Useful Talks And Videos From Web Design Conferences

• By The Smashing Editorial
• November 9th, 2012
• Conferences, Inspiration, Videos
• 19 Comments

As a Web professional, you can get great inspiration from a good conference session. While conferences may not bring value to all industries, the Web industry is stacked high with inspirational experts and quiet little geniuses beavering away from small home offices. A good Web conference shines a light on these clever souls and promotes professional growth and shared knowledge.

The number of conferences surrounding the Web design and development field continues to grow as new processes, techniques and other shared experiences, turned learning opportunities, are always presenting themselves throughout the industry. The problem becomes, with so many conferences that are out of reach for one reason or another, how does one catch the highlights from the conference that won’t fit into a 140 character tweet?

Luckily, more and more conferences are turning to video to capture their events to not only preserve the experience, but to pass it on to those who could not attend. So there are more chances than ever for Web professionals to stay abreast of all the latest industry talks and tips even when they can’t make it to a particular conference in person. We have gathered some inspiring resources and conference talks in this post, just in case you missed them or needed the refresher.

Bringing The Conferences To You

As a conference organiser, getting the word out about a conference can be as difficult as it is important. Lanyrd is great for the social element, and Eventbrite is a no-brainer as the ticket gateway. But what about after the event?

How do you reach the audience that you missed initially? How do you effectively expand the reach of your conference’s most poignant and potent talks? A number of sites have sprung up collating all of this wonderful content. Each with their own take on curating a library of conference videos.

Organized Wonder

Organized Wonder is a true oasis to find great content. The platform lets you discover the best talks, documentaries, interviews, short films and various other videos across the Web, and you can follow people you admire and share the content you value with others.

Taking a community/social approach to curated conference video, users are able to post video and receive followers, much like Twitter. Organized Wonder is the brainchild of Sawyer Hollenshead and features not only conference video, but also interviews and documentaries relevant to the Web industry.

David McCandless – The Beauty Of Data Visualization

• Frank Chimero – Do Things The Long, Hard, Stupid Way
• Craig Mod – Nourishing Habits For Nourishing Design
• Jeremy Keith – All Our Yesterdays
• Saron Ann Lee – Redesigning Success
• Rich Hickey – Simplicity Matters

Ontwik.com

Conceived by Ahmed Al-Ajmi, Ontwik is a curated library with content being pulled in via YouTube and Vimeo. The sessions on Ontwik tend to be development related with a large number of JavaScript sessions.

Ontwik has a comments feature so users can interact with other viewers and like the other video libraries, Ontwik has featured content on the front page.

Paul Irish – Javascript Development Workflow Of 2013

• Jina Bolton – Style Guide-Driven UI Design With Sass
• Tiffany Conroy – Design Processes, Not Interfaces
• Divya Manian – Designing In The Browser

Techpresentations.org

Techpresentations takes a different approach to collating conference video. It’s basically a wiki of technical presentations on various topics. Users can contribute to the site and there are feeds for upcoming events and calls for papers. The site doesn’t actually have conference video, but links to various conference sites. However, the Website’s conference listing is not very comprehensive.

Tim O’Reilly – Keynote Of OSCON 2012

• Brian Aker – Scaling OpenStack Technology. Lessons From The Field
• Rachel Chalmers – State Of The Infrastructure
• Steven G. Harris – Open Source, Java And Oracle – Cracking The Code
• Nicole Sullivan – The Top 5 Mistakes Of massive CSS
• Tom Cook – A Day In The Life Of Facebook Operations

TED Tech Talks

TED tech talks is a great place to go if you are looking for inspiration and future ideas from brilliant people from around the world. Browse the best talks and performances from TED conferences, TEDx and partner events, by subject, length, or rating. You can also check out TED’s What’s Next in Tech theme.

Evan Williams – On Listening To Twitter Users

• Melissa Marshall – Talk Nerdy To Me
• Mena Trott – On Blogs
• Jonathan Harris – The Web’s Secret Stories
• Golan Levin – On Software (As) Art
• John Maeda – Designing For Simplicity

Creative Mornings Videos

Creative Mornings is a monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types. All events are free of charge, include a 20 minutes talk, and are hosted in cities all over the world.

Kelli Anderson – About Design, Physics and Apple Pie

• Jonathan Harris – About Creative Phases And The Myth Of Consistency
• Charles Renfro – About His Projects In Performing Arts, Visual Arts and Architecture
• Bre Pettis – About Building Robots, Seattle, New York, Hackerbot Labs, And More
• Benjamin Salka – About Story Pirates
• Kirby Ferguson – About Everything Is A Remix”

Besquare

Besquare is meant to be resource for designers and developers to watch inspirational content when they have the spare time. At present, the content is being pulled in from Vimeo and YouTube. Future content will be hosted directly with Besquare. Plenty of useful features are planned to be rolled out to the site, including streaming of live events and speaker profile pages.

Ethan Marcotte – A Dao Of Flexibility

• Josh Brewer – Design Is About Relationships
• Jeffrey Zeldman – Interview
• Wilson Miner – When We Build
• Matthew Smith and Jamin Jantz – Switch: From Freelance To Entrepreneur

Do Lectures

DoLectures.Do Lectures is based on the simple idea that people who do things can inspire the rest of us to go and do things, too. Each year a set of people is invited to come to Do Lectures in Wales, UK and tell what they do. Small Do’s, big Do’s or extraordinary Do’s – definitely all of them are inspiring talks from people who want to change the world.

James Bridle – So What Does The Future Of The Book Look Like In A World Gone Digital?

• Shira Lazar – Breaking Barriers
• Mike Beeston – How To Read The Digital Tea Leaves
• David Hieatt – How Love, Luck And Ideas Got A Town Making Jeans Again?
• Mickey Smith – Do Trust In The Things You Love

Confreaks

Confreaks. Confreaks records conferences, seminars and workshops. The Website features the five most recent conferences, and the top five most viewed videos of the last seven days, the last 30 days, and all time.

Aaron Patterson – Rails 4 And The Future Of Web

• Sandi Metz – Go Ahead, Make A Mess
• Glenn Vanderburg – Grasping Complexity With Both Hands
• Erik Michaels-Ober – Writing A Rails Engine
• Will Leinweber – Schemaless SQL – The Best Of Both Worlds
• Leon Gersing – Gonzo – Exploration of Culture, Innovation and the Weird in Software

TYPO International Design Talks

TYPO Video Portal lets you watch talks from innovative designers, professors, marketing experts, scientists, artists, journalists and many more who speak at Typo Conference in London, Berlin or San Francisco, where they present and discuss diverse approaches in the fields of communication and design.

Tina Roth Eisenberg – The Power Of Side Projects And Eccentric Aunts

• Mike Monteiro – What Clients Don’t Know (… And Why It’s Your Fault)
• Anthony Burrill – Working Hard And Being Nice To People
• Irma Boom – Manifesto For The Book
• Paula Scher – Breakthroughs, Successes And Failures

MAD 2011 Conference Talks

MADinSpain is a Spain based international design event, hosted by the Spanish-speaking online community Domestika. Once a year, some of the best creative designers and agencies gather together in Madrid to share their insights and breathe creativity.

Matt Lambert – Motion Graphics,CGI, And Other Story Telling Elements

• Christian Alzmann – Industrial Light & Magic
• Joon Yong Park – First Born
• David Ronhe & Renaud Futterer – Hellohikimori
• Anders Gustavsson – Creativity And How It Merges With All Aspects In Multimedia And Design

JS Conf EU

JSConf EU JSConf EU events are described as intense, informative, challenging, even exclusive to a certain degree, but above all they’re fun. The JSConf EU 2012 had some of the talks take place in an inflatable transparent plastic bubble.

Michael Bebenita & Shu-yu Guo – Low Level JavaScript

• Stuart Memo – JavaScript Is The New Punk Rock
• Jing Jin & Matthew Delaney – The Web’s Black Magic
• Angus Croll – Break All The Rules
• Malte Ubl & John Hjelmstad – A Novel, Efficient Approach To JavaScript Loading

Beyond Tellerrand Conference Videos

Beyond Tellerrand is an affordable three-day event with intensive workshops and high-quality talks for Web enthusiasts about design, technology, inspiration and networking.

Des Traynor – Creating Dashboards And Data Visualizations That Resonate

• Jon Tan – Welcome To The Brave New World Of Web Type
• Steph Troeth – Cheat Your Way With UX
• Aaron Gustafson – Crafting Rich Experiences With Progressive Enhancement
• Dan Rubin – Hands-On Prototyping With HTML And CSS

WebShaped Conference Videos

Finland’s only frontend conference, Webshaped is a one-day event bringing together design and development.

Dan Eden – Moving The Web

• Lea Verou – /Reg(exp){2}lained/: Demystifying Regular Expressions
• Kyle Neath – A Better Future With KSS
• Simon Collison – A Philosophy of Restraint
• Karri Saarinen – Building With Twitter Bootstrap
• Phil Nash – The Browser Is Taking Over

The Thinking Digital Conference’s Videos

Thinking Digital is a three-day event, in an intimate and informal setting, with speakers from the worlds of technology, media, science, industry and the arts. While it has a much broader topic range than just Web industries, Thinking Digital delivers great talks for designer and developers, too.

Cameron Moll – The Burden Of Being Creative

• Inayaili de Leon – The Mechanical Revolution
• Brian Suda – Visualizing Data
• Mike Kus – Designing For Humans
• Faruk Ates – Designing To Where The Web Will Be
• Susan Weinschenk – Top Ten Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People

An Event Apart Videos

An Event Apart is an intensely educational two-day learning session for passionate practitioners of standards-based Web design. They present a wide diversity of Web-related talks. Some of the great minds in our industry discuss the newest developments and techniques.

Jeff Veen – How Web Works

• Jared Spool – Anatomy Of A Design Decision
• Kristina Halvorson – Message And Medium: Better Content By Design
• Like Wroblewski – Mobile First!
• Dan Cederholm – The CSS3 Experience
• Jeremy Keith – The Essence Of Interactivity

5D Immersive Conference Videos

As today’s digital technology blurs the boundaries between design, environment and storytelling, 5D explores our common goal of shaping immersive experiences through creative world-building. These videos are not focused on Web design and more on design in general.

Gore Verbinski – Reality And Hyper Reality

• The Future Of Storytelling In Transmedia
• Sekhar Kapur and Alex McDowell – Building Digital Worlds For The Screen
• Tracy Fullerton – Building Worlds
• Design Is Change
• Play As Process: Worldbuilding And New Ways To Imagine

JavaZone Conference Videos

JavaZone is one of Scandinavia’s biggest meeting places for software developers. JavaZone has been described as a high-quality, independent conference, and is a forum for knowledge exchange, recruitment and branding. As the name implies this conference focuses on the development side of design. Here be code!

Jonas Bonér – Up, Up And Up: Scaling Software With Akka 2

• Tim Berglund – Advanced Git
• Christine Gorman – Readable Code – And The Longest Secret Of How To Achieve It
• Margaretha Miles – The Challenge Of Maintenance
• Christian Johansen – Pure, Functional JavaScript
• Bartosz Majsak And Aslak Knutsen – Real Agile: How Real Test Lead To Real Progress

Øredev Conference Videos

Øredev Developer Conference in Malmö, Sweden, is another Web development-oriented conference focusing on subjects such as Java, .Net, Project Management, Web development and Testing.

Some Of The Talks from 2011 You Can Catch Up On

Jon Moore – Hypermedia APIs

• Kim Hindart – Are We Carrying Horses In Our Pockets?
• Jon Skeet – A Less Technical Talk On Technical Communication
• Neal Ford – Abstraction Distraction
• Jeff Atwood – Stack Overflow: Social Software For The Anti-Social
• David Evans – What Testers And Developers Can Learn From Each Other

JSConf 2012

JSConf focuses on two things, presenting mind-altering JavaScript technology during the daytime and providing exceptional “networking” parties during the evenings. One of the key differentiators about JSConf is that it is put on by a (crazy) group of JavaScript developers just like you.

James Whelton – Changing The World One Coderdojo At A Time

• Avni Khatri And Chris Williams – Diversity In Computing
• Christopher Chedeau – JSPP. Morph C++ Into JavaScript
• Brian McKenna – Roy
• Nikolai Onken – The Bikeshed Initiative
• Jake Archibald – AppCache Douchebag

Re:Build 2011

Re:Build is a conference about building the Web, drawing speakers from all fields of Web work.

Some Of The Talks from 2011 You Can Catch Up On

Neven Mrgan – Bit Depth

• Jan Cavan – Design Roadmap
• Brad Colbow – It’s The Little Things
• Leah Culver – Passion To Startup

WebStock

Webstock is a series of Web-related events with the aim of improving how websites are built through inspiration, education, insightful analysis and practical application. It’s a well-respected conference with thoroughly selected speakers. The archive of the site provides over 120 talks.

• Frank Chimero – The Digital Campfire
• Mark Pilgrim – The Future Of The Web: Where Are We Going And Why Am I In This Handbasket?
• John Gruber – The Gap Theory Of UI Design
• Marco Arment – Contrary To Popular Belief

Interlink Conference Videos

Interlink Conference is a small hand-crafted event created for all types of creative Web professionals. Explore the intersection of Web design, code, and content during 2 empowering days of curated talks and workshops in Vancouver.

Paul Boag – Unbelievable eCommerce

• Jessica Hische – Lettering For A Living
• Faruk Ates – Responsive People
• Jina Bolton – Why CSS Preprocessors Matter
• Erin Kissane – Little Big Systems
• Frank Chimero – Interview

PHP UK Conference Videos

PHP UK Conference. PHP UK Conferences take place once a year in London. They are attended by hundreds of delegates, speakers, sponsors, partners and volunteer assistants, and run by volunteers from the PHP community and elected committee members of PHP London. Among the delegates are professional Web developers and managers, along with some general PHP enthusiasts/evangelists and employment recruiters.

Harrie Verveer – Recognising Smelly Code

• Ian Barber – Teaching Your Machine To Find Fraudsters
• Patrick Allaert – Masterizing PHP Data Structure 102
• Rasmus Lerdorf – A Look At PHP In 2012
• June Henriksen – Creative Coding: Why “Doing Nothing” Doesn’t Mean You’re Not Working
• Zoë Slattery – The Misguided Manager

Build Conference Vimeo Channel

Build is a five-day design event made up of three days of conference, workshops, lectures & parties – bookended by a day of film and another of music.

Simon Collison – We Are The Explorers

• Craig Mod – Edges and Boundaries And The Future Book
• Simon Collison – We Are The Explorers
• Jason Santa Maria – On Web Typography
• Tim Brown – More Perfect Typography

Breaking Development Conference Videos

Breaking Development is one of the first conferences devoted entirely to designing and developing sites and applications for mobile devices using the open Web stack.

Matt Menzer – Here Be Dragons: Mobile Web And The Enterprise

• Jenifer Hanen – A Minimalist’s Guide To The Mobile Web
• James Pearce – This Web Goes To 11
• Josh Clark – The Seven Deadly Myths Of Mobile
• Peter-Paul Koch – The Mobile Browser World

Scandinavian Developers Conference Videos

SDC is about bringing together people who work with software development, to discuss new ideas, views on industry trends, and exchange experiences. It covers all the news about the latest tools and frameworks for both the Java and .Net platforms, as well as plenty about development for the Web, IBMi, and Mobile devices.

Martin Roth – RJDJ

• Sergi Mansilla – Application Development In The Cloud
• Jonas Nicklas – Testing Ikebana
• Paul Lewis – Making Games In HTML5
• Brad Lassey – Mozilla
• Björn Eriksson – Ocean Observations

Keeping it Realtime Conference

Keeping it Realtime is a melting pot conference for realtime technologies. The event describes itself as being a smaller gathering free of elitists, out of which you can get real big value, like being to talk to everyone and thereby making great connections.

Leah Culver – Why We Chose Long-Poling Over Websockets

• Panel Discussion – What Does Realtime Mean For The World Of The Future?
• Axel Kratel – Extending Message Brokers Natively All The Way To The Browser With Websockets
• Stephen Blum & Todd Greene – Building Realtime Voting For Spike TV
• Chad Selph – Telephony And The Realtime Web
• Sridatta Thatipamala – The Path To 500K: Achieving Massive Realtime Scalability

99U’s Videos

The annual 99U Conference, held each Spring, brings together 400+ creative thinkers and doers for two days to hear talks from creative luminaries and exchange best practices on making ideas happen.

James Victore – Your Work Is A Gift

• Tony Fadell – On Setting Constraints, Ignoring Experts & Embracing Self-Doubt
• Yves Béhar – Why Designers Should Be In Love With The Process
• Tony Schwartz – The Myths Of The Overworked Creative
• Scott Belsky – Is It Urgent, Or Is It Important?
• Jonah Lehrer – The Origins Of Creative Insight & Why You Need Grit

Mobilism Conference Videos

In 2011 and 2012 Mobilism invited some of the best speakers from the Web development and the mobile world, as well as representatives from browser vendors, operators, W3C, and tool makers, to guide you through the confusing jumble of platforms, tools, screen sizes, standards, and browsers that is the mobile ecosystem.

Brad Frost – For A Future-Friendly Web

• Stephen Hay – Responsive Design Workflow
• Brian Fling – Resonance: A Mobile Design Ethos
• Steve Souders – High Performance Mobile
• Lyza Danger Gardner – The Essence Of Content On The future Web

New Adventures Conference Videos

New Adventures is a unique and affordable Web design conference in the heart of England.

Robbie Manson – The Mindful Designer

• Mark Boulton – A New Canon
• Travis Schmeisser – We Used To Build Forts
• Jon Tan – Dedicated To Alan Colville

Velocity Conference Videos

O’Reilly Velocity Conference focuses on scalable, fast, and reliable Websites and services. It’s the best place to learn from peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share what has worked (and equally importantly, what has not worked) in real world applications. The focus is on practical, large-scale Web development, presented by experts.

Jay Parikh – Building For A Billion Users

• Richard Cook – How Complex Systems Fail
• Dallas Marlow – Lightning Demos
• Albert Wenger – Threats & Opportunities for a Faster and Stronger Web
• Jesse Robbins – Changing Culture & Being A force For Awesome
• Mike Christian – Frying Squirrels And Unspun Gyros

Fronteers Conference Videos

Fronteers is the Dutch non-profit trade organization of front-end developers, currently uniting some 450 front-end developers across The Netherlands and Belgium.

Chris Heilmann – Reasons To Be Cheerful

• Meagan Fisher – Creating Lifelike Designs With CSS3
• Jake Archibald – Reusable Code, For Good Or For Awesome!
• Derek Featherstone – Accessibility For The Modern Web

Frontend Conference Videos

FrontEndConf. Two days of inspiring talks on Frontend & UX technologies.

Javier Bargas-Avila – Is Beautiful Really Usable?

• Massimiliano Marcon – How Late Is Later?
• Thomas Jaggi and Rosmarie Wysseier – Frontend Development In Complex Projects
• Roger Dudler – Bridging The Gap Between Design And Development
• Denys Mishunov – Science Of Design

Day of JS Videos

Day of JS. On Jan 27th, 2011 MJG International put on a free conference at Google HQ. With speakers covering topics such as the state of the mobile Web, mobile javascript frameworks, browser performance and mobile best practices.

Scott Jehl – jQuery Mobile

• Alex Russell – How Web Browsers Work
• Dion Almaer & Ben Galbraith – The State Of The Mobile Web
• David Kaneda – Sencha Touch
• Yehuda Katz – SproutCore
• Kevin Whinnery – Titanium Mobile

Valio Con 2012

Videos of the talks from the Valio Con 2012, a Web design & development conference known for having a great vibe and being a lot of fun, like beach and bonfires, giveaways and prizes and easy approachable people.

Jeff Sheldon – On Ugmonk: Building A Brand From Passion Project To Full-Time Gig

• Jonathan Moore – Designing Experiences People Love
• Kyle Neath – Building An Army Of Robots
• Krystyn Heide – Create Happiness
• Rich Thornett – A Labor Of Love

There are plenty of extremely valuable conference materials out there. Sites like those listed above will hopefully help to share the knowledge from extremely talented speakers from around the globe. The world suddenly seems like a much smaller and better connected place for Web folks.