On 7 June, a couple of hundred web developers and designers will once again descend on Bristol’s harbourside for the third annual Pixel Pioneers conference. As in previous years, the one-track event will feature some of the industry’s brightest minds from around the world, who will present a mix of practical and inspiring talks about the latest trends in UX, design and front-end development.
This time speakers include internationally renowned Bristol residents Rachel Andrew and Jon Tan as well as Phil Hawksworth (UK), Verne Ho (USA), Lisi Linhart (Austria), and Chen Hui Jing (Singapore), who will cover topics as diverse as cutting-edge CSS layouts and how to understand them with DevTools, durable and inclusive design, modern web development with the JAMstack, web animation as an essential part of great user experience, and designing conversations for chatbots.
User experience champion Craig Sullivan, meanwhile, will present a 15-minute model for optimising device experiences. After analysing 400 client setups for Google Analytics data, Craig found experiences, particularly on mobile, littered with UX bugs, rendering issues and broken functionality. His data-driven approach helps test the right devices and flush out costly and harmful product defects.
The conference is preceded by a choice of two full-day workshops on 6 June (Front-End Performance with Harry Roberts and Web Accessibility for Developers with Shopify’s Tiffany Tse and Scott Vinkle), and there’s also a free warm-up event at Cookpad‘s HQ featuring talks by Bristol-based designer Elliot Jay Stocks and members of the Cookpad product and design team.
“I’m really excited about revealing the full line-up for this year’s conference,” Oliver Lindberg, founder of Pixel Pioneers, said. “It was really important to me to bring some world-class speakers to Bristol and also invite some local ones, such as Rachel Andrew, one of the primary authorities on CSS Grid, and Jon Tan, who runs the co-working studio Mild Bunch in Stokes Croft. Usually, they travel the world but very rarely give talks in their hometown.”
The event is a great opportunity for the community to come together, share ideas, learn, network catch up with old friends and make some new ones. Even though the focus is on organising an affordable event with international speakers on people’s doorstep, after two successful events in Bristol (and another two in Belfast), Pixel Pioneers is attracting designers and developers from all over the place.
“The majority of attendees are coming from Bristol and the south west,” Oliver commented, “but it’s fantastic to see that we also have people travelling from elsewhere in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania, Norway and even the US!”
Student tickets are half-price, and if you’re a member of an underrepresented group in tech but can’t afford the ticket for any reason, you can even attend the conference for free. Apply for a diversity ticket by 10 May.
For more on the event, the complete schedule and to pick up your tickets, check out the Pixel Pioneers website. To stay up to date, sign up to the newsletter and follow @pixelpioneers on Twitter.
