's a really great place to get started with something new, is just start with something and then see what you can make it into, or see how you can break it. I think it's a good way to learn things. Amelia: [00:29:40] Yeah, I think that's great. I was also reading an article yesterday. I've been meaning to learn 3D modeling, like you're talking about, Nate, that your kids are doing. It was this article, someone did a 100 days of 3D modeling to learn. They had a few things where it was like, one day they'll do a tutorial and the next day they'll make something with that knowledge. Every other day, they're doing a tutorial and it's an easier day, or every other day they do something easy and then they do something really hard. That's a good idea, because otherwise, you're either burning yourself out, or you're not learning as much as you could. Nate: [00:30:17] I feel like we are so early in programming education in that there's not really – I'm lumping 3D modeling into this too. There's not really a good place that you can go that will give you this off-the-shelf curriculum to learn 3D modeling, as you learn D3. Cassie: [00:30:32] Yeah, it's definitely a tricky thing. I find it really hard, even just trying to figure out what I need to learn to be a good front-end developer nowadays, because I feel there's just so much and I inevitably just go off on rabbit hole tangents all the time into the stuff that I'm really interested in. I'm like, “I should be learning webpack, but I'm going to learn some 3JS instead.” Amelia: [00:30:59] I feel whenever I try to write an article, I turn into a grade school version of myself that would tweak the PowerPoint slide styles, instead of actually writing my presentation, where this is the only reason idea in my blog posts have something fun in them is I don't like writing. Cassie: [00:31:16] I'd rather Amelia: [00:31:17] just do something fun, like scribble on the page with SVG. It's also a strength, I guess. Because most of these things I do, I'll end up using them Cassie: [00:31:26] in work. I work with someone who uses the phrase procrasti-working. That's when you know that you're really bad at procrastinating. You have a couple of things that you want to do. Then if you're not doing one of them, then you're going to be doing the other one to procrastinate them. Right, Nate: [00:31:43] procrastinate doing something else you should be doing, so that at least, you're moving Cassie: [00:31:48] I was to Amelia: [00:31:49] my friend about this. She said, she cleans when she has a deadline. That sounds like such a superpower. At least something's clean. Cassie: [00:31:57] Before I do a talk, my house is the tidiest it's ever been. Everything is alphabetically organized. Everything is polished. Nate: [00:32:06] Can you tell us about how you prep for your talks? What does that workflow look like? I prep with Cassie: [00:32:11] great difficulty, is the honest answer. I'm very lucky, because there's a lot of people at Clearleft who do a lot of public speaking. Jeremy Keith being one of them and he helped me huge amounts with my talk writing. I think that the first ever talk I did, it was just a little talk at a meet-up. I was just doing a show and tell, basically, of some of my CodePens I clutched a glass of wine for the whole thing and just showed people the fun stuff I was working on. Doing a conference talk, it needs to have a little bit more structure than just a list of things. I think that it's very rare that you see a talk that's just a list of things that is engaging. I think Jeremy really helped with that, because he's very good at telling stories and he said to me, what you need is you to make sure that your talk has a narrative structure. You need a flow to it. I wrote down everything that I wanted to talk about on post-it notes. Then Jeremy prompted me with different narrative structures. One being the hero's journey, I think was the one I used, so you've got a hero. The hero learns something along the way and overcomes something. I looked at all of the notes that I had and tried to arrange them into different narrative structures and then, eventually found one that I was happy with. Amelia: [00:33:39] What are the other narrative structures? What do you even google find this story to narrative arts? Nate: [00:33:45] The Wikipedia page on the hero's journey is pretty good. There's another one. There's a graph. I'll link to this in the show notes. There's a blog called Reedzy, and they've actually diagrammed out. There's a talk by Kurt Vonnegut, where he actually goes through all these different narrative arcs. One of them that he talks about is the hero's journey, but they actually plot out Cinderella. Here, I'll send you the link. Cassie: [00:34:10] I love graphs of Cinderella. Excellent. Nate: [00:34:14] Yeah, so Kurt Vonnegut, he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five and he also gave this really fantastic talk. There's a YouTube video of it, where it's Kurt Vonnegut graphs the plot of every story. There's actually a database of these different narrative plot lines. Dativism Cassie: [00:34:28] storytelling. Yeah, this is right up my street. Yeah, I love cart when I get as well. Amelia: [00:34:34] I also found this chart of how happy Harry Potter is throughout all the books. It looks like he just gets progressively less happy. Yeah, Nate: [00:34:42] progressively sadder the whole time, right? Amelia: [00:34:44] Yeah. It's pretty dark by that in there. Cassie: [00:34:47] What are some other narrative arcs? Oh, the rags to riches. That's a narrative arc. Oh, rags to riches has two, so there's the rags to riches rise and riches to rags full Icarus, where you rise and then fall. I feel that'd be such a Amelia: [00:35:03] disappointing book. Cassie: [00:35:04] Yeah. Amelia: [00:35:04] Everything's happy until the end. You definitely wouldn't want to choose that for a conference talk. Right. For a conference, you got to end on the up. Yeah, Cassie: [00:35:08] definitely. Amelia: [00:35:15] Yeah, I love the concept of using storytelling in talks, because I think, especially with technical talks, it can be very like, all right, people want facts. I'm going to tell people how to use this thing. I'm just going to have slide after slide of here's a fact, here's a best practice and then it can be really hard to sit through an hour of that and keep paying attention and just keep learning things. Cassie: [00:35:39] I think it's the human element, isn't it? Again, you need more whimsy and more human elements to things. I think some of the best conference talks that I've seen have been – I learnt this thing by doing it wrong for ages. This is what happened, because I was doing it wrong and I learned this lesson the hard way. I think that that's really good, because it feels – you have empathy with them. It feels more relatable. Amelia: [00:36:06] Brain, it's like, I can avoid this pain myself. Cassie: [00:36:11] Everybody likes to laugh at other people's misfortune as well. You Amelia: [00:36:16] just started a creative coding meetup. Cassie: [00:36:19] Yes. Amelia: [00:36:20] Right before lockdown, right? Cassie: [00:36:23] Yeah. We had about three meet-ups and then lockdown happened. It was really great. There's a conference in Brighton called FFConf and Charlotte Dan did a talk. She's amazing. She does lots of really cool generative art. She makes degenerative jewelry as well, which is very cool. A lot of my Brighton nerd friends, we all went to this conference and we saw her talk and she talks through pen plotting and generative art with CSS and generative art with JavaScript and using hardware and creating physical things, like jewelry and stuff. We were all really inspired. Afterwards, we were like, “Let's have a meet-up,” because it's really hard to find time to do all of that stuff and motivation to do side projects outside of work. We decided to do a meet-up that wasn't the normal talk structure, where you go along and watch people talk and then leave again. It was more of we call it a knitting circle for nerds. Everyone just goes along and we all have our laptops and we just tinker on projects and help each other. Then do a little show-and-tell at the end and eat crisps. Sometimes there's a very, very small dog. A very, very small dog. Very, very, very small chihuahua. Amelia: [00:37:48] [inaudible] . Cassie: [00:37:50] Yeah, now that's all moved online now, because of the plague. It's been really lovely, because we've got this little Slack community that has been there the whole time the lockdown's been happening and quarantine's been happening. It's just been such a great bunch of people. Creativity without the pressure and coding without the link to work and career development and stuff. It's just feels a very free space. Everyone there has been super open about feeling a bit creatively restricted, or battling with balancing out life stuff and coding. Yeah, it's been a really, really lovely group of people. Chris, one of the people from Brighton Generator, he is just a project machine. Even when everyone else hasn't been making stuff, he's just been knocking out projects pretty much every week. It's been wonderful watching what he's been making. That Amelia: [00:38:51] sounds so nice to just have that group, especially in these times. On Twitter, I feel a lot of people are having just such a hard time with a lot of people get inspiration from nature, or talking to people, or going places. It's just so hard when you always stay in the same house, if you see the same things and the same people all the time. Yeah, definitely. I think that that's fine. People shouldn't be outputting stuff all Cassie: [00:39:18] the time. You shouldn't feel like you have to constantly be producing things. Sometimes you have to take time to absorb stuff. If that's reading books, or watching tutorials, or going for walks, or that thing. I think it's all just as important. Amelia: [00:39:34] Totally agree. Cassie: [00:39:35] Ooh, if you're wanting to learn more about SVG filters, Sara Soueidan has an amazing set of articles on Codrops, which I Amelia: [00:39:43] learned everything from. They're really great. Nate: [00:39:45] One of the things I appreciate about you is that you remember people's names. I've noticed that in your talks as well. When you are saying, you're not just like, “Oh, there's a blog post on SVG filters.” You're like, “Sara Soueidan wrote this filter.” You should know her as well as her article. I really appreciate that. I think I would like to see more of that in general. Cassie: [00:40:06] It's so important. One of the things that brings me the most joy, which I've started doing is there are a few times where I had made a CodePen or something, or written a blog post and someone actually just sent me a direct message just saying, “Oh, I just read your article and it was really helpful. Thank you for that.” I do that now. Every time I read something and it's useful, I get hold of the person directly and just say, thank you. It's such a small thing, but yeah, I think it's really nice, especially for people who don't have analytics and tracking on their things, because I don't. I don't really want to know who's on my blog, because I get a bit too overwhelmed with numbers and statistics. But it's really nice to get a message from someone saying that they enjoyed it. Amelia: [00:40:51] I love that. Also, I feel for me, the better something is, probably the less likely I'll reach out to someone to say that I enjoyed it, because I'm like, “Oh, there's so many people who are telling them that it's great.” As a creator, it's so nice to get any message. I think being on the other side has helped that anxiety. Cassie: [00:41:12] Yeah. I think we put people on pedestals and don't reach out for that reason. I think we should stop doing Amelia: [00:41:19] also recently released new newsletter. I think it's monthly. What was your motivation behind starting it? I think it's solely focused on SVG, which is just a great niche. Where do you find inspiration for that newsletter? There is Cassie: [00:41:36] a little patch of time where GreenSock were hosting the CodePen challenges. I mean, it was about a month. Every week, Jack from GreenSock got hold of me with a whole load of CodePens for me to look through and judge. I just loved it. It was so much fun. I spent every Sunday evening just going through all of these different CodePens and writing people messages and telling them what I liked about it. I got so many lovely messages back. It just felt so joyful and so lovely to be able to signal boost some people who are making really cool things and give people some feedback. I basically just loved it, so I thought that I would like to carry on doing that. Then I had also, just before lockdown happened, I did a workshop in Brussels and I met Louie, who's also putting the newsletter together with me and we've been Internet friends for quite a while, but it was we met in person for the first time. We just got along really well. We decided we wanted to do a little side project together. Yeah, he's been writing some SVG tips for a while as well on Twitter and I've been looking at those and thinking, “Oh, it'd be great if we could get these tips out to some more people.” Amelia: [00:42:50] Oh, I've seen those. They're so good. Cassie: [00:42:52] Yeah, I learned things. Amelia: [00:42:54] Yeah, Cassie: [00:42:57] me too for sure. He's a creative coding tour de force, he is. Nate: [00:43:00] Cassie, thank you so much for being with us today. It was really delightful. Cassie: [00:43:04] Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. It was lovely to meet both of you, and especially because I've been such a huge fan of Amelia: [00:43:11] Amelia's work for a while. Nate: [00:43:19] Thank you. Hey, you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Amelia: [00:43:22] If you have a minute, a review on iTunes would help other people find the podcast. We have a lot of great content coming up. To be notified of new episodes, hit that subscribe Cassie: [00:43:37] button.
Ben Sauer is a product design leader, formerly employed by Babylon Health and Clearleft. He's currently writing a book, titled Secret Design Skills. In Episode 7 of 'What's NEXT' Ben Sauer argued that we need frameworks to navigate times of crisis. However, the metaphors we choose can have a profound effect on the solutions we create. Ben explained how to avoid being shackled by the concepts of the past.
Enjoy our content? Support This is HCD by becoming a Premium Member Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. In this session, I'm chatting with Jeremy Keith. Jeremy is a philosopher of the internet. Every time I see him speak, I'm struck by his calming presence, his brilliant mind and his deep humanity. Jeremy makes websites with Clearleft. His books include DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, HTML5 for Web Designers, Resilient Web Design, and, most recently, Going Offline. Hailing from Erin's green shores, Jeremy maintains his link with Irish traditional music, running the community site The Session. He also indulges a darker side of his bouzouki playing in the band, Salter Cane. You can find out more about Jeremy at adactio.com. https://dannyvankooten.com/website-carbon-emissions/ http://designingforperformance.com/ https://idlewords.com/2020/03/we_need_a_massive_surveillance_program.htm Learn more about Gerry McGovern's World Wide Waste book Join our live online Coffee Timeevents every Tuesday and Thursday during the pandemic with a surprise guest each time :-) This is HCD Podcast Network EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Power of Ten with Andy Polaine NEW: The Big Remote with Gerry Scullion and Andy Polaine Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran NEW: World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern NEW: Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Enjoy our content? Support This is HCD by becoming a Premium Member Welcome to World Wide Waste, a podcast about how digital is killing the planet, and what to do about it. In this session, I'm chatting with Jeremy Keith. Jeremy is a philosopher of the internet. Every time I see him speak, I'm struck by his calming presence, his brilliant mind and his deep humanity. Jeremy makes websites with Clearleft. His books include DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, HTML5 for Web Designers, Resilient Web Design, and, most recently, Going Offline. Hailing from Erin's green shores, Jeremy maintains his link with Irish traditional music, running the community site The Session. He also indulges a darker side of his bouzouki playing in the band, Salter Cane. You can find out more about Jeremy at adactio.com. https://dannyvankooten.com/website-carbon-emissions/ http://designingforperformance.com/ https://idlewords.com/2020/03/we_need_a_massive_surveillance_program.htm Learn more about Gerry McGovern's World Wide Waste book Join our live online Coffee Timeevents every Tuesday and Thursday during the pandemic with a surprise guest each time :-) This is HCD Podcast Network EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Power of Ten with Andy Polaine NEW: The Big Remote with Gerry Scullion and Andy Polaine Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran NEW: World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern NEW: Global Jams Podcast with Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium Support the show.
Chris and Jeremy Keith discuss imbuing teams with a shared sense of ownership of their design system, creating design systems able to address unforeseen scenarios, design ops as an essential part of an effective design system, and more.Guest:Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer working with @Clearleft, playing music with @SalterCane, creator of @Huffduffer. You can find Jeremy on Twitter and LinkedIn.Host:Chris Strahl is co-founder and CEO of Knapsack, DnD DM, and occasional river guide. You can find Chris on Twitter and LinkedIn.Links:Episode transcript → Google DriveProgressing The Web → Jeremy Keith via MediumProgressive Enhancement: What It Is, And How To Use It? → Sam Dwyer via Smashing Magazine
Richard Rutter is a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Clearleft, which is one of the most respectful and influential independent digital design consultancies in the UK. Wired Magazine named Richard and his co-founder as two of the 100 most influential people in the UK digital sector. In this episode, we are going to discuss what made Clearleft one of the most influential design agencies in the UK, what kind of value they provide for clients that have designers in-house and what type of marketing is the most effective for design agencies. Show-notes: http://entrepreneursinb2bsales.com/richard-rutter/interviews
UX Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy Budd curates the Leading Design and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. In this episode, we spoke about: the biggest learnings from the last Leading Design conference, why and how designers should say no to their managers, and the current state of design education.
This is a talk from “beyond tellerrand // Berlin 2019”. Cassie Evans gave a talk about “Interactive Web Animation with SVG” at the sixth #btconf in Berlin.
Internet Marketing: Insider Tips and Advice for Online Marketing
On today's episode of the Internet Marketing Posdcast, Andy is joined by Andy Budd, UX Designer, speaker, Clearleft CEO, Brighton Digital Festival co-founder and curator of UX London to talk about why you should try to speak at conferences and how you can break into the speaking circuit. On the show you'll learn: The path Andy took into public speaking How public speaking tends to work Why any professional should consider entering the public speaking circuitWhy conferences are like music festivals The many benefits that you can enjoy from speaking at conferences Some of the classic mistakes people make when it comes to public speaking Why it's important to understand your audiencePlus, Andy provides his top tip for anyone who wants to become a public speaker. If you'd like to connect with Andy, you can find him on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Phil’s guest on this episode of the IT Career Energizer podcast is Jeremy Keith. He is a web developer at Clearleft, a design agency that he co-founded, in 2005. He is the author of several books about web design and is a regular speaker at conferences across the world. He is also an organiser of events, including the recent Patterns Day 2 in Brighton. In this episode, Phil and Jeremy Keith discuss how writing improves your spoken communication skills and builds your career. They also talk about how to get through difficult career phases. Jeremy shares his take on the future of the industry as a whole including some of the concerns he has about the direction web development is going in. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (2.36) TOP CAREER TIP As you learn something and progress in your career, write about it. You could just keep a record for yourself or put it all on a website. That approach has served Jeremy well. This really enhances your communication skills. You soon become good at explaining complex things in writing and using speech. Writing is also a great way to be noticed. (6.14) WORST CAREER MOMENT Having to let some staff go, because of the financial situation his company was in, was gut-wrenching for Jeremy. However, it taught him that no matter how hard things get, life goes on. The people he had to let go now have decent jobs, so they are now in a good situation. That experience also changed the way he handles company finances. As a result, they have not had any financial issues since. (9.21) CAREER HIGHLIGHT CoolSiteoftheDay.com has been highlighting the best sites and apps, since 1994. Keith was a fan from day one and set himself the goal of getting one of his sites selected as the coolest site of the day. Naturally, he was thrilled when that is exactly what happened. (11.05) THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T Keith is worried about some aspects of the industry. Websites have become too bloated and slow, especially in light of the needs of emerging markets. He is concerned that the process of creating sites is becoming so complicated that the majority of people are not be able to easily learn the skill. Nevertheless, he is still optimistic. The web design and development communities are still willing to share and work closely together. Once someone figures something out, they share it a way of working that benefits everyone. (14.02) THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – The fact that something he made in his bedroom could be seen by anyone in the world who wanted to view it. What’s the best career advice you received? –If you are supposed to be somewhere or do something, show up. What’s the worst career advice you received? – Invest in this or that technology. Usually, following that advice turns out to be wrong. Instead, you need to learn the underlying principles. What would you do if you started your career now? – He would probably go down the self-taught route and focus on learning the underlying principles rather than focusing on just one tech discipline. What are your current career objectives? – Helping others is what brings Jeremy the most satisfaction, so that is his current focus. What’s your number one non-technical skill? – Writing. It has enabled him to become a good public speaker and communicator. How do you keep your own career energized? – Jeremy has been lucky to find new tech that has interests him enough to keep him energized. What do you do away from technology? – Music is still his first love. He also enjoys reading, but he is careful to read non-fiction as well as fiction, which keeps things interesting. (20.07) FINAL CAREER TIP Build your own website and use it to learn to write well, share what you know in different ways and track your career. BEST MOMENTS (4.42) – Jeremy - “Develop the skill of being able to explain things well.” (12.39) – Jeremy - “Share what you know once you have figured something out. This is good for everyone.” (14.57) – Jeremy - “If you are supposed to be somewhere, or on a call, at a certain time, be there.” (15.52) – Jeremy - “Don’t invest in just one tech. Instead, learn the underlying principles. You can apply those to anything.” (20.14) – Jeremy - “Have a website of your own where you share things and track your career.” ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organisations to design, develop and implement software solutions. Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers. In 2017, Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey. CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/philtechcareer LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Facebook: https://facebook.com/philtechcareer Instagram: https://instagram.com/philtechcareer Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast’s website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer ABOUT THE GUEST – JEREMY KEITH Jeremy Keith is a web developer at Clearleft, a design agency that he co-founded, in 2005. He is the author of several books about web design and is a regular speaker at conferences across the world. He is also an organiser of events, including the recent Patterns Day 2 in Brighton. CONTACT THE GUEST – JEREMY KEITH Jeremy Keith can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/adactio LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adactio Website: https://adactio.com/
Personas are polarizing, some love them, but many love to hate them. This week, Erin and JH talk to Andy Budd, CEO and co-founder of Clearleft about why the social mediaverse should stop freaking out about the evils of personas. They're a tool in the toolkit, and come with contextualized nuance all their own. Read our blog post about it here: https://bit.ly/2KA7B5H --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/awkwardsilences/message
GUEST BIO: My guest on today’s show was an early pioneer of Web Standards, writing a best-selling book on the subject of CSS. He then went on to found Clearleft, arguably the first dedicated UX consultancy in the UK. He also set up dConstruct, the UK’s first digital design conference, and UX London, the country’s first dedicated UX conference. EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Andy Budd is a renowned Design Leader and agency CEO. He started his IT career working as a designer. During his early career, Andy became a pioneer in the field of Web Standards. At that point, he published his first book – CSS Mastery. Over 14 years ago, he co-founded Clearleft, one of the UK’s first dedicated User Experience consultancies. In 2015, he set up the dConstruct conference, which was held for 10 years. It was the first design conference to be run, in the UK. He is also the founder and curator of Leading Design. That annual conference improves design leadership and management. Andy speaks at these and many other conferences that are held across the world. KEY TAKEAWAYS: (1.09) – The first thing I wanted to ask you really was about how you transitioned from the web standards and the CSS aspect or your IT work to founding Clearleft. Andy as a natural transition, and goes on to describe how it happened. He started his working life as a flash coder, creating games. From there, he discovered CSS. When he did he realized almost immediately that separation of presentation and content was the way to go. Baked into this were standards around accessibility and usability. Andy was an early adopter of web standards. He had the 3rd table list website in the UK. He got together with two other early standards geeks to found Clearleft. At the time he was already creating controlled vocabularies, working with information architecture, usability testing and much more besides. So, he was one of the first people, in the UK, to take care of user experience, rather than just making a site look pretty. For the first few years, it was hard to get clients. Nobody could understand why it took them twice as long to deliver a website and why the fees were higher. In time, that changed. Now, UX design is the norm. (4.48) – Phil comments that at the time Andy set up Clearleft, a lot of people would not have known much about UX. So, he asks Andy how big a part of educating people about education was to making Clearleft a success. Andy agrees educating potential clients about usability was important. But he goes on to say that the fact people had never really thought much about UX before was also a superpower. Nobody else was really doing it. As a result, as soon as firms began to wake up to the importance of UX Clearleft grew really quickly. This was especially the case when companies moved away from using websites solely for marketing. Once, they started to use their sites to sell things and transactions were involved the functionality of the website became far more important. (6.11) Phil asks if the introduction of new devices like iPads and SmartPhones has changed the approach to UX at all. Andy responds by saying that the tools have changed. But, the underpinning philosophy hasn’t really changed. The underlying problem-solving principles remain the same. However, the introduction of smartphones had an impact in another way. Mobile sites had to be slicker and better designed. At that point, a lot of companies woke up to how ugly, clunky and old-fashioned their main sites were. When they saw how good a website could look and what an effective sales tool that type of site was a lot of firms wanted to re-design their original websites. (7.44) – Can you please share a unique career tip with the I.T. career audience? Andy explained that for him no single thing led to his success. His approach has to continually review what he is doing and make little course corrections. But, he does say that working in a company where you are not the best at what you do is a good idea. It ensures that you are continually challenged and stretched. You need to be a continual learner and have a beginner’s mindset. This ensures that you learn new tools. If you do not, your knowledge becomes stale. At some point, those tools are going to become obsolete. When that happens, you are stuck. (10.32) – Can you tell us about your worst career moment? And what you learned from that experience. Andy has been very lucky career-wise. So, could not think of anything he would categorize as a bad career moment (11.47) – What was your best career moment? Andy has had a lot of great moments in his career. His first speaking gig went really well, so that was a highlight. Meeting Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path was also a great career moment. He was sat next to him at a book signing at SXSW South by Southwest. His work has also led to him traveling the world, which Andy has clearly enjoyed doing. Plus, over the years, he has worked with some fantastic clients. Spending time in Copenhagen working with Nordic Region Banks was a highlight for Andy. Working with Zappos was also exciting. (13.38) – Can you tell us what excites you about the future of the IT industry and careers? Andy is fascinated by the rise of artificial intelligence. He believes that in the next decade or so, AI means that things are going to get really exciting. About two years ago, Andy realized he was a bit out of the loop when it comes to AI. Rather than read a bunch of books about it, he decided to pull a diverse group of people together to discuss where AI could take them. The result was really interesting. It is clear that the landscape is changing drastically. AI will lead to wide-scale automation. As that happens, jobs are going to disappear and be replaced by others. So, people are going to have 2 or 3, maybe 4, careers in a lifetime. That is why it is so important to be a continual learner. Some talk about there being a 4th industrial revolution. Regardless, these changes are going to create winners and losers, but it will also be exciting. Andy states that we are already moving away from hand coding using a traditional text interface. Coding is set to become more visual, with developers acting more like curators and editors than creators. (16.57) – What drew you to a career in IT? As a child, Andy enjoyed using the BBC Micro and Spectrum computers. While other kids were out playing football, he was learning to code. He thinks that his interest in sci-fi and love of reading gave him a curious mind, which is why he was drawn to all things tech. But, he did not realize that he could turn what he viewed as a hobby into a career. Nobody, in his family or circle, was involved in the IT industry. So, he was not exposed to the possibilities. After university, he did an aeronautical engineering degree. To do that he had to learn how to use CAD, which he really enjoyed and quickly became good at. Once he had finished his engineering degree, he went traveling for 6 to 7 years. During that time, he started to use internet cafes to communicate with friends at home and research his next destination. One day, while he was in one of these cafes he saw a guy building his own web page. He was creating a travel blog. Later, he met a web designer. He worked for 6 months and traveled for 6 months. Andy decided that he wanted to do the same. In 1999, he arrived back in the UK, bought a Pentium 486 and learned HTML and how to code. To do this he turned to several sources. One of which was a website called Ask Dr. Web, which was run by Jeffrey Zeldman. In time, he became a friend on Andy’s. It was him that inspired him to learn CSS, which eventually led Andy to where he is today. (21.25) – What is the best career advice you have ever received? When Andy set up his IT business he read a book called E-Myth. It contained one great piece of advice which was to make sure that you are working on your business, not in it. That means you need to hire people to do the day to day tasks for you, so you can be free to grow your business. He also explains that you need to see your career as a journey. You have to see it as a business and treat it that way. (22.24) - Conversely, what is the worst career advice you've ever received? You need a business plan is no longer good advice. It is no longer necessary. (23.52) – If you were to begin your IT career again, right now, what would you do? Andy states that when he got started in the design industry the bar was much lower. The tools and sites were so basic that it was not that hard to compete. You could easily get in at the bottom end of the market building sites for local businesses. Now big providers like Shopify and SquareSpace make it possible for people to put together fantastic sites without employing a technical person. (26.52) – What are you currently focusing on in your career? Andy’s focus is on helping others to unlock the power of the web. He is very appreciative of what IT pioneers have done to enable him to succeed. So, he wants to pay it forward and help others. (19.16) – What is the number one non-technical skill that has helped you the most in your IT career? Andy is a keen and experienced diver. In fact, he is a dive instructor. That role taught him the importance of becoming a good communicator. You are working in a dangerous environment, so you need to communicate effectively with your students. If you do not, it can be disastrous. Learning to be a good communicator has ended up helping his IT career in many different ways. (31.01) - What do you do to keep your own IT career energized? Andy works as a servant leader. He is a boss who is very focused on helping others to energize and progress their careers. Taking that approach has had a positive impact on his career too. It helps to keep him motivated and keeps his team engaged and contributing. (31.57) - What do you do in your spare time away from technology? Andy’s IT role takes him all over the world. Whenever he can, he incorporates a bit of leisure time onto his business trips. Doing this provides him with the chance to continue to explore new countries and cultures. Andy also loves good food. So much so, that he has made it his mission to eat at every one of the top 50 restaurants in the world before he is 50. He is really enjoying completing that mission. He still dives a lot and has recently tried cave diving. Andy has also got into bouldering, which is indoor climbing. He says it is a lot more fun than going to the gym. Participating in the sport has virtually cured the RSI he has picked up from his constant mouse usage. This is because climbing stretches and strengthens the muscles in the hands and arms. More importantly, it works the opposite muscle groups from the ones used while working with a keyboard and mouse. Bouldering is very popular with the IT crowd. A lot of it is about problem-solving. Planning your route and working out what techniques and hacks to use is all part of the fun. (36.02) – Phil asks Andy to share a final piece of career advice with the audience. If you work in the design industry, you need a killer portfolio. A CV that shows career progression also helps. But, when someone is hiring a designer they want evidence of what you are able to do. If you are claiming to be a UX designer you have to demonstrate that fact. For example, when hiring, Andy wants to see photos from user research sessions, as well as interactive, paper-based and animated prototypes. If someone claims they can do information architecture, he wants to see sitemaps, content audits and controlled vocabularies. BEST MOMENTS: (4.34) ANDY – "These days, saying you’re a UX designer is like saying you breathe air or drink water. It’s just what all of us do." (5.45) ANDY – "Our clients quickly realized the benefits of not just making a pretty website, but making something that actually delivered business results." (8.27) ANDY – "It's always better to work in a company where you are not the best at the thing you do." (15.31) ANDY – "We're moving towards a kind of visual coding. I think we're moving much more towards being curators, and editors rather than creators" (22.53) ANDY – "It's important for you to be working on your business, not just in it." (36.07) ANDY – "For the design industry, having a killer portfolio is everything." (37.34) ANDY – "A really good resume should be backed with a powerful portfolio that demonstrates that you can do these things." CONTACT ANDY: Twitter: https://twitter.com/andybudd LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andybudd/ Website: http://www.andybudd.com/
Andy Budd brings years of knowledge and experience to his interview. Hear from Andy on the changing shape of the agency world and how it has evolved during his career. Andy will also share why the clients he serves and his greatest competition are one and the same. The market has shifted over the years and Andy describes why this has been great for how they like to work at Clearleft. Hear the value of "sticking it out" in the digital world and why some people choose to leave the profession.
Andy Budd discusses the evolution of design as a practice and its role in the product creation process. Andy is Co-Founder & CEO of ClearLeft a design consulting and training firm in the UK. clearleft.com awh.net
Jonathan interviews Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft and the man behind popular design conferences like UX London and Leading Design. Jonathan asks lots of questions and but doesn’t even get close to asking everything he wants to ask. Some of the topics Jonathan and Andy touch on: How Andy is pathological! It’s true!
Web design pioneer, Clearleft chief executive, and UX thought leader Andy Budd chats with Big Web Show host Jeffrey Zeldman about the failings and triumphs of our design community over the past 20 years, why the success of design thinking killed the market for design studios, and how to reinvent your studio or agency for today's market. Links for this episode:Andy Budd | ClearleftAndy Budd::BlogographyAndy Budd (@andybudd) | TwitterStrategic Design & Innovation Consultancy | ClearleftHomepage | UX London 2019UX London (@UXLondon) | TwitterHome New York | Leading Design Conference 2019LeadingDesignConf (@LDconf) | TwitterDigitalBrighton (@DigitalBrighton) | TwitterBrought to you by: ZipRecrutier (Visit the link to post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE). CacheFly (Learn more at http://5by5.CacheFly.com)
Web design pioneer, Clearleft chief executive, and UX thought leader Andy Budd chats with Big Web Show host Jeffrey Zeldman about the failings and triumphs of our design community over the past 20 years, why the success of design thinking killed the market for design studios, and how to reinvent your studio or agency for today’s market.
I take this episode to chat to Andy Budd, founder of design agency Clearleft, outspoken social media presence and organiser of several design conferences here in the UK. We talk about issues with designer titles, building an ownership mindset for your own career, agencies vs in-house, and bringing a new generation of designers into more senior design positions. Got thoughts or feedback? Hit me up on twitter @jonnyburch or join the community at progressionpack.com/chat Handy links: - Andy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andybudd - Ladder of Accountability: https://bit.ly/2Nb580N - Leading Design Conference: https://2018.leadingdesignconf.com/ - Submarine Leadership: https://bit.ly/2xRbTQw - The Peter principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle --- - Progression Pack: https://progressionpack.com - Me on twitter: https://twitter.com/jonnyburch
Ben Sauer is a Design Strategist who's worked with some of the world's well known brands: Virgin, Tesco, Pearsons, British Gas, Penguin Random House, BBC. Ben worked with Clearleft as a Design Strategist for many years and more recently turned his attention to how voice will change design.Over the last couple of years, Ben has been focusing on helping brands navigate the voice space and figure out how voice will impact their business, as well as where to start with a voice strategy.Ben joins Dustin and I today to discuss the ins and outs of voice first design strategy, including finding a use case and the differences between voice design strategy and design strategy in general.Where to listeniTunes/Apple podcastsSpotifyStitcherTuneIniHeartRadioPippaYouTubeAny other podcast player you use or ask Any Pod to play VUX World on AlexaLinksFollow Ben Sauer on TwitterVisit voiceprinciples.comBenSauer.net See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
We have special guest Jeremy Keith from ClearLeft to discuss Service Workers: what they are, how users can benefit from them, and how we implement them. Jeremy authored the book “Going Offline” which goes into glorious detail on the subject, so he's well positioned to discuss the topic.
Today we are talking to Andy Budd, the founder of ClearLeft. And we discuss bridging the gap between designers and technologists, the rise of DesignOps and its comparisons to DevOps, and how great design can take your product to the next level. All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.
Jeremy Keith reveals how the web is neither good or bad, nor neutral, but an amplifier. He inspires us to not let the future be just something that happens to us, but rather something we make with the small things we do today. He encourages us to build software ethically with our users’ psychological vulnerabilities in mind. He motivates us to not build on rented land, but to publish using the superpower of our own URLs. He also shows us how looking to the past is just as important as looking to the future. Iron Man Photo Story (4:43) On Net Neutrality (13:31) What's "Adactio"? (20:44) Is the Internet Good or Evil? (24:41) Hippocratic Oath for Software Designers (35:51) Resilient Web Design (49:06) Why do you Love the Web so Much? (54:26) The Power and Generosity of the Community (63:05) What Comes Next? (71:34) Listener Question? (73:44) Last Words to the Builders of the Web (74:18) Contact Info (80:15) Check out the detailed show notes and Eli Jorgensen’s astonishing superhero artwork at userdefenders.com/047 This episode is brought to you by InVision Studio (userdefenders.com/studio): The world's most powerful screen design tool Get your FREE audiobook from Audible at userdefenders.com/freebook. No commitment. Cancel in 30 days, and you won't be charged. The book is still yours to keep.
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Jeremy is the founder of ClearLeft - a passionate group of UX and digital strategists based in the UK - where Jeremy now heads research and development. He is the author of a number of books on web development, including his latest book, Resilient Web Design, has been seen on stages like An Event Apart and South By South West, and is also the creator of the world’s first Science Hack Day!
Back for 2018 with a blast, this episode features ballistic missile shenanigans, Intel's security faux pas and a robot bear. We're joined in the studio by the amazing Andy Budd, CEO of Clearleft, to talk through his pioneering work on the Juvet Agenda and his thoughts on the future of work, AI and humanity. -- Alexa Stop is supported by Manifesto and Wirehive, recorded live in London, UK. manifesto.co.uk wirehive.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/alexa-stop-podcast/message
One of the most important things about running successful digital projects is cultivating effective collaborations. Ellen De Vries, Content Strategist at Clearleft and author of Collaborate: Bring people together around digital […] The post 039 Collaboration – Ellen De Vries of Clearleft appeared first on The Creative Agency Podcast.
Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation
In this episode Andy Davis talks to Jeremy Keith, the Technical Lead and co-founder of the design agency Clearleft in Brighton. Jeremy has been writing on his personal site, adactio.com, for over fifteen years. He also written a number of books: DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, HTML5 For Web Designers, and most recently, Resilient Web Design which you can read for free online. He also created Huffduffer.com a site for creating your podcast of found sounds. On the show they discuss throwing your ideas and projects out into online technology communities, using forums and tech sites to get feedback on your product and getting over the self-doubt you can have about your project. They also touch on Jeremy’s career as a writer and how writing books differs from creating podcasts and blogs. Show Notes: 1.38 The open source nature of online technical communities. 7.44 Has the quality of open source software and information decreased due to the ability to share it so easily. 10.23 The positive effects of putting unfinished projects out to the tech community to get constructive feedback. 12.27 The pursuit of perfection never ends but we can switch our mindset to an agile way of thinking and constantly improve on our product. 13.26 You’ll always cause division when posting project on the internet but it’s a fantastic place to learn new skills. 18.27 How did you come about writing a book. 20.32 Comparing writing a book to blogs & podcasts. 22.06 How your motivations can help determine what medium will be most effective to share your views on. 23.22 What were your experiences when starting your own business. 28.38 Having the right approach to your business is essential to making your company succeed. 34.44 Staying on top of the tech marketplace and keeping an eye on what’s going on around you. 36.56 Technology advancing so quickly due to its sharing economy.
Clearleft's Andy Budd and host Zeldman discuss the changing role design agencies must play to remain relevant; the rise of in-house design; working with pattern libraries (since 2008!); whether the “golden age” of web design and blogging is over; and much more. Andy Budd has been blogging about design and technology since 2003. He was one of the leading lights of the web standards movement and his book, CSS Mastery, sold over 60,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. Andy is a founding partner at UX design consultancy Clearleft; the curator of dConstruct, one of the UK's most popular design conferences; and the force behind UX London, the UK's first dedicated usability, IA, and UX design event. Links for this episode:Homepage | ClearleftCSS Mastery: Amazon.co.uk: Andy Budd, Emil Björklund: 9781430258636: BooksAndy Budd: BlogographyAndy Budd (@andybudd) | TwitterBrought to you by: ZipRecrutier (Visit the link to post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE). BlueApron (Check out this week's menu and get your first three meals FREE—with FREE SHIPPING—by going to BlueApron.com/bigwebshow.
Clearleft’s Andy Budd and host Zeldman discuss the changing role design agencies must play to remain relevant; the rise of in-house design; working with pattern libraries (since 2008!); whether the “golden age” of web design and blogging is over; and much more. Andy Budd has been blogging about design and technology since 2003. He was one of the leading lights of the web standards movement and his book, CSS Mastery, sold over 60,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. Andy is a founding partner at UX design consultancy Clearleft; the curator of dConstruct, one of the UK’s most popular design conferences; and the force behind UX London, the UK’s first dedicated usability, IA, and UX design event.
Web pioneer Jeremy Keith talks with us about the resiliency of the web, upcoming innovations in CSS and browser support, native vs. web, and what he's excited about in web development. You can follow him on his site at https://adactio.com/. ================== Our episode this week is sponsored by LiquidWeb. Liquid Web is offering a 33% discount for your first 6 months of hosting. Head over to https://liquidweb.com/wordpress and use the code WPTONIC33 at checkout for your discount. ================== Table of Contents for Episode 161 0:00 Podcast intros. 2:16 Resilient Web Design, and how the past influences the future 4:42 Has the web gotten too complex? How has the evolution of the web influenced our job roles? 9:19 What brings about an obsession with tools rather than underlying principles? 11:54 What was it like during the Web Standards movement, and why is that important today? 17:29 What things that are going to be supported by browsers in the next year are making you excited? Both CSS and JS APIs? 23:18 If you're a developer, what is your advice for people wanting to experiment more with emerging browser technologies? 26:27 What's Jeremy's view of the WordPress ecosystem and community? 31:12 Native vs web is not a productive argument. Both will exist side-by-side forever. 36:50 Things you once you could only do in Flash, you can now do with CSS and SVG. 38:05 Thoughts on voice recognition, artificial intelligence, and touch screens. 46:27 Why Clearleft stays always from having a CMS of choice and stays dedicated to front end development. 49:27 What are the biggest misconceptions people have about progressive enhancement? 53:00 Podcast outros. 55:10 Bonus Content. 55:12 Why the biggest threat to the web isn't technical, but cultural. 58:40 Is internet surveillance a reason people might be fearful of using the web in the future? Why the heart of the web has always been decentralization, and how monolithic platforms are a threat to the openness of the original web. =================== Links mentioned during this episode: Clearleft http://clearleft.com/ HTML5 For Web Designers https://abookapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition) https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Standards-Jeffrey-Zeldman/dp/0321616952 Resilient Web Design https://resilientwebdesign.com/ Codepen http://codepen.io/ JSBin https://jsbin.com/ GitHub https://github.com/ Scott Jenson: Mobile Apps Must Die (2011) https://jenson.org/mobile-apps-must-die/ Once Upon a Forest (Flash site) http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/ Praystation (Flash site) http://ps3.praystation.com/pound/v2/ Hype Cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/methodologies/hype-cycle.jsp
On this week’s program, I’m joined by my friend Andy Budd, one of the founders of British design agency Clearleft. Recently, he organized a conference called Leading Design, we talk about that and discuss what it takes to be a leader in design driven companies, and what it’s like in companies that aren’t.
This week Jon and Dan are joined by Andy Budd from Clearleft - a well known UX Design agency based in Brighton. Clearleft are well known for their high quality of work as well as advancing the field by putting on a number of UX, Design and Development events around the country.In this episode they cover:Small vs large agenciesQuality vs quantity of client workHow do Clearleft judge their success metricsTaking on the projects you want to work onGrowing the team from the founders and adding new skillsHow adding content strategy skills to the team has helped Clearleft enhance their offeringWhat are the driving factors behind the events and conferences Clearleft put on, and what effect does that have on their businessGiving back to the design community - why we do these thingsShow notes:Clearleft’s website, including their work and blog. Keep an eye out for the new website & rebrand launching end 2016/early 2017.Clearleft’s new event; Leading Design (24 - 26 October 2016). At the time of publishing, now in the past, but sign up for details next year.Clearleft’s other conferences:UX London (24-26 May 2017)dConstruct (on a break this year)Every Interaction’s website update, taking a content-first approach.
Jeremy Keith (@adactio), web guru & co-founder of ClearLeft, talks with us about the potential pitfalls and hopes on Progressive Enhancement with Web Components. Resources Extensible Web Components (2016) - https://adactio.com/journal/11052 Responsible Web Components (2014) - https://adactio.com/journal/7967 Adam Onishi's article - http://adamonishi.com/2016/08/web-components-and-progressive-enhancement/ Eric Bidelman on Web Components in PWA (specifically on JavaScript class extension as Progressive Enhancement) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCDdeqzUlY&feature=youtu.be&t=6m34s Polymer Shop Demo - https://shop.polymer-project.org/ Polymon - https://polymon.polymer-project.org/ Gold Standard - https://github.com/webcomponents/gold-standard/wiki The Extensible Web Manifesto - https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/ Alex Russell's response to Keith - https://infrequently.org/2014/09/uncomfortably-excited/ Sturgeon's Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law Soledad's Lightning Talk - https://soledadpenades.com/2014/09/19/extensible-web-summit-berlin-2014-my-lightning-talk-on-web-components/ Bruce Lawson blog post on the Extensible Web Summit -http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2014/extensible-web-summit-berlin/
Lou and Andy Budd discuss the evolution of the UX conference over the years, the importance of an attendee-centered experience and program design, the differences between American and European conference markets and their changing relationship to Karaoke as time goes on. A fascinating look behind the curtain for those of us who live our lives between conference trips.
Intercom co-founder Des Traynor chats with Clearleft CEO and design thought leader Andy Budd. Andy explains why young startups tend to prioritize development over design, the role designers will play in the new world of voice and chat-based UIs, and much more.
In this episode, we explore many agency leadership issues such as what it takes to solve large business problems with clients. One example you'll hear is how Clearleft transformed Penguin Books recently.We also explore:- what is an agency,- why the CEO should be the least talented person in the agency,- finding the right team,- documenting your agency's core values,- how to allow the client to become an engaged part of your agency's team, and- how to grow slowly.
This week on the Boagworld Show we are joined by Andy Budd from Clearleft to discuss success and running a successful agency. This weeks show is sponsored by Acquia, the leading provider of cloud platforms for building, delivering and optimising digital experiences. We are also sponsored by FreeAgent, accounting software for small businesses and freelancers, recommended by 99.5% of its users.
Fredrik talks to Aaron Gustafson about web standards. His origin story, how he got into web standards. How the standards work and who should get involved. The problems with prefixes and how we use them. This episode was recorded during the developer conference Øredev 2015, where Aaron gave two talks. Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS! Comments, questions or tips? We are @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlund och @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed on info@kodsnack.se if you want to write something longer. We read everything you send. If you like Kodsnack we would love a review in iTunes! Links Frameset Quark Dreamweaver Fetch Eric Meyer DOM level 0 A list apart Jeffrey Zeldman XHTML COMDEX Molly Holzschlag South by southwest Filemaker Jeff Veen Jen Robbins - Web design in a nutshell Jeremy Keith Andy Budd Richard Rutter Clearleft The web standards project Glenda Simms Derek Featherstone W3C TPAC Indesign Pagemaker CSS shapes Web platform incubator community group SVG Network information API - seems to have been shut down Vendor prefixes Edge - Microsoft’s successor to Internet explorer Alex Russell on vendor prefixes and their problems WHATWG - Web hypertext application technology working group Web SQL Firefox phones did not last Zork Basecamp Harvest Adaptive web design, second edition Aaron’s two talks Titles You’re the web standards guy Who falls into web standards and how does it happen? Between midnight and 5 a.m. Things were starting to stabilize a bit on the web The only way to build a solid foundation The web standards bug Before coming to the web In the trenches every day making web pages Help make other specs better Vendor prefixes have bitten us in the ass We don’t experience the web the way everyone else does I can’t believe I want them to make their ads more accessible
Design is about communication. It is about articulating decisions made from a professional perspective in order to sell something, or have a user do something. Other than speaking verbally, writing is the most important skill set to have when communicating ideas or opinions. On this Halftime, I discuss why the people that are the best at their craft are also good writers and why writing is designing words. In order to be great at what you do, you also MUST be a good communicator. Being able to articulate and construct your ideas in written form are very important to our growth as creatives and as human beings. Mentions include: Slack Medium Basecamp Richard Branson, Virgin Warren Buffett Jillian Michaels Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook Dave Ramsey Tina Fey Mark Ecko Jeffrey Zeldman, Happy Cog Founder A List Apart Jeremy Keith, Clearleft Pencil vs. Pixel podcast Todd Van Horne, Nike GIG Google Design Episode 59: Subjective vs. Objective Episode 25: Interception Show Joe Bosack, Joe Bosack & Co. My next guest is Michelle Cruz, Senior Art Director of the New York Red Bulls. Prior to the Red Bulls, Michelle spent many years at ESPN as a broadcast designer working on much of the visual work still in use today, as well as the New York Knicks as an art director. Sign up for the weekly email newsletter for updates, discounts on future products and exclusive content for subscribers. Did you enjoy this episode? Then please rate and/or write a review of the show on iTunes. Also, be sure to follow show host, @TAdamMartin and @MakersofSport on twitter and Dribbble.
This week on the Boagworld Web Show we are joined by Jeremy Keith from Clearleft to discuss growing your business. A transcript of this show and all links mentioned are available at: https://boagworld.com/season/12/episode/1213/
Fresh from our adventures at Smashing Conference in Santa Monica, on this week’s Unfinished Business I’m joined by user-experience professional, author (of some CSS book or another) and director at ClearLeft, Andy Budd. Joining us was one of my favourite people; designer, author and founder of Authentic Jobs, Cameron Moll.
UX Podcast attended the biggest UX conference in Sweden to date with over 850 attendees. “From Business To Buttons” was held on 21 April 2015. We managed to talk to three of the speakers on the day: Pamela Pavliscak, Cindy Alvarez and Mike Monteiro. To round up the day we were joined by Ben Sauer, UX Designer at Clearleft.
In a fast-moving episode, designers Andy Budd and Jeffrey Zeldman discuss why clients spend more on toilet cleaning than design, honest pitching, the ins and outs of agile pricing, modular code libraries, selling web services instead of deliverables, the maturation of our industry since the mid-1990s, the value of reputation, design as a collaborative process, how and why agencies get invited to pitch, passion as studio marketing, our field's evolution from layout-making to strategic design thinking, and much more. Sponsored by Mandrill (Use the code '5by5' for 50,000 free email sends per month for your first six months.).
Sure, the page is dead, but now what? If you're Code for America, you work with Clearleft to develop a pattern library and a component-based CMS built in Jekyll to deliver a new responsive website. Cyd Harrell and Jeremy Keith tell us about their fast-paced, iterative process. Read more »
Natalie and Simon launched the first version of Lanyrd.com while on honeymoon in Casablanca. As the site took off, they realised their side project was destined to become something much bigger. This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd, from a two-week proof of concept to a full-fledged startup via three intensive months of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. They’ll share the trials, tribulations and lessons they learned along the way. This is the talk they wish they’d heard before they got started! Natalie co-founded Lanyrd on her honeymoon with her husband Simon. Before co-founding a startup, she worked as a senior client-side engineer at Clearleft in Brighton, UK. Today, she juggles leading design, client-side engineering and UX on the project with building the company. If Natalie had any time for hobbies, she would enjoy pottery, yoga, writing and flying her kite. Follow Natalie on Twitter: @Natbat Simon is a co-founder of Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django web framework. Prior to diving in to the world of entrepreneurship, Simon built crowdsourcing and database journalism projects for the Guardian newspaper in London. Simon is responsible for all of the server-side code on Lanyrd, unsurprisingly written with Django. He is also obsessed with Zeppelins, and hopes one day to build one. Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonw Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).
Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman are joined by Richard Rutter, co-founder of Fontdeck and Clearleft, to discuss typography on the web and more. Links for this episode:Richard Rutter | Clearleft LtdRichard Rutter (clagnut) on TwitterClagnut is Richard RutterFontdeck webfonts: Real fonts for your websiteThe Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – a practical guide to web typographyWeb Typography Sucks | Slides and notes from SxSW 2007Ampersand · The Web Typography ConferenceTypeCon | Presented by the Society of Typographic AficionadosAn Event Apart Minneapolis 2011Amazon.com: The Elements of Typographic Style (9780881791327): Robert Bringhurst: BooksSponsored by Audible and MailChimp.
Dan Benjamin and Jeffrey Zeldman are joined by Richard Rutter, co-founder of Fontdeck and Clearleft, to discuss typography on the web and more.
In this interview, Andy Budd tells us the best practices to employ when building your site for your target audience, and what is needed to make your designs have a lasting impression.
Continuing a popular @media tradition, the final session for day one, hosted by Jeremy Keith, will feature a handful of speakers discussing questions posed by conference attendees. Wear your flak jacket: there will be controversy! Jeremy Keith is an Irish web developer living in Brighton, England where he works with the web consultancy firm Clearleft. He has written two books, DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax, but what he really wants to do is direct. His latest project is Huffduffer, a service for creating podcasts of found sounds. When he’s not making websites, Jeremy plays bouzouki in the band Salter Cane. His loony bun is fine benny lava. Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @adactio Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
Andy Budd from ClearLeft joins Tim for a discussion about Silverback, a guerilla usability testing application for Macintosh computers. Andy also informs us about the upcoming UX London conference to be held in May of this year. You can find information about Silverback at www.SilverbackApp.com You can find information about the UX London conference at http://2010.uxlondon.com/
Jeremy Keith from Clearleft discusses his session at 2008's UI13 conference called Ajax Design Considerations that Tim attended. What do UX professionals need to know about Ajax to best make use of it in websites and web applications? And why is Jeremy's title at Clearleft currently "Lineman for the County"?You can find Clearleft athttp://clearleft.com/Check out the 2009 dConstruct conference athttp://2009.dconstruct.org/UI14 is coming this November and you can learn more about it athttp://www.uie.com/events/uiconf/2009/The Wikipedia entry for Jimmy Webb's classic song "Wichita Lineman" is athttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita_Lineman
Planning documents for web app projects are often overlooked, despite their importance in the success of the product. James Box and Richard Rutter of Clearleft share their successful process of creating rough interactive prototypes for clients when creating web applications.
Peter participates in a panel with Andy Budd of ClearLeft and Hammad Khan (persona creative) to discuss the creation of a positive user experience and the importance of user experience design.
This week, Ajax design expert Jeremy Keith joins us from Brighton, England. Jeremy is the technical lead at Clearleft, a leading design consultancy in the UK. We talked about the evolution and best use of the techniques we call Ajax.
These days people expect more from a website than a handy set of tools and a pretty interface - they want an experience. From the moment somebody enters your site they’ll be judging you on everything from the way the site looks to the tone of your error messages. And they won’t just be judging you against other sites. They will be judging you on every customer experience they have ever had, from the rude man at the train station to the lovely hotel clerk that checked them in on holiday. So in order to compete, we need to up our game and look at experiences both on and off-line. In this session Andy Budd will look at the 9 key factors that go into designing the perfect customer experience. By taking examples from the world around us, Andy will discuss how we can turn utilitarian experiences into something wonderful. Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft, Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers online experience. Andy is a regular speaker at international design events such as SXSW, An Event Apart and Web Design World. He also runs the popular dConstruct conference, which takes place in Brighton every year. Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine. Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery and blogs at andybudd.com. Never happier than when he’s diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
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What is the current status of Version 2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? Gian Sampson-Wild tells us the story.She also explains how Flickr and Google have used Ajax without sacrificing accessibility.For more on the Maguire vs SOCOG case, see Joe Clark's reader's guide (www.contenu.nu/socog.html).A listener subsequently pointed out a USA case - National Federation of the Blind v Target, as described on the Disability Rights Advocates website (http://tinyurl.com/djrfd) - thanks elDavo.Gian's blog is The Kismet Heuristic (www.tkh.com.au).You can also read her peer review of the Samurai Errata. (samuraireview.wordpress.com)You might also want to check out the WCAG Samurai Group website (wcagsamurai.org).Gian mentions the work of Cameron Adams and Jeremy Keith. Cameron wrote 'AJAX: Usable Interactivity with Remote Scripting' (www.sitepoint.com/article/remote-scripting-ajax) in 2005. Jeremy Keith's book is 'Bulletproof Ajax' (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321472667/informdesign); you can read an interview with him on Digital Web magazine (www.digital-web.com/articles/jeremy_keith_2) ... and the giveaway:Andy Budd of Clearleft (clearleft.com) has donated a free ticket (worth 85 pounds sterling plus VAT) for dConstruct 2007 (2007.dconstruct.org) to a UXpod listener. To be in the draw, send an email to gerry at infodesign.com.au, with the subject line dConstruct, by June 28. Winner drawn on June 30, and notified by email. Ticket is non-transferrable, so please only enter if you or a colleague wish to attend.Duration: 16:40File size: 11.5MB
Design is hard. The Web is complicated. How do we make things for people when all we have are the most basic understanding of what they want? Join Jeffrey Veen as he takes a broad survey of the challenges designers face today, and how we're all solving those problems with new perspectives on user research, interaction design, and information architecture.
Thomas Vander Wal provides an overview on tagging services and outline where there is value in tagging. This focuses on what is different in folksonomy that improves upon tagging, so that it becomes a powerful tool. Thomas provides insights to help answer when to use tagging and/or categories, who should be tagging, the value of a tagcloud (or lack of value) when used properly, and how to create value from tagging to improve the sites and services we build.
How can we build modern web applications that use DOM Scripting and Ajax-type technologies and ensure that they are accessible? To find the answers Derek lookd at the impact of Ajax and dynamically-generated content on people with disabilities by examining how various assistive technologies interact with modern web development techniques such as DOM Scripting and Ajax. Using those results Derek creates a strategy to make some currently popular design patterns more accessible to all users.
Can you ever go back to Ajax once you Web 2.0 with Flex 2.0? The Flex 2 framework and the Eclipse-based Flex Builder 2 IDE provide you with a superior development workflow for creating web applications. You can create rich user interfaces quickly by using features such as data binding, application states, custom components, effects, and transitions. Join Aral Balkan, the Lone Ranger of the Flash Platform at d.Construct, as he shows you how easy it is to use open data, consume web services and create mashups in Flex 2 by using open source ActionScript 3 libraries for Flickr, Mappr, Odeo, and YouTube. Warning: This session may alter your preconceptions about the Flash Platform.
Over the course of d.Construct, we've heard plenty about APIs from the people providing them: Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. But why should you, as a developer, be interested? Come on a journey with Jeremy Keith as he describes how much fun can be had from hacking around with open data. Listen to his experiences of experimenting with mashups. Find out how Web Services can rekindle the passion in your code. After some initial foreplay describing the differences between REST and SOAP, join Jeremy as he penetrates some code. Soon you'll be swinging with Amazon, Flickr, and Google Maps.
A quick chat with Andy Budd and the Clearleft office dalek. Plus some more Odeo messages.
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