I had the pleasure of attending All Day Hey for the first time this week and I was fully blown away. Big shout out to the organisers, crew, speakers and everyone who put their efforts into the day.
Arriving in Leeds the night before, I met up with some familiar faces from Notts and from FFconf last year. It felt like a natural continuation of the good vibes felt back in Brighton.
On conference day a group of us met up for some delicious breakfast at Moose Coffee. If you like American style breakfast (and portion sizes!) I’d highly recommend it. Then we headed to the conference with minutes to spare before we found a seat and got comfy, ready for a day of great talks.
Amy Hupe – How to write sh*t documentation
The day kicked off with Amy’s talk. Immediately I knew we were in for a treat with a reference to the deliciously twisted blog from DHH, which continued throughout! I often go back and read this blog out of pure schadenfreude, it’s fucking wild.
Amy combined hilarious tongue in cheek delivery alongside some fantastic takeaways. While I only dabble in a bit of content design, I found a lot of really valuable points I could apply especially around using active language over passive.
Michelle Barker – Building a greener web
Michelle delivered a talk all around a more responsible and sustainable approach to the web. I really enjoyed her approach on how we can all contribute individually to reducing our emissions and waste when it comes to the digital space, it’s a fact that most emissions are causes by a handful of big corporations, but we still have the power and privilege to make change.
I particularly appreciated the accessibility of the talk to someone like myself who is less technical.
Emma Bostian – Building effective cross-cultural teams
Firstly, big props to Emma for going ahead with her talk after an evening in the hospital!
Emma’s talk really shed a lot of light on the different ways we communicate depending on our culture. I’ve had a lot of thoughts around how to communicate with different personality types at work, but I’ve never really considered how that applies when you combine different cultural communication styles.
I feel like I took a lot away from this, and I will have to give The Culture Map a read as I would like to delve more into this topic.
Marco Vidonis – The wonders of WebRTC
Now, being honest, I went into this talk not knowing what WebRTC was, but Marco’s lightning talk was really concise and told me a lot about it! I would also say that Marco probably wins the best designed slides of the day from me 🏆
Amanda Wowk – Plain language: it’s not just for designers
Amanda’s talk felt like a natural continuation of some of the topics covered in Amy’s talk earlier. She talked about how using plain language makes the web and beyond more accessible for everyone, something which I very much agree on!
It left me feeling like I should review my copywriting skills and make sure I’m writing in the more simple way possible, which is a great takeaway!
Matt Wheeler – Is your website accessible? Probably not
The final lightning talk was from Matt, who spoke to us about accessible web design and development. He says accessibility shouldn’t be an afterthought, using the all too common accessibility overlays as an example of this.
I also liked how he talked about accessibility starting with the brand. As a designer who straddles both myself, I very much agree, as in the past I’ve worked with brand palettes that just don’t work for the web in terms of accessibility. UX and accessibility go hand in hand, and I just found myself nodding along with everything Matt said.
Jack Franklin – Abstractions, complexities and off-ramps
Now Jack’s talk was the one that I went into thinking I wouldn’t really get it, as I’m a designer and not a developer! However, Jack’s delivery made this a really accessible talk to me too so I appreciated that. While I might not maintain large code bases, or integrate third-party apps… I do understand the problems he talked about with complexities adding to a project that can add potential failure points. I hear a lot about moving away from using too much JS, and this talk did a lot to add to that conversation. As someone who has tried to learn JS and failed miserably… I agree 😅
While I jest here, I think one of the major takeaways I took from Jack’s talk was when he spoke about the balance of UX and DX swaying more towards UX. I believe this also applies where the ‘D’ stands for Designer, something I want to go away and think about how we achieve.
Dina Amin – Making by breaking
Finally Dina closed the conference, and this was the talk I was excited for all day!
Dina’s talk all centred around her journey into a career in animation, and the steps it took to get there. From an education in product design, through to ‘tinkering’ with stop motion on Instagram. Her passion leaped out of the screen when she showed some of her old work. I loved how she explained her unique view on the world and how she can make a character out of any old bits of trash. This talk really spoke to me, I used to do similar tinkering when I was in school and university, and on a personal level it made me long for the days of creativity for the sake of it. While Dina has made this her career, she said that she makes a lot of time for personal projects too, and that she only now shares work that she wants to do more of – this was the big takeaway for me professionally.
A perfect close to the day, entertaining the audience with her whimsical work.
When the conference came to a close we all went to the social at Headrow House afterwards, a great little venue that really helped everyone come together and discuss the day.
For me, it felt like the overall theme was ‘communication’. How we communicate, why, what’s important to communicate throughout teams, other forms of communication than what you know, and a creative approach to communication.
I can’t wait for the next one 👏
