Responsive design has made designing flexible websites fashionable again, but there’s way more to being fashionably flexible than technology or using CSS3 media queries.

This unique, hands-on, workshop — hosted by Andy Clarke, designer, author and speaker — puts the design back into responsive design. Andy will teach you how to design from the ‘content out’, instead of from the ‘canvas in’.

He’ll demonstrate how to separate design from layout, and if you work with designs made in Photoshop, he’ll show you how to deconstruct a design into its components (colour, texture and typography) before reassembling it for a fluid continuum of devices from mobile phones to desktops and everything in between.

If you’re a web designer or developer, you’ll learn how to:

• adapt layouts for smartphones, tablets and more
• make decisions about navigation, search and other interface elements
• optimise typefaces and type sizes for different screens

What will you learn?

In the morning, Andy will demonstrate:

• preparing your content for responsive design
• defining content and device breakpoints
• interpreting visual designs
• separating design from layout
• designing alternatives

Working in groups, in sketchbooks and in Photoshop, you’ll put the lessons you’ve learned into practice.

In the afternoon, Andy will explain how to:

• minimise markup for maximum flexibility
• apply CSS3 media queries responsibly
• serve appropriately sized images
• reorder content with table display properties

And this day will be full of opportunities to ask questions and swap ideas with like-minded designers and developers. You’ll leave with a head full of ideas you can put into practice right now, and the inspiration to get stuck into it the very next day.

Keen to start building web and mobile apps with web technologies? This workshop is the kickstart you need.

HTML5 is so much more than a bunch of new semantic markup. Over the course of a very full day John Allsopp will take you beyond the header and footer, to focus on some of the powerful, but surprisingly easy to use features of HTML5 and related W3C technologies.

John will also focus on important universal access issues like backwards compatibility, accessibility, device and browser support, to ensure your sites and apps work across the widest range of devices for as many people as possible.

What will I learn?

In this in-depth hands on workshop, you’ll learn about and put into practice the key elements you need to know about to start building apps with web technologies.

• New form elements, attributes and APIs for creating rich HTML5 application interfaces.
• Features of HTML5 that allow applications and sites to still be usable when the user is offline, and to store data during a session, and between sessions.
• Learn how to include audio and video to be played natively in the browser, with fallbacks for older browsers.
• Get a solid understanding of the 2D drawing capabilities of the HTML5 Canvas
• The ability to know where the user is, whether they’re using a mobile or desktop device can greatly improve the experiences we can create. Learn how you can locate and track your users using the W3C geolocation standard.
• HTML5 and related W3C technologies are increasingly providing the sorts of goodies we’ve had to rely on jQuery, other JavaScript libraries, and plug-ins like Flash to provide. We’ll also be covering some of the well supported W3 standards that are making developers’ lives easier, and enabling new, standards based user experiences.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for anyone who is ready to start building apps using web technologies. The core focus is the features of HTML5, particularly DOM APIs, and what they enable, not JavaScript. So, if you are comfortable with CSS and HTML, you will be fine with this workshop.

However, we will cover aspects of the DOM, and there’ll be a little bit of JavaScript involved, but there’s no need to be a Ninja!