5 ways Generate will make you a better designer

Conferences are great places to be inspired, to recharge your creative batteries, to meet fellow makers, and also great places to learn new skills.

Generate New York promises all of these opportunities, with a real emphasis on discovering, sharing and learning.

Oliver Lindberg - conference organiser and net mag's Editor – says: “We've been lucky enough to attract some amazing speakers for Generate New York. What strikes me is how practical the talks promise to be. There's an amazing amount to learn.”

Here are some Generate New York highlights that promise a real emphasis on teaching and sharing...

• Buy your ticket for Generate New York

01. Build faster websites

Designing For Performance – presented by Lara Hogan – will focus on performance basics. She'll explore the subject from a design and front end perspective, including tips for optimizing HTML, CSS, and images.

02. Master project timelines

Irene Pereyra, User Experience Director and Anton Repponen, Creative Director, will walk-through an in-depth ‘behind the scenes’ of the challenges they have faced while working on large redesigns and other interactive projects in a chronological manner: from how the projects started, to the successes and hurdles faced along the way, and ultimately to launch.

03. Write better CSS

People are making some amazing things with CSS. But all this creativity and experimentation can, if not handled correctly, turn off users and customers. That's because CSS can slow your site down, particularly as the site scales.

Shopify's Jonathan Snook will be exploring how to write modular and scalable CSS for projects that are in continual development.

04. Work better with your clients

Mike Monteiro of Mule Design will be delivering the closing keynote: 13 Ways Designers Screw Up Client Presentations.

Giving some insight into what he'll be sharing, Monteiro says: “I’d rather have a good designer who can present well than a great designer who can’t. Work that can’t be sold is as useless as the designer who can’t sell it.”

The client designer relationship is, of course, a complex one. Monteiro – an exhaustive interview – further expands his views of how the dynamic should work.

05. Survive as a modern web worker

Brad Frost will be delivering the opening keynote talk at Generate New York, where he'll be discussing how to survive the pressures of working on today's web .

Sketching out his keynote, Frost says: "I want to talk about what it means to make a website in 2015 and what it means to call yourself a web designer... We're swimming in options, technologies, techniques, opinions. I want to say - coming from a none-programming background - that it's alright to not know everything."

Words: Martin Cooper