From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022).
I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together.
It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mildy. You definitely weren’t going to learn practical techniques to bring back into work on Monday morning. If anything, it was the kind of event that might convince you to quit your job on Monday morning.
The talks were design-informed, but with oodles of philosophy, culture and politics.
As you can imagine, that’s not an easy sell. Hence why we stopped running the event. It’s pretty hard to convince your boss to send you to a conference like that.
Sometimes I really miss it though. With everything going on in the tech world right now (and the world in general), it sure would be nice to get together in a room full of like-minded people to discuss the current situation.
Research By The Sea is most definitely not just for UX researchers—this sounds to me like the event to attend if, like me, you’re alarmed by everything happening right now.
Next Thursday, February 27th, this is the place to be if you’ve been missing dConstruct. See you there!
I’ve been reading lots of modern takes on Greek classics. So when I saw that there was going to be a short of run of Sophocles’s Electra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, I grabbed some tickets for the opening night.
With Brie Larson taking on the title role in this production, it’s bound to be popular.
I didn’t know anything about this staging of the play—other than it was using the Anne Carson translation—which is how I like it. I didn’t know if it was going to be modern, retro, classical or experimental.
It turned out to be kind of arty, but not in a good way. Arty like art school with all the clichés.
The production somehow managed to feel packed with gimmicks but also seriously underbaked at the same time. There must have a been a lot of “yes, and…”s during the workshopping, but no subsequent round of “no, but…”s. So we got lots of ideas thrown at the wall like spaghetti. Very few of them stuck.
Instead of enhancing the core text—which is, thankfully, indestructable—most of the gimmicks lessened it. It’s like they were afraid to let the play speak for itself and felt like they had to do stuff to it. Most of it ended up creating an emotional distance from the story and the characters.
It wasn’t bad, per se, but it definitely wasn’t good. It was distinctly mediocre.
Now, take all of this with a big pinch of salt because this is just my opinion. The very things that turned me off might tickle your fancy. Like the way it was half way to being a musical, with characters singing their dialogue in that monotone way that they do in Les Mis (but this is like Les really Mis). And the vocal effects that did nothing for me might be quite effective for you.
Even as I was watching it, I was thinking to myself, “Well, this isn’t really for me, but I can kind of appreciate that they’re trying to experiment.”
But then towards the end of the play, it went too far. Over the PA came samples of reporting of recent news stories; graphic, grisly, and crucially, real. If you’re going to attempt something like that, you need to earn it. Otherwise you’re just cheapening the real-world suffering. This play absolutely did not earn it.
Elektra has finished its run in Brighton and is now heading to London where it’s supposed to play until April. I’m curious to see how it goes.
Remy was on the team too. He did the heavy lifting of actually making the thing work—quite an achievement in just five days!
Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document the historical context of the time. Now that it’s all done, I’m somewhat astounded that we managed to achieve both.
Remy and I were both keen to talk about the work, which is why we did a joint talk at Fronteers in Amsterdam that year. We’re both quite sceptical of talks given by duos; people think it means it’ll be half the work, when actually it’s twice the work. In the end we come up with a structure for the talk that we both liked:
Now, we could’ve just done everything chronologically, but that would mean I’d do the first half of the talk and Remy would do the second half. That didn’t appeal. And it sounded kind of boring. So then we come up with the idea of interweaving the two timelines.
After putting so much work into the talk, we were keen to give it again somewhere. We had the chance to do that in Nottingham in early March 2020. (cue ominous foreboding)
The folks from local Brighton meetup Async had also asked if we wanted to give the talk. We were booked in for May 2020. (ominous foreboding intensifies)
We all know what happened next. The Situation. Lockdown. No conferences. No meetups.
But technically the talk wasn’t cancelled. It was just postponed. And postponed. And postponed. Before you know it, five years have passed.
Part of the problem was that Async is usually on the first Thursday of the month and that’s when I host an Irish music session in Hove. I can’t miss that!
I really enjoyed giving the talk and the discussion that followed. There was a good buzz.
It also made me appreciate the work that we put into stucturing the talk. We’ve only given it a few times but with a five year gap between presentations, I can confidentally say that’s it’s a timeless topic.
I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century.
That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week.
Top tip: if you get married in year ending with 00, you’ll always know how long ago it was. Just lop off the first 2000 years and there’s the number.
As well as being the year we got married (at a small ceremony in an army chapel in Arizona), 2000 was also the year we moved from Freiburg to Brighton. I never thought we’d still be here 25 years later.
2005 was twenty years ago. A lot of important events happened that year. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and met people who became lifelong friends (including some dear friends no longer with us).
I gave my first conference talk. We had the first ever web conference in the UK. And myself, Rich, and Andy founded Clearleft. You can expect plenty of reminiscence and reflection on the Clearleft blog over the course of this year.
2010 was fifteen years ago. That’s when Jessica and I moved into our current home. For the first time, we were paying off a mortgage instead of paying a landlord. But I can’t bring myself to consider us “homeowners” at that time. For me, we didn’t really become homeowners until we paid that mortgage off ten years later.
2020 was five years ago. It was also yesterday. The Situation was surreal, scary and weird. But the people I love came through it intact, for which I’m very grateful.
Apart from all these anniversaries, I’m not anticipating any big milestones in 2025. I hope it will be an unremarkable year.
I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.
To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.
Like, when I went out to my usual Wednesday evening traditional Irish music session I was prepared the inevitable discussion of Trump’s election. I was ready to quite clearly let people know that I didn’t want to talk about it. But I didn’t have to. Maybe because everyone else was feeling much the same, we just played and played. It was good.
Still, I was ready for the weekend and I wasn’t really feeling psyched up for FFConf on Friday. But once I got there, I was immediately uplifted.
It was so nice to see so many people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I had the chance to reconnect with people that I had only been hearing from through my RSS reader:
“Terence, I’m really enjoying your sci-fi short stories!”
“Kirsty, I was on tenterhooks when you were getting Mabel!”
(Mabel is an adorable kitty-cat. In hindsight I probably should’ve also congratulated her on getting married. To a human.)
The talks were really good this year. They covered a wide variety of topics.
There was only one talk about “AI” (unlike most conferences these days, where it dominates the agenda). Léonie gave a superb run-down of the different kinds of machine learning and how they can help or hinder accessibility.
Crucially, Léonie began her talk by directly referencing the exploitation and energy consumption inherent in today’s large language models. It took all of two minutes, but it was two minutes more than the whole day of talks at UX Brighton. Thank you, Léonie!
Some of the other talks covered big topics. Life. Death. Meaning. Purpose.
I enjoyed them all, though I often find something missing from discussions about meaning and purpose. Just about everyone agrees that having a life enfused with purpose is what provides meaning. So there’s an understandable quest to seek out what it is that gives you purpose.
But we’re also constantly reminded that every life has intrinsic meaning. “You are enough”, not “you are enough, as long as there’s some purpose to your life.”
I found myself thinking about Winne Lim’s great post on leading a purposeless life. I think about it a lot. It gives me comfort. Instead of assuming that your purpose is out there somewhere and you’ve got to find it, you can entertain the possibility that your life might not have a purpose …and that’s okay.
I know this all sounds like very heavy stuff, but it felt good to be in a room full of good people grappling with these kind of topics. I needed it.
The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.
But…
The theme of the conference was UX and “AI”, and I’ve never been more disappointed by what wasn’t said at a conference.
Not a single speaker addressed where the training data for current large language models comes from (it comes from scraping other people’s copyrighted creative works).
Not a single speaker addressed the energy requirements for current large language models (the requirements are absolutely mahoosive—not just for the training, but for each and every query).
My charitable reading of the situation yesterday was that every speaker assumed that someone else would cover those issues.
The less charitable reading is that this was a deliberate decision.
Whenever the issue of ethics came up, it was only ever in relation to how we might use these tools: considering user needs, being transparent, all that good stuff. But never once did the question arise of whether it’s ethical to even use these tools.
In fact, the message was often the opposite: words like “responsibility” and “duty” came up, but only in the admonition that UX designers have a responsibility and duty to use these tools! And if that carrot didn’t work, there’s always the stick of scaring you into using these tools for fear of being left behind and having a machine replace you.
I was left feeling somewhat depressed about the deliberately narrow focus. Maggie’s talk was the only one that dealt with any externalities, looking at how the firehose of slop is blasting away at society. But again, the focus was only ever on how these tools are used or abused; nobody addressed the possibility of deliberately choosing not to use them.
If audience members weren’t yet using generative tools in their daily work, the assumption was that they were lagging behind and it was only a matter of time before they’d get on board the hype train. There was no room for the idea that someone might examine the roots of these tools and make a conscious choice not to fund their development.
Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.
But none of the speakers at UX Brighton chose to examine the larger context of the tools they were encouraging us to use.
One speaker told us “Be curious!”, but clearly that curiosity should not extend to the foundations of the tools themselves. Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Instead look at all the cool stuff we can do now. Don’t worry about the fact that everything you do with these tools is built on a bedrock of exploitation and environmental harm. We should instead blithely build a new generation of user interfaces on the burial ground of human culture.
Whenever I get into a discussion about these issues, it always seems to come back ’round to whether these tools are actually any good or not. People point to the genuinely useful tasks they can accomplish. But that’s not my issue. There are absolutely smart and efficient ways to use large language models—in some situations, it’s like suddenly having a superpower. But as Molly White puts it:
The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.
There are no ethical uses of current large language models.
And if you believe that the ethical issues will somehow be ironed out in future iterations, then that’s all the more reason to stop using the current crop of exploitative large language models.
Anyway, like I said, all the talks at UX Brighton were very good. But I just wish just one of them had addressed the underlying questions that any good UX designer should ask: “Where did this data come from? What are the second-order effects of deploying this technology?”
Having a talk on those topics would’ve been nice, but I would’ve settled for having five minutes of one talk, or even one minute. But there was nothing.
There’s one possible explanation for this glaring absence that’s quite depressing to consider. It may be that these topics weren’t covered because there’s an assumption that everybody already knows about them, and frankly, doesn’t care.
To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.
Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.
In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.
With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.
Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.
It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.
Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!
I love libraries. I think they’re one of humanity’s greatest inventions.
My local library here in Brighton is terrific. It’s well-stocked, it’s got a welcoming atmosphere, and it’s in a great location.
But it has an information architecture problem.
Like most libraries, it’s using the Dewey Decimal system. It’s not a great system, but every classification system is going to have flaws—wherever you draw boundaries, there will be disagreement.
The Dewey Decimal class of 900 is for history and geography. Within that class, those 100 numbers (900 to 999) are further subdivded in groups of 10. For example, everything from 940 to 949 is for the history of Europe.
Dewey Decimal number 941 is for the history of the British Isles. The term “British Isles” is a geographical designation. It’s not a good geographical designation, but technically it’s not a political term. So it’s actually pretty smart to use a geographical rather than a political term for categorisation: geology moves a lot slower than politics.
But the Brighton Library is using the wrong label for their shelves. Everything under 941 is labelled “British History.”
The island of Ireland is part of the British Isles.
The Republic of Ireland is most definitely not part of Britain.
Seeing books about the history of Ireland, including post-colonial history, on a shelf labelled “British History” is …not good. Frankly, it’s offensive.
(I mentioned this situation to an English friend of mine, who said “Well, Ireland was once part of the British Empire”, to which I responded that all the books in the library about India should also be filed under “British History” by that logic.)
Just to be clear, I’m not saying there’s a problem with the library using the Dewey Decimal system. I’m saying they’re technically not using the system. They’ve deviated from the system’s labels by treating “History of the British Isles” and “British History” as synonymous.
I spoke to the library manager. They told me to write an email. I’ve written an email. We’ll see what happens.
You might think I’m being overly pedantic. That’s fair. But the fact this is happening in a library in England adds to the problem. It’s not just technically incorrect, it’s culturally clueless.
Mind you, I have noticed that quite a few English people have a somewhat fuzzy idea about the Republic of Ireland. Like, they understand it’s a different country, but they think it’s a different country in the way that Scotland is a different country, or Wales is a different country. They don’t seem to grasp that Ireland is a different country like France is a different country or Germany is a different country.
It would be charming if not for, y’know, those centuries of subjugation, exploitation, and forced starvation.
The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.
There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.
Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.
Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.
I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.
I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.
But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.
So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.
It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.
While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.
“It’s having your own website”, I said.
But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.
Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.
What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.
a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros
In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.
Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.
In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.
I like that second kind of bookmarklet.
Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.
Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.
Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.
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.
It’s been another busy week of evening activities that ended up covering a range of musical styles.
Monday
On Monday night I went to the session at The Fiddler’s Elbow. It’s on every fortnight. The musicians are always great but the crowd can be more variable. Sometimes it’s too rowdy for comfort. But this week was perfect, probably because not many people are going out in late (dry) January.
On Thursday night I was back in The Jolly Brewer. My friend Rob roped me into doing a Burns Night thing. “It’s not a session, but it’s not a gig” was how he described it. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
We had been brushing up on our Scottish tunes, but we were mostly faking it. In the end it didn’t matter. I don’t think there was a single Scottish person there. But there was a good crowd enjoying their tatties and neeps with suitably-addressed haggis while we played our tunes in the background.
Some more musicians showed up: a fiddler and two banjo players. “Isn’t there old-time music here tonight?” they asked. We told them that no, it was Burns Night, but why not play some old-time tunes anyway?
So I passed the night jamming along to lots of tunes I didn’t know. I hope I wasn’t too offputting for them. It was good fun.
Friday
Finally on Friday evening it was my turn to leave my mandolin at home and listen to some music instead. The brilliant DakhaBrakha were playing out at Sussex Uni in the Attenborough Centre.
Imagine if Tom Waits and Cocteau Twins came from Eastern Europe and joined forces. Well, DakhaBrakha are even better than that.
I think I first heard them years ago on YouTube when I came across a video of them playing at KEXP. The first song caught my attention, then proceeded to mercilessly hold my attention captive until I was completely at their mercy—the way it builds and builds is just astonishing! I’ve been a fan ever since.
The gig was brilliant. I was absolutely blown away. I highly recommend seeing them if you can. Not only will you hear some brilliant music, you’ll be supporting Ukraine.
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!
Socialising in England usually follows a set pattern. You work during the week. You go out on the weekend.
This week I’ve been doing the exact opposite. I’ve been out every weeknight and I plan to stay in all weekend.
Monday
On Monday Jessica and I took a trip up to London. Dinner in Chinatown followed by a film in the Curzon cinema in Soho.
Usually dinner and a movie would be a fun outing, but this was a more sombre affair. The film we saw was The Zone Of Interest followed by an interview with the director, Jonathan Glazer.
The film is officially released in February. This was an advance screening organised by The Wiener Holocaust Library. Jessica is a member, which is how we got our invitations.
I was unsure whether the framing device of The Zone Of Interest would work. The hidden camera set-up could’ve come across as gimicky. But it worked all too well. The experience was disturbingly immersive, thanks in no small part to the naturalistic performances. Not showing the other side of the wall was the right decision—hearing the other side of the wall was incredibly effective. The depth of research that went into this project was palpable. It not only succeeded in its core task of showing the banality of evil, it also worked on a meta level, displaying the banality of the remembrance of evil.
See this film. And see it projected if you can.
Tuesday
With the heaviness of Monday evening still rightly staying with me, I was glad to have an opportunity to lose myself in music for a while. There was an impromptu Irish music session at the lovely Hand In Hand brewpub in Kemptown. It’s usually more of a jazz venue, but my friend Robb who works there convinced them to try a more folky evening.
The session was nice and intimate—just five of us playing. The pub was busy and everyone seemed to really appreciate the music. Me, I just really got into playing jigs and reels with my talented friends.
Wednesday
Whereas the session in the Hand in Hand was an impromptu affair, the session in the Jolly Brewer is regular as clockwork. Every Wednesday evening at 8 o’clock, rain, hail, or shine.
Enough with the culture—time for some good hard science!
I hadn’t been to a Brighton Astro meetup in ages. Their monthly lectures are usually on the first Thursday of the month, which clashes with the session in the Ancient Mariner in Hove. But this month’s gathering was an exception, which meant I could finally make it.
Professor Malcolm Longair from the University of Cambridge was ostensibly speaking about the James Webb Space Telescope, but the talk ended up being larger in scope. The over-riding message was that we get the full picture of the universe by looking at all the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum—not just visible light, but not just infrared either.
It was so great to see how Brighton Astro has grown. It started life years ago as a meetup in the Clearleft building. Now it gets over a hundred people attending every month.
Friday
The weekend starts now. Apart from Salter Cane band practice tomorrow morning, I plan to stay in and stay cosy.
So it sometimes happens that if the calendar aligns just right, there are many sessions in one week. This was one of those weeks. I managed a streak of five sessions in a row.
The first was the regular Sunday afternoon session in The Bugle.
Then on Monday, it was The Fiddler’s Elbow.
The night after that there was a one-off session in the Hand in Hand, which will hopefully become a regular monthly occurrence.
On Wednesday it was the regular session at The Jolly Brewer.
Finally on Thursday it was the monthly session at The Lord Nelson.
I’m very lucky to have so many opportunities to play the music I love with my fellow musicians. I don’t take it for granted.
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.
It’s like a little mini conference season here in Brighton. Tomorrow is ffconf, which I’m really looking forward to. Last week was UX Brighton, which was thoroughly enjoyable.
Maybe it’s because the theme this year was all around creativity, but all of the UX Brighton speakers gave entertaining presentations. The topics of innovation and creativity were tackled from all kinds of different angles. I was having flashbacks to the Clearleft podcast episode on innovation—have a listen if you haven’t already.
As the day went on though, something was tickling at the back of my brain. Yes, it’s great to hear about ways to be more creative and unlock more innovation. But maybe there was something being left unsaid: finding novel ways of solving problems and meeting user needs should absolutely be done …once you’ve got your basics sorted out.
If your current offering is slow, hard to use, or inaccessible, that’s the place to prioritise time and investment. It doesn’t have to be at the expense of new initiatives: this can happen in parallel. But there’s no point spending all your efforts coming up with the most innovate lipstick for a pig.
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!
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!
