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Smashing Conference Live — Day 1

Events 102 Smashing Events 16

Over the next two days, we'll be bringing you all of the insights, photos, and highlights from the Smashing Conference — live from the conference venue. Our team will be posting updates from the early morning to the late evening on both days to bring you as close to the conference as possible. You can also track the tweets from the conference by following the hashtag #smashingconf and...

Make your first API call
Make your first API call

Over the next two days, we’ll be bringing you all of the insights, photos, and highlights from the Smashing Conference — live from the conference venue. Our team will be posting updates from the early morning to the late evening on both days to bring you as close to the conference as possible. You can also track the tweets from the conference by following the hashtag #smashingconf and permalink for live updates.

smashing conference live day 1

Bookmark this page to follow the auto-updates in real time. Please note that no live stream is available, but all videos will be made available for free after the event. You might want to check the schedule of the conference as well.

Here are some of the highlights of Day 1:

Monday, September 9th 2013

01.37

We gave away five Startup Vitamins posters to 5 SmashingConf attendees who’ve shared some really eye-catching #smashingconf snapshots — wouldn’t you agree? :)

07.00

Getting things ready for Smashing Conference 2013. It’s a beautiful day in Freiburg — the sun is shining and there’s barely a cloud in the sky. Everyone is up, bright and breezy, and we can’t wait to welcome everyone at the Kaufhaus.

Sunny Freiburg

“Cloud Nine.” Image credits — conceived:

07.15

We’re getting the Smashing Conference flags ready to hang outside the Kaufhaus:

smashing mag flags

And here they are! Look out for them blowing in the breeze. Join the queues of designers and developers and watch out for the Smashing Crew in orange handing out t-shirts, attendee bags and goodies! Exciting!

Attendee badges and goodie bags are all set and ready to go (and, of course, full of surprises!):

08.00

08.30

A couple of balloons in smashing colors this year ;)

“Party vibes at #smashingconf this morning.” Image credits — davidroessli:

Image credits — rebeccaac12:

08.38

08.51

08.53

09.00

09.05

What a surprise! The world’s first and best Web design boy band perform Bruce Lawson’s “Like a Rounded Corner”. We’ve got Dan Mall on keyboard, Nishant Kothary and Brad Frost on guitar, and Dan Rubin singing — what a performance!

“What a way to open a conference! #smashingconf!” thatpita.

Of course, photos weren’t enough — we just had to record!

09.15

Elliot Jay Stocks tells us his story, walking us through his flash websites with their on-load music, pixel fonts, and other crimes against the Web. But what’s been important are his side projects. Your side projects represent your passion and you never know what can grow from them. They can have a huge impact on your career.

Image credits — maratz:

09.44

10.20

Dan Mall talks about creating a visual inventory. Present your client with a bunch of websites that have solutions to the problem that you are having. Use these to ask questions that start conversations. Solve your clients’ problems using the successes and failures of others.

10.38

10.44

11.10

Grab a snack, have come coffee, and make sure to chat to all of the other attendees. When we come back Tim Kadlec will be talking about “Deliberate Performance” and Inayaili de León Persson about “The Most Important Part of your Job”.

Need some directions? Cat shows the way to the Smashing Lounge.

smashing lounge

If you need to chill out on some sofas, buy some Smashing Magazine books, or you just want to meet Cody, come along and say “Hi!”

And if you need some help or have some questions, speak to the crew. You can’t miss those orange t-shirts!

smashing crew

11.15

Make sure you say “Hi!” to our wonderful sponsors. They’re the guys that make it possible! Here are some of them in person:

Rukzuk

rukzuk sponsors

Inline Manual

inline manual

WordPress.com

wordpress

Fotolia

fotolia

11.17

11.19

11.20

Tim Kadlec talks about the importance of performance:

He’s given some great advice on setting a performance budget. Make sure that your page doesn’t go over that budget. This gives you a framework to decide whether you include a feature in your site or not. For example, your client wants you to add a carousel – to stay within budget you can decide to either:

  1. Optimize – optimize the carousel
  2. Remove – remove something else from the website
  3. Don’t include it at all. If something isn’t important enough to replace something there then it doesn’t need to be on your website.

This framework gives you something tangible to talk about with your boss or clients and helps you to make decisions.

Respect the people that come to your site:

  • respect their time, don’t make them waste their time waiting for your website to load.
  • respect their money – people on a mobile network can get charged a lot of money to download your website.
  • respect their desire for content.

And embrace constraints!

12.20

If you’re working from home, Inayaili de León has got some great advice. Stay in touch with your team, share news with other people, use Skype and Google Hangouts. Pick up the phone.

13.00

Lunch time! Be sure to try out the Freiburger Wurst at the Münsterplatz! Highly recommendable! ;)

14.05

How do you find your passion and follow it? Should we take jobs that we aren’t passionate about? Is it possible to pay attention to detail in something you don’t care about? Dan Rubin explains…

15.03

A few insights into Andy Hume’s talk on “Real Life Responsive Design”:

Image credits — klickreflex:

15.56

Afternoon break! Grab a pretzel everyone, and play some good ol’ football:

16.30

What lessons can we learn from the Web’s inner workings as we move to a mobile-driven, multi-device internet? Luke Wroblewski up on stage talking about where we need to focus our efforts on and to share lots of practical advice on how as well.

16.35

At what point does mobile use overtake traditional web use? At the mobile moment!

17.16

Here’s that Chrome Racer that Luke W. showed off. All from inside the browser – incredible!

17.22

The question isn’t just “How do we design for mobile creation?”… it’s “How do we design for multi-device creation?” — Luke W.

17.30

Jake Archibald rocks the stage with a couple of simple snippets of HTML and JavaScript… aaaand proves to be a Games of Thrones fan ;)

18.30

It’s time for our last break… Let’s get back in an hour, grab some cold beer (provided, of course!) and join the evening talk!

If you want to head right to the party, that’s cool, too. Here is the map: http://www.smashed.by/confmap — the doors open around 9 PM.

19.35

The evening session with @indiegamemovie just kicked off, everyone has a cold beer in their hands… and it’s only the first day, folks! ;-)

21.00

And now we’re all off to the attendee party — yaaay! A huuuge thank you once again to @wordpressdotcom for hosting tonight’s party — everyone is in for a truly fantastic evening! :-)

Thank you, dear attendees, for all your tweets, snapshots and wonderful feedback — we sincerely appreciate it! We look very much forward to seeing you tomorrow! Rock on!

Ready for Day 2 of the Smashing Conference?

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