Journal tags: responsiveconf

When I announced the Responsive Day Out just three months ago, I was at pains to point out that it wouldn’t be a typical Clearleft event:

It’s a kind of conference, I guess, but I think of it as more like a gathering of like-minded people getting together to share what they’ve learned, show some examples, swap techniques, and discuss problems. And all of it will be related to responsive web design.

Well, it all went according to plan. In fact, it surpassed all expectations. It was really, really, really good, thanks to the unstoppable quick-fire knowledge bombs being dropped by each and every amazing speaker.

In the run-up to the event, I kept telling the speakers not to prepare too much; after all, these would just be quick 20 minute talks, and they were all donating their time and expertise …but clearly they didn’t listen to me. Everyone brought their A-game.

At the excellent after-party, courtesy of the kind people of Gridset, lots of people said how much they liked the format. It’s one I shamelessly ripped off from Honor’s Improving Reality event—a batch of three quick, focused talks back-to-back, followed by a joint discussion with all three speakers, and some questions from the audience. I was playing host for the day, and I tried my best to keep things lighthearted and irreverent. From the comments I heard, I think I succeeded in bringing the tone down.

Despite the barebones, stripped-down nature of the event, there was good coffee on hand throughout, thanks to A Book Apart and Shopify.

There will be audio, thanks to Drew. There will be video, thanks to Besquare and Mailchimp.

In the meantime, Marc has posted a bunch of pictures on Flickr and Orde Saunders liveblogged the whole day.

If you came along, thank you. I hope you had a good time and enjoyed a day out at the seaside. Special thanks to the people who came from afar afield as Italy, Spain, and Belgium. I really appreciate it.

I really enjoyed myself, and I was relieved that the somewhat unorthodox gathering worked so well. But really, yesterday was a smash hit because of the speakers. Sarah, David, Tom, Richard, Josh, Laura, Elliot, Anna, Bruce, Andy, Owen, Paul, and Mark …you were all magnificent. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This is shaping up to be a fun week. I’m off to Altitude down the coast in Portsmouth tomorrow. If you’re going to be there, come and say hello. Then just two days after that it’ll be the Responsive Day Out here in Brighton. Squee!

If you’re coming to Brighton the day before the conference, I recommend heading along to Thursday’s Async event on building HTML5 games. I won’t be able to make it, alas—I’ll be whisking the speakers off to an undisclosed location for a nice evening out.

I have a favour to ask of you if you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out on Friday. If you have any web-related books that you no longer need, please bring them along with you. I want to support Scrunchup’s initiative to distribute materials to schools.

I’ll also be bringing some books along, thanks to sponsors A Book Apart. If you ask a question during the discussion portions of the day, you can claim a book: either Ethan’s, or Luke’s, or Karen’s.

If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out, please get there nice and early for registration. Doors open at 9am and everything kicks off at 10am. There will be coffee. Good coffee.

Here’s the plan. It may change…

9:00 – 10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:20	Sarah Parmenter
10:20 – 10:40	David Bushell
10:40 – 11:00	Tom Maslen
11:00 – 11:15	Chat with Sarah, David, and Tom
11:15 – 11:45	Break
11:45 – 12:05	Richard Rutter and Josh Emerson
12:05 – 12:25	Laura Kalbag
12:25 – 12:45	Elliot Jay Stocks
12:45 – 13:00	Chat with Richard, Josh, Laura, and Elliot
13:00 – 14:30	Lunch break
14:30 – 14:50	Anna Debenham
14:50 – 15:10	Andy Hume
15:10 – 15:30	Bruce Lawson
15:30 – 15:45	Chat with Anna, Andy, and Bruce
15:45 – 16:15	Break
16:15 – 16:35	Owen Gregory
16:35 – 16:55	Paul Lloyd
16:55 – 17:15	Mark Boulton
17:15 – 17:30	Chat with Owen, Paul, and Mark

The Responsive Day Out is only two weeks away. Exciting!

If you have a ticket, just print it out (or bring along an electronic version on some kind of screen) and you’re good to go. If you didn’t get your Eventbrite ticket, let me know and I can resend it.

If didn’t get a ticket, sorry. But all is not lost. In my experience, it’s at this time—in the final run-up to the event—that ticket-holders start to bail, for whatever reasons: clashing events, work duties, illness, or whatever. We’re not offering any refunds, but people can swap tickets. So if you can’t make it, give a shout-out on Twitter: I can guarantee that there are plenty of people willing to take that ticket off your hands.

Remember, this isn’t going to be a typical Clearleft conference: a lot of the things that you would expect to get as standard at a conference won’t be on offer. No badges. No lanyards. No banners. No sponsor stands. And if you want to get a tea or coffee from the bar in the Brighton Dome, you’ll have to pay for it (although we will have coffee cart from Small Batch Coffee on hand to dish out free flat whites).

Here’s how I’ve got the day planned:

9:00 – 10:00	Registration
10:00 – 10:20	Sarah Parmenter
10:20 – 10:40	David Bushell
10:40 – 11:00	Tom Maslen
11:00 – 11:15	Chat with Sarah, David, and Tom
11:15 – 11:45	Break
11:45 – 12:05	Richard Rutter and Josh Emerson
12:05 – 12:25	Laura Kalbag
12:25 – 12:45	Elliot Jay Stocks
12:45 – 13:00	Chat with Richard, Josh, Laura, and Elliot
13:00 – 14:30	Lunch break
14:30 – 14:50	Anna Debenham
14:50 – 15:10	Andy Hume
15:10 – 15:30	Bruce Lawson
15:30 – 15:45	Chat with Anna, Andy, and Bruce
15:45 – 16:15	Break
16:15 – 16:35	Owen Gregory
16:35 – 16:55	Paul Lloyd
16:55 – 17:15	Mark Boulton
17:15 – 17:30	Chat with Owen, Paul, and Mark

It’s going to be a frenetic action-packed day! Then (after a suitable interval to grab some fish’n’chips or a curry or something) we can head on over to The Loft on Ship Street for the after-party from 7:30pm.

If the Responsive Day Out isn’t enough brain food for you, you might like to know that Remy is running a workshop the day before on mobile web apps. So if you’re coming down to Brighton anyway, you can kill two web technology birds with one stone.

The Responsive Day Out is just seven weeks away. That’s only 49 sleeps!

Alas, Malarkey has had to drop out. Sad face. But, I’ve managed to find another talented web geek from Corby: Tom Maslen of Responsive News fame. Happy face!

Here’s another bit of news: there will be an after-party. Rejoice! Thanks to the generosity of the fine people behind Gridset—that would be Mark Boulton Design then—we’ll be heading to The Loft on Ship Street in the evening to have a few drinks and a good ol’ chinwag. That’s where Remy had the Full Frontal after-party and I thought it worked really, really well. Instead of shouting over blaring music, you could actually have a natter with people.

Many, many thanks to Gridset for making this possible.

In other news of generosity, Drew has offered to work his podcasting magic. Thank you, Drew! And Craig has very kindly offered to record and host video of the event, made possible with sponsorship from Mailchimp. Thank you, Craig! Thank you, Mailchimp!

And get this: A Book Apart are also getting behind the day and they’ll be sending on some books that I plan to give away to attendees who ask questions during the discussiony bits. Thank you, my friends apart!

I could still do with just one more sponsor: I’d really like to hire out the Small Batch coffee cart for the day, like we did at dConstruct. There will be coffee and tea available from the Dome bar anyway, but the coffee is pretty awful. Even though the Responsive Day Out is going to be a very shoestring, grassroots affair, I’d still like to maintain some standards. So if you know of a company that might be interested in earning the gratitude of a few hundred web geeks, let them know about this (it’s around a grand to caffeinate a conference worth of geeks for a day).

If you’ve got your ticket, great; I look forward to seeing you on March 1st. If you don’t; sorry. And before you ask, no, I’m afraid there is no waiting list. We’re not doing any refunds or transfers—if someone with a ticket can’t make it, they can simply give (or sell) their ticket to someone else. We won’t be making any lanyards so we don’t need to match up people to name badges.

So keep an eye on Twitter (especially closer to the day) in case anyone with a ticket is planning to bail.

Well, there’s been an overwhelming response to the Responsive Day Out. Tickets sold out in less than 24 hours! I guess that I’m not the only one who wants to spend a day listening to what these great designers and developers have to say about the challenges of responsive web design.

So I got in touch with the Corn Exchange to see if there was any way of fitting in some more seats. It turns out there is. So the capacity for the event has expanded a bit and some more tickets have gone on sale.

But if you want one, you’d better grab it fast.

Oh, and remember, if you work at a cool company that wants to have the undying gratitude of web designers and web developers, get in touch about sponsoring a pre- or post-event party.

Update: And that’s it. The extra tickets are now gone too.

Any announcement that begins with “I’m really excited to announce…” usually doesn’t end well. It often means that some startup or product has been bought by Facebook, Twitter or Google. But with that in mind…

I’m really excited to announce… I’m putting on a new event.

It’s called Responsive Day Out and it will take place in the Corn Exchange in Brighton on Friday, March 1st, 2013.

It’s a kind of conference, I guess, but I think of it as more like a gathering of like-minded people getting together to share what they’ve learned, show some examples, swap techniques, and discuss problems. And all of it will be related to responsive web design.

A whole slew of really smart talented people will be speaking: Andy Clarke, Anna Debenham, Mark Boulton, Sarah Parmenter, Elliot Jay Stocks, Laura Kalbag, Bruce Lawson, and many more.

The format will be fun. There’ll be a block of three quickfire talks, just 15 to 20 minutes long, followed by a combined discussion hosted by yours truly, when I’ll be marshalling questions from the audience. We’ll have four of those blocks: two in the morning and two in the afternoon, with each block separated by a break.

I’m really looking forward to trying out this format. I think it’s going to be nice and zippy, with plenty of good solid practical lessons.

There are many different kinds of conferences. There are the big events like UX London with three days of talks and workshops. By the way, tickets for this year’s events went on sale this week—just check out that line-up of speakers! Grab yourself a ticket …or rather, convince your boss to grab you a ticket because, let’s face it, an intensive three-day event like UX London is the kind of thing that requires a training budget.

It’s a very different beast to dConstruct, which remains an affordable “big picture” event despite its stellar line-up of international speakers. I wish it could be cheaper, but there are certain unavoidable costs in any event: venue hire, speaker payment, travel and accommodation—it all adds up.

Then you’ve got the grassroots events like Barcamps and meetups, which ideally are free to attend, with costs covered by sponsorships.

I wish I could make Responsive Day Out a free event but putting it on in the Corn Exchange means there will be costs involving venue hire, lighting and projection. That said, I’ve done my best to keep the event as affordable as possible so…

Tickets are fifty quid plus VAT (a total of sixty quid).

I’ve had to cut a lot of corners to keep the price cheap:

• There will be no lanyards. You’ll just get a sticker or a stamp on your hand or something similarly lo-tech.
• There is no branding to speak of. The website is a simple one-page affair that Paul and I whipped up in a day or two. There will be no banners on stage or in the foyer. There isn’t even a logo.
• There are no speakers from overseas. This makes quite a big differences to the travel expenses—this is one of the reasons why dConstruct and Ampersand necessarily cost more.
• Perhaps most importantly, the speakers are very generously donating their time and considerable knowledge to this event.
• Unless some generous company wants to step up with sponsorship, there will be no after-party or pre-party. If you know of a generous company who would enjoy the undying gratitude of 300 web designers and developers by putting on either a pre- or after-party, please, please get in touch.

So please keep your expectations in check. This will not be a polished event like Build or dConstruct and it might feel a little provincial with its entirely UK-based speaker line-up but hey, fifty quid! Not bad, right?

With that in mind, if you have any interest at all in the design and development challenges involved in building responsive websites, you should grab a ticket and come along to the Responsive Day Out.

I’m really excited!