Some of the UMS crew took a road trip (9 hours one way!) down to St. Petersburg for Front-End Conf. a weekend or two ago. We met some wonderful people, talked about the best place to punch a dolphin (if you are so inclined) and heard some great speakers spreading the good word about design. With what looked like about 200 attendees and 7 speakers, Front-End Conf. had a relaxed mood and room to breathe but we already talked about that in the preview post.

Conversation and creativity were the words of the day. The speakers talked almost universally about the importance of accurately and successfully communicating ideas and values. Larissa Meek started us off with a comprehensive dissection of the brainstorming process. She reminded us that great ideas take experience, practice and an environment free of judgment. She even held her own brainstorming session right on stage. She has also graciously given us all her slides to study.

Niki Brown applied fundamental design principles to the problems we all face when trying to create a great design. She gave us the checklist and roadmap for what to think about when designing. Niki’s Slides. Meagan Fisher had to cut her talk short due to illness but during her time on stage showed us some of the most beautiful slides ever created, if you follow her on Dribbble you’ve already seen a preview of these fabled slides and Jina Bolton showed us her methods for structuring and building CSS.

Lea Alcantara made the whole audience switch seats and see what a stranger thinks of us. This gave us a new perspective on self branding. She reminded us that brands are defined by user perception. Often we are too close to our personal brand so we need others to help us define our message. Lea’s slides. With Sarah Parmenter giving us a superb overview of designing for the iPhone and Adelle Charles rounding out the day helping us out with a branding session.

We were able to get interviews with all the speakers and then some, we’ll be posting these over the next month or so in our Podcast series. We need to give a really big thanks to Dan Denny for putting on such a great conference and inviting us down. Front-End Conf. was a great show and if you didn’t make it out don’t worry; there’s always next year.

Here’s the twitter linkup for all the speakers if you’re into that sort of thing:
@larissameek
@meaganfisher
@lealea
@nikibrown
@jina
@adellecharles
@sazzy
@frontendconf
@dandenney