Who You Going to See at 10AM on June 1st?

When you go to the Big Design Conference 2012, the 10AM hour is your first “power hour” of speakers.  Yes, you have to choose to between a seasoned UX professional, a panel of experts, a typeface historian, and an author.  The topics include managing design(ers), lessons from a design library, web typography, and UX principles of Jim Henson.  Managers, nerds, design snobs, and puppet lovers have something to see.  Details are below.

Choice #1: Lessons from the DELL Design Pattern Library

The Dell Design Library is run by Global Site Design (GSD), Dell’s internal interactive design group. GSD is responsible for the complete transformation of Dell.com’s user experience and design across the site’s roughly 7,000,000 pages globally. Rebuilding a site on such a massive scale requires that you start with a firm foundation, so GSD created a modular design system consisting of a relatively small number of parts and templates that can be rearranged almost infinitely to build any desired webpage. These parts and templates, along with the instructions for using them, are housed in Dell’s custom built, publicly available, design library.

Join members of Dell’s Global Site Design team in a frank discussion about the highs and lows of building out a design library. The team will detail out how and why they built the library and give real world examples about what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t.

What You Will Learn:

• How to build a design library.
• How to scale a design system across a HUGE enterprise.
• What makes a good design library.
• How a library saves time and resources.
• How a design library supports a global team.
• Questions and Answers with the people who created and maintain the library.

Choice #2: Managing UX Design(ers)

If you lead UX activities and designers, you already know that it ain’t your usual management job. If you’re a designer or a developer or a non-UX manager, and are considering making the switch to UX management, then you need to know up front that this ain’t your usual management job. Prospects, newbies, and experienced leaders alike will find valuable guidance in this presentation, and we’ll make time to hear from each other about our victories and mistakes, and what alternately excites and terrifies us about leading UX teams.

In this presentation I’ll start with tips to help you decide whether you should – or should not – consider a UX management path, and share some general leadership observations. Then we’ll get into the good stuff, digging into what makes leading UX and UX designers such a unique and fascinating way to spend your days and nights.

You’ve probably already had (or will soon get) general management and leadership training, so this session will not include a personality type assessment, manager-employee role playing games, or trust exercises. We’ll focus on the things that make UX leadership different from other leadership roles, and prepare you to be successful as a leader in the field you learned to love as a practitioner.

Choice #3: CSS Web Typography Changes Everything

Web typography has been changing dramatically thanks to browser support for @font-face and server-based fonts. Web designers now have thousands of font choices where they once had just a dozen. But beyond @font-face, CSS 3 introduces myriad new OpenType typographic controls, being supported by the latest browsers. These OpenType features bring to web design the level of typographic refinement that print designers have enjoyed for the past decade. Beyond that, OpenType can do things you’ve never imagined fonts could do, from translating text to self-censorship, from building charts to predicting the future!

What You Will Learn

• How @font-face server-based web fonts work, and what options they replace
• Your choices for enabling @font-face, from self-hosting to web font services
• Learn about the state and near future of advanced typography support in browsers
• See how OpenType can make text more sophisticated
• Examine the “correct” typographic use of all these new features
• Review OpenType features in action on web pages, from workhorse everyday typography to the surprising and bizarre, via fonts created by Phinney and friends

Choice #4: From Muppets to Mastery–Core UX Principles of Jim Henson

Jim Henson started working as a puppeteer in 1954, a fair 40-50 years before many of us even considered User Experience as a career. He did, however, take it upon himself to apply many of the core principals that UX Designers are falling love with today (or are at least using as part of our everyday lives). Hang out for a quick dive into the life of Jim Henson, with a view into his work from the perspective of how it pertains to what it is we’re doing today, that promises to even leave Waldorf and Statler happy.

And yes, there will be muppets.

So many choices, you will want to register today!