Tags: day

When I was looking back at 2024, I mentioned that I didn’t give a single conference talk (though I did host three conferences—Patterns Day, CSS Day, and UX London).

I almost spoke at a conference though. I was all set to speak at an event in the Netherlands. But then the line-up was announced and I was kind of shocked at the lack of representation. The schedule was dominated by white dudes like me. There were just four women in a line-up of 30 speakers.

When I raised my concerns, I was told:

We did receive a lot of talks, but almost no women because there are almost no women in this kind of jobs.

Yikes! I withdrew my participation.

I wish I could say that it was one-off occurrence, but it just happened again.

I was looking forward to speaking at DevDays Europe. I’ve never been to Vilnius but I’ve heard it’s lovely.

Now, to be fair, I don’t think the line-up is finalised, but it’s not looking good.

Once again, I raised my concerns. I was told:

Unfortunately, we do not get a lot of applications from women and have to work with what we have.

Even though I knew I was just proving Brandolini’s law, I tried to point out the problems with that attitude (while also explaining that I’ve curated many confernce line-ups myself):

It’s not really conference curation if you rely purely on whoever happens to submit a proposal. Surely you must accept some responsibility for ensuring a good diverse line-up?

The response began with:

I agree that it’s important to address the lack of diversity.

…but then went on:

I just wanted to share that the developer field as a whole tends to be male-dominated, not just among speakers but also attendees.

At this point, I’m face-palming. I tried pointing out that there might just be a connection between the make-up of the attendees and the make-up of the speaker line-up. Heck, if I feel uncomfortable attending such a homogeneous conference, imagine what a woman developer would think!

Then they dropped the real clanger:

While we always aim for a diverse line-up, our main focus has been on ensuring high-quality presentations and providing the best experience for our audience.

Double-yikes! I tried to remain calm in my response. I asked them to stop and think about what they were implying. They’re literally setting up a dichotomy between having a diverse line-up and having a good line-up. Like it’s inconceivable you could have both. As though one must come at the expense of the other. Just think about the deeply embedded bias that would enable that kind of worldview.

Needless to say, I won’t be speaking at that event.

This is depressing. It feels like we’re backsliding to what conferences were like 15 years ago.

I can’t help but spot the commonalaties between the offending events. Both of them have multiple tracks. Both of them have a policy of not paying their speakers. Both of them seem to think that opening up a form for people to submit proposals counts as curation. It doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. Having a call for proposals is great …as long as it’s part of an overall curation strategy that actually values diversity.

You can submit a proposal to speak at FFconf, for example. But Remy doesn’t limit his options to what people submit. He puts a lot of work into creating a superb line-up that is always diverse, and always excellent.

By the way, you can also submit a proposal for UX London. I’ve had lots of submissions so far, but again, I’m not going to limit my pool of potential speakers to just the people who know about that application form. That would be a classic example of the streetlight effect:

The streetlight effect, or the drunkard’s search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look.

It’s quite depressing to see this kind of minimal-viable conference curation result in such heavily skewed line-ups. Withdrawing from speaking at those events is literally the least I can do.

I’m with Karolina:

What I’m looking for: at least 40% of speakers have to be women speaking on the subject of their expertise instead of being invited to present for the sake of adjusting the conference quotas. I want to see people of colour too. In an ideal scenario, I’d like to see as many gender identities, ethnical backgrounds, ages and races as possible.

I’ve been on a sabbatical from work for the past six weeks.

At Clearleft, you’re eligible for a sabbatical after five years. For some reason I haven’t taken one until now, 19 years into my tenure at the agency. I am an idiot.

My six-week sabbatical has been lovely, alternating between travel and homebodying.

Belfast

The first week was spent in Belfast at the excellent Belfast Trad Fest. There were workshops in the morning, sessions in the afternoon, and concerts in the evening. Non-stop music!

This year’s event was a little bit special for me. The festival runs an excellent bursary sponsorship programme for young people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend:

The bursary secures a place for a young musician to attend and experience a week-long intensive and immersive summertime learning course of traditional music, song and dance and can be transformative.

Back in April, I did a month-long funding drive on The Session:

Starting from today, and for the whole month of April, any donations made to The Session, which normally go towards covering the costs of running the site, will instead go towards sponsoring bursary places for this year’s Belfast Summer school.

I was really hoping to hit £1000, which would cover bursary sponsorship for eight students. In the end though, the members of The Session contributed a whopping £3000!

Needless to say, I was thrilled! The Trad Fest team were very happy too—they very kindly gave me a media pass for the duration of the event, which meant I could go to any of the concerts for free. I made full use of this.

That said, one of the absolute highlights of the week wasn’t a concert, but a session. Piper Mick O’Connor and fiddler Sean Smyth led a session out at the American Bar one evening that was absolutely sublime. There was a deep respect for the music combined with a lovely laidback vibe.

Brighton

There were no shortage of sessions once Jessica returned from Belfast to Brighton. In fact, when we got the train back from Gatwick we hopped in a cab straight to a session instead of going home first. Can’t stop, won’t stop.

The weather hadn’t been great in Belfast, which was fine because we were mostly indoors. But once we got back to Brighton we were treated to a week of glorious sunshine.

Needless to say, Jessica did plenty of swimming. I even went in the ocean myself on one of the hottest days.

I also went into the air. Andy took me up in a light aircraft for a jolly jaunt over the south of England. We flew from Goodwood over the New Forest, and around the Isle of Wight where we landed for lunch. Literally a flying visit.

I can attest that Andy is an excellent pilot. No bumpy landings.

Cork

Our next sojourn took us back to the island of Ireland, but this time we were visiting the Republic. We spent a week in the mightiest of all the Irish counties, Cork.

Our friends Dan and Sue came over from the States and a whole bunch of us went on a road trip down to west Cork, a beautiful part of the country that I shamefully hadn’t visited before. Sue did a magnificent job navigating the sometimes tiny roads in a rental car, despite Dan being a nervous Nellie in the passenger seat.

We had a lovely couple of days in Glengarriff, even though the weather wasn’t great. On the way back to Cork city, we just had to stop off in Baltimore—Dan and Sue live in the other Baltimore. I wasn’t prepared for the magnificent and rugged coastline (quite different to its Maryland counterpart).

Boston

We were back in Brighton for just one day before it was time for us to head to our next destination. We flew to Boston and spent a few days hanging around in Cambridge with our dear friends Ethan and Liz. It was a real treat to just pass the time with good people. It had been far too long.

I did manage to squeeze in an Irish music session in the legendary Druid pub. ’Twas a good night.

Pittsburgh

From Boston we went on to Pittsburgh for Frostapalooza. I’ve already told you all about how great that was:

It was joyous!

Saint Augustine

After all the excitement of Frostapalooza, Jessica and I went on to spend a week decompressing in Saint Augustine, Florida.

We went down to the beach every day. We went in the water most days. Sometimes the water was a bit too choppy for a proper swim, but it was still lovely and warm. And there was one day when the water was just perfectly calm.

When we weren’t on the beach, we were probably eating shrimp.

It was all very relaxing.

Brighton

I’ve spent the sixth and final week of my sabbatical back in Brighton. The weather has remained good so there’s been plenty of outdoor activities, including a kayaking trip down the river Medway in Kent. I may have done some involuntary wild swimming at one point.

I have very much enjoyed these past six weeks. Music. Travel. Friends. It’s all been quite lovely.

With great power, comes great creativity: thoughts from CSS Day 2024 · Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s Paul’s take on this year’s CSS Day. He’s not an easy man to please, but the event managed to impress even him.

As CSS Day celebrates its milestone anniversary, I was reminded how lucky we are to have events that bring together two constituent parties of the web: implementors and authors (with Sara Soueidan’s talk about the relationship between CSS and accessibility reminding us of the users we ultimately build for). My only complaint is that there are not more events like this; single track, tight subject focus (and amazing catering).

My stint as one of the hosts of CSS Day went very well indeed. I enjoyed myself and people seemed to like the cut of my jib.

During the event there was a real buzz on Mastodon, which was heartening to see. I was beginning to worry that hashtagging events was going to be collatoral damage from Elongate, but there was plenty of conference-induced FOMO to be experienced on the fediverse.

The event itself was, as always, excellent. Both in terms of content and organisation.

Some themes emerged during CSS Day, which I always love to see. These emergent properties are partly down to curation and partly down to serendipity.

The last few years of CSS Day have felt like getting a firehose of astonishing new features being added to the language. There was still plenty of cutting-edge stuff this year—masonry! anchor positioning!—but there was also a feeling of consolidation, asking how to get all this amazing new stuff into our workflows.

Matthias’s opening talk on day one and Stephen’s closing talk on the same day complemented one another perfectly. Both managed to inspire while looking into the nitty-gritty practicalities of the web design process.

It was, astoundingly, Matthias’s first ever conference talk. I have no doubt it won’t be the last—it was great!

I gave Stephen a good-natured roast in my introduction, partly because it was his birthday, partly because we’re old friends, but mostly because it was enjoyable for me to watch him squirm. Of course his talk was, as always, superb. Don’t tell him, but he might be one of my favourite speakers.

The topic of graphic design tools came up more than once. It’s interesting to see how the issues with them have changed. It used to be that design tools—Photoshop, Sketch, Figma—were frustrating because they were writing cheques that CSS couldn’t cash. Now the frustration is the exact opposite. Our graphic design tools aren’t capable of the kind of fluid declarative design we can now accomplish in web browsers.

But the biggest rift remains not with tools or technologies, but with people and mindsets. Our tools can reinforce mindsets but the real divide happens in how different people approach CSS.

Both Josh and Kevin get to the heart of this in their tremendous tutorials, and that was reflected in their talks. They showed the difference between having the bare minimum understanding of CSS in order to get something done as quickly as possible, and truly understanding how CSS works in order to open up a world of possibilities.

For people in the first category, Sarah Dayan was there to sing the praises of utility-first CSS AKA atomic CSS. I commend her bravery!

During the Q&A, I restrained myself from being too Paxmanish. But I did have l’esprit d’escalier afterwards when I realised that the entire talk—and all the answers afterwards—depended on two mutually-incompatiable claims:

1. The great thing about atomic CSS is that it’s a constrained vocabulary so your team has to conform, and
2. The other great thing about it is that it’s utility-first, not utility-only so you can break out of it and use regular CSS if you want.

Insert .gif of character from The Office looking to camera.

Most of the questions coming in during the Q&A reflected my own take: how about we use utility classes for some things, but not all things. Seems sensible.

Anyway, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about the substance of what Sarah was saying, there was no denying that it was a great presentation. They were all great presentations. That’s unusual, and I say that as a conference organiser as well as an attendee. Everyone brings their A-game to CSS Day.

Mind you, it is exhausting. I say it every year, but it always feels like one talk too many. Not that any individual talk wasn’t good, but the sheer onslaught of deep dives into the innards of CSS has my brain exploding before the day is done.

A highlight for me was getting to introduce Fantasai’s talk on the design principles of CSS, which was right up my alley. I don’t think most people realise just how much we owe her for her years of work on standards. The web would be in a worse place without the Herculean work she’s done behind the scenes.

Another highlight was getting to see some of the students I met back in March. They were showing some of their excellent work during the breaks. I find what they’re doing just as inspiring as the speakers on stage.

In fact, when I was filling in the post-conference feedback form, there was a question: “Who would you like to see speak at CSS Day next year?” I was racking my brains because everyone I could immediately think of has already spoken at some point. So I wrote, “It would be great to see some of those students speaking about their work.”

I think it would be genuinely fascinating to get their perspective on what we consider modern CSS, which to them is just CSS.

Either way I’ll back next year for sure.

It’s funny, but usually when a conference is described as “inspiring” it’s because it’s tackling big galaxy-brain questions. But CSS Day is as nitty-gritty as it gets and I found it truly inspiring. Like, I couldn’t wait to open up my laptop and start writing some CSS. That kind of inspiring.

I haven’t spoken at any conferences so far this year, and I don’t have any upcoming talks. That feels weird. I’m getting kind of antsy to give a talk.

I suspect my next talk will have something to do with HTML web components. If you’re organising an event and that sounds interesting to you, give me a shout.

But even though I’m not giving a conference talk this year, I’m doing a fair bit of hosting. There was the lovely Patterns Day back in March. And this week I’m off to Amsterdam to be one of the hosts of CSS Day. As always, I’m very much looking forward to that event.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time for the biggie. UX London is just two weeks away—squee!

There are still tickets available. If you haven’t got yours yet, I highly recommend getting it before midnight on Friday—that’s when the regular pricing ends. After that, it’ll be last-chance passes only.

Patternsday 2024 – Photos by Marc Thiele

Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!

Patterns Day Patterns | Trys Mudford

Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:

Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.

Breadcrumbs, buttons and buy-in: Patterns Day 3 | hidde.blog

A nice write-up of Patterns Day from Hidde.

The third Patterns Day happened yesterday. It was lovely!

The last time we had a Patterns Day was in 2019. After five years it felt very, very good to be back in the beautiful Duke Of York’s for another full day of design systems nerdery.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A lot of people told me how much they enjoyed the event, which swelled my heart with happiness. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who came—thank you so much!

The talks were, of course, excellent. I feel pretty good about the flow of the day. I tried to mix and match between big-picture talks with broad themes and nitty-gritty talks diving into details. The contrast worked really well.

In the pub afterwards it was fascinating to hear how much the different talks resonated with people. So many people felt seen, in the best possible way. It’s quite gratifying to hear that you’re not alone, that other people are struggling with the same kinds of issues with design systems as you are.

At the very first Patterns Day when it was still early days for design systems, there was still a certain amount of cheerleading, bigging up all the benefits of design systems. In 2024 there’s a lot more real talk about how much hard work there is. The design systems struggle is real.

There was another overarching theme at this year’s Patterns Day. Even though there was plenty of coverage of technical details like design tokens, typography and components, the big takeaway was all about people. Collaboration. Agreement. Community. These are the real foundations of a design system that works.

I’m so grateful to all the wonderful speakers yesterday for reminding us of what really matters.

It is now exactly five weeks until Patterns Day—just another 35 sleeps!

Everthing is in place for a perfect day of deep dives into design systems. There’ll be eight snappy 30 minute talks—bam, bam, bam!

Here’s the schedule I’ve got planned for the day:

9:00	Registration.
9:45	Jeremy introduces the day.
10:00	Jina delivers the opening keynote.
10:30	Débora talks about the outcomes, lessons and challenges from using design tokens.
11:00	Break.
11:30	Yolijn talks about the relay method for design system governance.
12:00	Geri talks about her journey navigating accessibility in design systems.
12:30	Lunch.
14:00	Richard talks about responsive typography in design systems.
14:30	Samantha talks about getting buy-in for a design system.
15:00	Break.
15:30	Mary talks about transitioning from a single to a multi-brand design system.
16:00	Vitaly delivers the closing keynote.
16:30	Jeremy wraps up the day.
16:45	Have a drink and a geek pub quiz at the Hare And Hounds pub.

I assume you’ve got your ticket already, but if not use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get 10% off the ticket price.

See you there!

Patterns Day is exactly six weeks away—squee!

If you haven’t got your ticket yet, get one now. (And just between you and me, use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get a 10% discount.)

I’ve been talking to the speakers and getting very excited about what they’re going to be covering. It’s shaping up to be the perfect mix of practical case studies and big-picture thinking. You can expect talks on design system governance, accessibility, design tokens, typography, and more.

I’m hoping to have a schedule for the day ready by next week. It’s fun trying to craft the flow of the day. It’s like putting together a set list for a concert. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and it really doesn’t matter because all the talks are going to be great anyway.

There are sponsors for Patterns Day now too. Thanks to Supernova and Etch you’re going to have bountiful supplies of coffee, tea and pastries throughout the day. Then, when the conference talks are done, we’ll head across the road to the Hare And Hounds for one of Luke Murphy’s famous geek pub quizes, with a bar tab generously provided by Zero Height.

Now, the venue for Patterns Day is beautiful but it doesn’t have enough space to provide everyone with lunch, so you’re going to have an hour and a half to explore some of Brighton’s trendy lunchtime spots. I’ve put together a list of lunch options for you, ordered by proximity to the Duke of York’s. These are all places I can personally vouch for.

Then, after the conference day, and after the pub quiz, there’s Vitaly’s workshop the next day. I will most definitely be there feeding on Vitaly’s knowledge. Get a ticket if you want to join me.

But wait! That’s not all! Even after the conference, and the pub quiz, and the workshop, the nerdy fun continues on the weekend. There’s going to be an Indie Web Camp here in Brighton on the Saturday and Sunday after Patterns Day.

If you’ve been to an Indie Web Camp before, you know how inspiring and fun it is. If you haven’t been to one yet, you should definitely come along. It’s free! If you’ve got your own website, or if you’re even just thinking about having your own website, it’s a great opportunity to meet with like-minded people.

So that’s going to be four days of non-stop good stuff here in Brighton. I’m looking forward to seeing you then!

Responsive typography and its role in design systems | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!

You’ve got your ticket, right?

In attempt to improve my Irish language skills, which are currently not very good at all, I’ve started using Duolingo. It’s quite good fun, with the just the right level of challenge so far.

Then there’s the gamification. Plenty of encouragement and nudging with prizes and streaks. Simon reckons it pays off:

It turns out the streak mechanism was exactly what I needed. That tiny piece of effort, repeated every day over multiple years, really does add up.

He mentions it in relation to Tom’s recently-ended ten-year streak of posting a video every single week.

During The Situation, I posted a video of myself playing a tune every day for 200 days.

A few years before that I did a 100 days challenge, publishing a post with exactly 100 words every day.

In both cases, the level of difficulty was just about right. If it were too difficult, the endeavour would inevitably fail at some point. As Robin says:

But every ounce of progress I’ve ever made is because I’ve focused on much, much smaller goals. Goals so small that they don’t even look like goals. Just write this morning. Just finish that chapter. Just get one less coffee. Just go for a walk over that hill. Just don’t eat that. Just call. Just work. Just sleep. These tiny, every day details are where progress is made. The small routines.

He mentions that in relation to new year’s resolutions, which are often far too broad and sweeping in scope. That chimes with something Justin Searles wrote recently:

I’ve never accomplished anything I felt proud of by setting a goal. In fact, the surest way to ensure I don’t do something is to set a goal. When asked to set goals for myself, I’ve found that expressing the goal (as opposed to achieving it) becomes my overriding objective.

I’m also not a fan of new year’s resolutions, though I do quite like Tina’s:

Keep slowing down. (Notice how everything’s still happening? Nothing is breaking.)

Like Anna says:

Forget resolutions, let’s all do less.

And if you are going to set a goal or resolution for yourself, why would you do it in the deepest gloom of winter? I’ve written about this before:

Think about it. It’s January. The middle of winter. It’s cold outside. The days are short. The only seasonal foods available are root vegetables and brassicas. Considering this lack of sunlight and fruit, it seems inadvisable to try to also deny yourself the intake of sugar, alcohol, meat, carbohydrates or gluten. You’re playing with a stacked deck. And then when inevitably, in the depths of winter, you cave in and pour yourself a glass of wine or indulge in a piece of cake, you now have the added weight of guilt on your shoulders to carry through the neverending winter nights.

So I’m not making any new year’s resolutions. Maybe I’ll make a Summer soltice resolution. But I’m not promising anything.

FROSTAPALOOZA - A CONCERT/PARTY/HAPPENING ON AUGUST 17th, 2024

Fancy joining me in Pittsburgh in August next year to celebrate Brad’s birthday?

The line-up for Patterns Day is complete! You’ll be hearing from eight fantastic speakers on March 7th 2024 here in Brighton.

I really like the mix of speakers we’ve got…

Half of the speakers will be sharing what they’ve learned from design systems in their organisations: Débora from LEGO, Mary from the Financial Times, Yolijn from the Dutch government, and Samantha from University College London. That’s a good spread of deep dives.

The other half of the speakers can go broad across design systems in general: Vitaly on design patterns, Rich on typography, Geri on accessibility, and Jina on …well, absolutely everything to do with design systems!

I’m so happy that I could get the line-up to have this mix. If you have any interest in design systems at all—whether it’s as a designer, a developer, a product manager, or anything else—you won’t want to miss this. Early bird tickets are £225.

But wait! That’s not all. If you really want to dive deep into interface design patterns, then stick around. The day after Patterns Day, Vitaly is running a one-day workshop:

In this in-person workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating enterprise grade tables, this workshop will give you the tools you need to excel at your work.

Places are limited. There isn’t room for everyone who’s going to be at Patterns Day, so if you—and your team—want to learn design pattern kung-fu from the master, get your workshop ticket now! Workshop tickets are £445.

I had a lot of fun making the website for Patterns Day.

If you’re interested in the tech stack, here’s what I used:

1. HTML
2. CSS

Actually, technically it’s all HTML because the styles are inside a style element rather than a separate style sheet, but you know what I mean. Also, there is technically some JavaScript but all it does is register a service worker that takes care of caching and going offline.

I didn’t use any build tools. There was no pipeline. There is no node_modules folder filling up my hard drive. Nothing was automated. The website was hand-crafted the long hard stupid way.

I started with the content. I wrote out the words and marked them up with the most appropriate HTML elements.

Time to layer on the presentation.

For the design, I turned to Michelle for help. I gave her a brief, describing the vibe of the conference, and asked her to come up with an appropriate visual language.

Crucially, I asked her not to design a website. Instead I asked her to think about other places where this design language might be used: a poster, social media, anything but a website.

Partly I was doing this for my own benefit. If you give me a pixel-perfect design for a web page and tell me to code it up, either I won’t do it or I won’t enjoy it. I just don’t get any motivation out of that kind of direct one-to-one translation.

But give me guardrails, give me constraints, give me boundary conditions, and off I go!

Michelle was very gracious in dealing with such a finicky client as myself (“Can you try this other direction?”, “Hmm… I think I preferred the first one after all!”) She delivered a colour palette, a type scale, typeface choices, and some wonderful tiling patterns …it is Patterns Day after all!

With just a few extra lines of CSS, the basic typography was in place.

I started layering on the colours. Even though this was a one-page site, I still made liberal use of custom properties in the CSS. It just feels good to be able to update one value and see the results, well …cascade.

I had a lot of fun with the tiling background images. SVG was the perfect format for these. And because the tiles were so small in file size, I just inlined them straight into the CSS.

By this point, I felt like I was truly designing in the browser. Adjusting spacing, playing around with layout, and all that squishy stuff. Some of the best results came from happy accidents—the way that certain elements behaved at certain screen sizes would lead me into little experiments that yielded interesting results.

I’m not sure it’s possible to engineer that kind of serendipity in Figma. Figma was the perfect tool for exploring ideas around the visual vocabulary, and for handing over design decisions around colour, typography, and texture. But when it comes to how the content is going to behave on the World Wide Web, nothing beats a browser for fidelity.

By this point I was really sweating the details, like getting the logo just right and adjusting the type scale for different screen sizes. Needless to say, Utopia was a godsend for that.

I was also checking back in with Michelle to get her take on design decisions I was making.

I could’ve kept tinkering but the diminishing returns were a sign that it was time to put this out into the world.

It felt really good to work on a web page like this. It felt like I was getting my hands into the soil of the web. I don’t think it’s an accident that the result turned out to be very performant.

Getting hands-on like this stops me from getting rusty. And honestly, working with CSS these days is a joy. There’s such power to be had from using var() in combination with functions like calc() and clamp(). Layout is a breeze with flexbox and grid. Browser differences are practically non-existent. We’ve never had it so good.

Here’s something I noticed about my relationship to CSS; my brain has finally made the switch to logical properties. Now if I’m looking at some CSS and I see left, right, top, or bottom, it looks like a bug to me. Those directional properties feel loaded with assumptions whereas logical properties feel much more like working with the grain of the web.

Mark your calendar: Thursday, March 7th, 2024. That’s when Patterns Day will return for its third edition.

Patterns Day is a one-day event focused on design systems. It’s for designers, developers, project managers, writers, and anyone else who’s working with design systems, pattern libraries, style guides, and components. Tickets are on sale now!

Once again, Patterns Day will be in the magnificent Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton, with its historic charm and dangerously comfortable seats.

The first Patterns Day was all the way back in 2017. Then we had the second Patterns Day in 2019. You can watch videos of the talks from both years.

We all know what happened after 2019. Nothing like a global pandemic to stop an event in its tracks.

Now, finally, Patterns Day is returning in 2024.

After all this time, is there still a need for an event focused on design systems?

In my opinion, the answer is “more than ever!”

When Clearleft first ran Patterns Day, we had been doing design systems work for a while, but other organisations were only at the start of their journey. Many of the attendees were from companies that were dabbling in design systems, or planned to put a design system together.

That situation has changed. Now most organisations either have at least some experience with design systems. Many companies have got design systems up and running.

But the challenges haven’t gone away. They’ve just changed. You might no longer need to convince anyone that a design system is a good idea, but you might well be struggling to convince people to use the design system you’ve got.

It can be lonely work. That’s why Patterns Day is so vital. It’s a chance to get together with other people going through the same struggles. You’ll have an opportunity to learn from their successes and failures. Most of all, you’ll have the reassurance that you are not alone.

I know that makes it sound more like therapy than a conference, but honestly, that’s where the true value lies.

We’ve already got some fantastic speakers lined up, but there are just as many still to come!

Can you tell that I’m very excited about this?

It would be lovely to see there. Tickets will cost £255, but you can secure your place now at the super early bird price of just £195. Dither ye not!

Can’t wait to see you in Brighton on March 7th—it’s going to be a day to remember!

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

I know how you feel, Samwise Gamgee.

I have returned from my travels—a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 crossing the Atlantic, followed by a weekend in New York, finishing with a week in Saint Augustine, Florida.

The Atlantic crossing was just as much fun as last time. In fact it was better because this time Jessica and I got to share the experience with our dear friends Dan and Sue.

There was dressing up! There was precarious ballet! There were waves! There were even some dolphins!

The truth is that this kind of Atlantic crossing is a bit like cosplaying a former age of travel. You get out of it what you put it into it. If you’re into LARPing as an Edwardian-era traveller, you’re going to have a good time.

We got very into it. Dressing up for dinner. Putting on a tux for the gala night. Donning masks for the masquerade evening.

It’s actually quite a practical way of travelling if you don’t mind being cut off from all digital communication for a week (this is a feature, not a bug). You adjust your clock by one hour most nights so that by the time you show up in New York, you’re on the right timezone with zero jetlag.

That was just as well because we had a packed weekend of activities in New York. By pure coincidence, two separate groups of friends were also in town from far away. We all met up and had a grand old time. Brunch in Tribeca; a John Cale concert in Prospect Park; the farmer’s market in Union Square; walking the high line …good times with good friends.

New York was hot, but not as hot as what followed in Florida. A week lazing about on Saint Augustine beach. I ate shrimp every single day. I regret nothing.

We timed our exit just right. We flew out of Florida before the tropical storm hit. Then we landed in Gatwick right before the air-traffic control chaos erupted.

I had one day of rest before going back to work.

Well, I say “work”, but the first item in my calendar was speaking at Web Summer Camp in Croatia. Back to the airport.

The talk went well, and I got to attend a performance workshop by Harry. But best of all was the location. Opatija is an idyllic paradise. Imagine crossing a web conference with White Lotus, but in a good way. It felt like a continuation of Florida, but with more placid clear waters.

But now I’m really back. And fortunately the English weather is playing along by being unseasonably warm . It’s as if the warm temperatures are following me around. I like it.

I managed to get out and play in trad sessions for four days straight: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Today I rest. Or rather, I pack.

There won’t be any Irish music sessions in my calendar for at least the next two weeks. There won’t be much of anything in my calendar. I’m about to be incommunicado as I travel to Amerikay on the wide Atlantic ocean.

You might have seen that video that’s been doing the rounds about how cruise ships got so big. I’m not going on a cruise. I’m going on a crossing. That video ends with:

There are over 320 cruise ships sailing around the world right now. But there’s only one ocean liner left. The Queen Mary 2.

That’s going to be my mode of transportation and my home for the next week.

Then I’ll be in New York for a weekend, followed by most of a week lying on St. Augustine beach in Florida.

All of my sparklines are about to flatline for a while: no blog posts, no links, no notes. I won’t have any internet access on board the ship.

Time for me to switch off my work email. I thought about setting up an autoresponder to let people know that I won’t be replying to their email for a few weeks. But then I thought, how is that any different from how I normally respond to email?