Space Time/No Time - Brightcove

Config 2024: In defense of an old pixel (Marcin Wichary, Director of Design, Figma) - YouTube

Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!

Design Principles For The Web - Jeremy Keith - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Web Dev Conf in Bristol recently. I think you can tell that I had fun—it was a good audience!

WWC22 - Design Principles For The Web - YouTube

Here’s the video of the talk I gave in front of an enormous audience at the We Are Developers conference …using a backup slidedeck.

The State Of The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I’ve also published a transcript.

The Ugly Truth about Design Systems

The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:

1. Current design systems thinking limits free, playful expression.
2. Design systems uncover organisational disfunction.
3. Continual design improvement and delivery is a lie.
4. Component-focussed design is siloed thinking.

It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.