Frontend United: when hard work pays off
For the past few months I’ve been spending my evenings helping to arrange Frontend United with a dedicated team of Drupal users. There were times when I wanted to give up and it didn’t seem like we were going to pull it off, but I plodded on through and last weekend it all came together.
Frontend United tries to pick unusual and creative locations, this year we raised the bar and picked a nightclub, we hired the über-trendy Cargo in Shoreditch, it wasn’t without its pitfalls but it was a very inspiring and stimulating space for our attendees. You can see all the buzz about Frontend United at eventifier.
Even though the core of the event is Drupal we tried hard to focus on frontend topics which do not solely need to be applied to Drupal. As Bruce Lawson mentioned in his entertaining closing talk on Saturday, we had provided a browser sandwich: Christian Heilmann and Bruce were first and last of our fantastic speakers on Saturday. The conference started off with an opening session from Christian, he showed us what excites him in the web world and got some of us excited about FirefoxOS. I would like to tell you more about this, but to be honest at this point I was outside the club with the other team members doing a little dance, ecstatic that we had actually made it - it was actually happening!
We covered a broad range of topics over the weekend. Zélia Sakhi spoke about the Golden ratio in her quest for beauty in design and reminded us to try and apply the techniques we learned in art school to our websites. Edward O'Riordan whisked us through 800 years of art history to remind us that code is tool in creating modern day artwork. Then at the other end of the scale we had very specific Drupal talks from Théodore Biadala about Javascript in Drupal and how to make it better, whilst Matt Fielding joined James Panton to reprise the famous session on the Death of a Themer, from Drupalcamp London: revealing to us who killed the themer; telling us how they, as designer and developer, work together harmoniously.
At the after party Alex Pott and Kristof De Jaeger committed some very important code to Drupal 8 core, which was met with a round of applause and cheers from all of the attendees. This mega patch will make deploying sites with many different field settings so much easier in future: a relief to all frontend designers who occasionally have to tinker with deployments.
I feel that even though there was such a wide range of sessions there were a few recurring take home messages:
- Communicate with the team. Constant communication with all involved helps to stay focused and achieve the desired outcome, try new things and overcome obstacles before they become unmanageable.
- Design in the browser. Eliminating Photoshop as much as possible and sometimes even wireframes to get to the desired outcome faster.
- Keep pushing yourself, not only in web development but in life.
In my personal experience, the Drupal community continue to support me and push me through all aspects of my life, not just the crazy theming goodness that Drupal brings. Helping to organise Frontend United was my way to give a little back.