Tuesday, February 10, 7:30pm

    Rawr! We have awakened from our fluffy hibernation slumber! And we hunger for sweet new web/design knowledge! If you do too, please come by for our first meetup of 2015, on February 10th, for an evening of casual nerdery and general interestingness.

    You can follow up.front on twitter and on meetup.com.

    PS: Want to start the new year with getting in front of an audience and talking about a topic that you are passionate about? Don’t wait, send us your talk idea! We can’t wait to read about it.

    • Johan Dettmar: Creativity, How?

      Everyone can be creative, most of us know this by now. Thus it is a skill, that can be improved, rather than a born-with-it talent.
      But how do we get more creative? Are we putting ourselves in the right environment and mindset in order to get the most juice out of our brains? Johan will talk about methods and ideas around the topic of improving your creativity as an individual or group.

      Johan is a freelance web developer based in Berlin, trying to mix client work and self initiated projects. At Hyper Island, where Johan used to study, they work process based, focusing a lot on HOW to be creative. Johan was part of a project called Project of How where he collected and shared methods on how to be more creative.

    • Stefan Judis:Staying In The Fast Lane - Tools to Keep Your Site Speedy & Light

      Developing a fast website is not easy. There are plenty of tools and techniques to serve a good and fast experience to our visitors. But monitoring how a site evolves and evaluating and spotting performance bottlenecks is also something everybody should take care of. This talk will give a brief overview describing which tools are available and why it makes sense to build up a performance culture inside of a company.

      Stefan has been working in e-commerce for 4 years and is just entering the world of single page applications. Mostly doing frontend stuff, he is also really into performance and fancy cutting edge technologies. In his spare time he contributes to various open source projects.

    • Ferdinand Vogler: Getting Web-Typography Just Right With Sass

      “95% of the information on the web is written language” (Oliver Reichenstein). Striving for typographic structure, hierachy and legibility across various devices should be a must in every designer’s skillset. In this talk Ferdinand will explain the basics of well-set type and how Sass can be a powerful ally to achieve that.

      Ferdinand is a communication design student in fifth semester at HTW Berlin and started his work as a design and web-development freelancer just over a year ago.

    Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

    Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

    You are required to follow our code of conduct.

    Tuesday, December 09, 7:30pm

    Save the date: The 53rd edition of Up.front is coming up on December 9th! Join us for the final meetup of the year with talks by David Owens, Tania Abanina and Hany Rizk.

    You can follow up.front on twitter and RSVP at meetup.com.

    • David Owens: The Virtues of Cities and How to Rebuild Them

      The earliest human settlements were founded, and grew, thanks to the benefits of shared resources and communal ways of working. After the industrial revolution city growth exploded to produce the global megacities we are familiar with today.
      These megacities are often missing the personal relationships that were the reasons for their original founding. Cities have grown to serve the global economy before their citizens.
      Connected cities and the sharing economy point to ways that we can recover some of those lost benefits of city living. How can we as designers and developers contribute to sustainable, livable and social cities?

      David Owens works as Principal Web Developer at AKQA. He’s fascinated by cities, networks and the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds.

    • Tania Abanina: Touchable Reminder for Our Dear Community

      In her lightning talk Tania will remind us of a part of our bodies that we strain a lot in our everyday work: wrists. After a short explanation of the anatomy, she’ll share a few exercises and releasing techniques that can be helpful to keep our wrists healthy.

      Tania is a web/UX designer and front-end developer, photographer, body researcher, tree hugger. Also Siberian.

    • Hany Rizk: Is UX Killing the Experience?

      Testing and optimisation techniques have become ubiquitous and common to a point where almost any use case or UI or UX element has become standardised with best practices and design guidelines. This leads to products having similar look-and-feels with no uniqueness or sense of identity at all.
      How can a product be designed with a strong identity to stand out among its competitors, while at the same time appeasing to best practices in UX and conversion?

      A UX person through and through, Hany has been working and actively involved in the UX scene for over three years now. After receiving a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Uppsala University in Sweden, Hany began focusing on UX & product strategy on which he’s given numerous talks at different conferences and events in Germany, Sweden and Lebanon. He is also on the organizing committee of EuroIA.

    Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

    Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

    You are required to follow our code of conduct.

    Tuesday, November 11, 7:30pm

    Up.front 52 is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, November 11th to talk all things web, design and front end. We still have a slot for a speaker available – Don’t wait, submit your talk idea!
    You can share the word via twitter or on meetup.com.

    • Mariusz Ciesla:Making animations make sense

      Judging by the number of animated GIFs on Dribbble, we can probably all tell that fancy animations and transitions are all the rage in interaction design. How do we make sure they add to the experience, rather than being a fancy distraction, though?

      Mariusz is a designer, developer and co-founder of Lifetramp.com. He’s a big fan of both animations and good user experience, which led him to running a Gibbon playlist about designing meaningful UI animations. Really bad at maintaining balance on a skateboard.

    • Bastian Albers:Why Gestures Suck in HTML5 (and why not so much anymore)

      We are used to fancy touch interfaces of native apps by now. You can do a lot if not almost all of that gesture goodness in the browser as well, but it's a kind of screwed up competition. "the browser" is a million things. Let me walk you through some technical basics and ideas of what you can do and how. And how to always have a fallback, as we're still building for the web.

      Bastian is a web developer and consultant from Berlin and often found teaching workshops at OpenTechSchool.

    Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

    Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

    You are required to follow our code of conduct.

    Tuesday, October 14, 7:30pm

    Join us on Tuesday, October 14th for talks by Jana, Johannes and Lu! Share, spread the word and invite friends via meetup.com or Twitter.

    • Johannes Ippen:Breaking the Web

      Popups, Flash Intros, Preloaders – when websites start to get annoying, they will break the user experience. But why are we making the same mistakes over and over again? Johannes Ippen tries to figure that out in his talk about Mark Twain, chairs and User Centric Design.

      Johannes Ippen is a designer and author from Berlin. With his team, he is responsible for the brand and marketing design at the game developer Wooga. In his spare time, he does fun stuff at thxalot.co.

    • Lu Nelson: Advanced Sass with Maps

      In this nerdy opinionated talk, Lu Nelson will look at the power of using ’maps’ in advanced Sass CSS. Maps are Sass’ version of hashes/objects/dictionaries, which since their introduction in late 2013 have offered new ways to dynamically drive complex CSS. Lu’s talk will look at the workings of ’maps’ in Sass and examples—drawn from his personal projects and experiments—of [what he considers to be] their most powerful features. It will show how the dynamic nature of Sass ’maps’ manages challenges such as modular and responsive layout and typography, complex css transitions, and more. The talk will also touch on performance and tooling with a look at ruby-sass vs. libsass, polyfilling maps in libsass, building with gulp.js and browser-sync, and other stuff.

      Lu Nelson is a Berlin-based designer/developer who likes to make CSS work the way he thinks it should work.

    • Jana Ahrens: Fashion and Tech: Emotion meets Optimization

      Fashion and tech, tech and fashion. Both industries eye each other with lots of curiosity. Lately they start to mingle. Sometimes cautiously and sometimes full-steam ahead with the power of VC-backed startups. But what does that mean for users, customers, programmers and designers? In which ways can we learn from each other? What is the current status and what needs to be done? Jana will share her insights from working in fashion and the web for many years, and shine a light on the status quo as well as on upcoming trends and future developments.

      Jana is a trained fashion designer who lately turned to writing about all things fashion. She is not so much interested in beautiful things but in the beauty of their context.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, September 09, 7:30pm

Celebrating our 50th meetup: Join us for up.front.ug on September 9th at co.up!

It’s official: we’re old! 50 years of up.front! Well, nearly. After more than four years and about 100 different speakers from all over the world and what feels like most of Berlin’s tech scene, we now reconvene for a celebratory recap with some of our veteran speakers, one from each of the past three years. So please join us on Tuesday, the 9th of September, for the 50th edition of our humble little meetup.

We’re happy to welcome Emma, Tim and Tiffany as our anniversary speakers:

  • The up.front Team: A Look Back at 4 Years of Up.front

    Charts! Maps! Numbers! Deep analytical insights into meetup demographics! Awards! And… er… ah! Historical photographs of the earliest recorded up.front meetups. They’re practically cave paintings. Ok, daguerrotypes. Also: Brownies! Prosecco! Balloons! And we totally didn’t open that Prosecco yet, we promise.

    The up.front team is a band of fearless red pandas, roaming the skies in their solar-powered meetup airship, delivering frontend fun to all sorts of tiny little islands. I may be mixing things up with TaleSpin, though.

  • Tiffany Conroy: Lions and Tigers and Handling User Capabilities

    Many applications restrict access to some features for some users for various reasons. For example: Only premium users get access to extra features. Only supervisors can edit product categories. I went on a hunt to gather patterns and techniques for handling the logic around user capabilities in client-side apps. Join me on a safari through the approaches, and I’ll tell you what I have learned.

    Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin doing front-end development and interaction design at SoundCloud. She created @weareallawesome and is a JSConfEu co-curator.

  • Tim Lucas: Let’s All Be Beginners Again

    It’s not often you’re afforded a view of your profession from the eyes of a beginner. After having recently taught an introductory course to web design and programming, Tim will share, reflect and discuss on some of the surprises and challenges that his students faced during their first foray into web development.

    Tim is a product designer and programmer from Melbourne, Australia. After leaving Berlin he co-founded @cssconfau, recently joined @buildbox, was a UI programmer at Amen, and is returning to up.front after 3 years whilst in town for jsfest.berlin.

  • Emma Rose Metcalfe: Erfahrung, Erlebnis & Universe time.

    From prototyping to opera singers, I’ve collected up my favourite things from the depths of Experience Design and the Experience Economy. We’ll rattle through some reasons why designing meaningful experiences with care and courage matters to all of us in a hyper social digital – wow, there’s a fainting goat – world.

    Emma Rose Metcalfe is an Experience designer and researcher. She used to head the product team at How.Do, which she also co-founded.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, July 08, 7:30pm

Upfront time! We’re delighted to welcome two wonderful speakers to our short-but-brilliant pre-semifinals up.front, which, refreshingly, won’t be football-themed. Join us for two great talks, cool drinks and general milling around and chatting with interesting people. And if you’re in a footbally mood: we’ll wrap up in time for you to commute to your favourite bar / public square / Späti / Ländereck / Dönerbude in time for kick off.
You can RSVP and spread the word on meetup.com and Facebook, and follow us on Twitter for updates.

  • Spiros Martzoukos Lessons from the FontShop site relaunch

    Download Slides

    After having worked for months on the Front End part of the new FontShop site relaunch, Spiros has learnt a lot of lessons, solved many problems and created others. He will share how the team used BEM and never looked back at tangled styles and specificity issues, integrated OOCSS and a living style guide in the process, used Angular to quickly set up complex applications within the site and what challenges they faced with Sass loading times.

    Spiros comes from Greece, is half Japanese and works in a German agency, Edenspiekermann, as a Front End Developer. His code is as schizophrenic as that.

  • Danielle Reid Design and the Future Interface

    Download Slides

    As technology moves increasingly from the desktop to the pocket - or wrist, interface design must be reimagined. This talk will discuss how we design information for future interfaces and the role that different mediums can play in both creating and consuming content as we’re on the go.

    Danielle is a former art director turned entrepreneur, co-founding Capsule.fm and Sterio.me. Both Capsule.fm and Sterio.fm offer new opportunities to design interfaces in the realm of audio technology.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, June 10, 7:30pm

It is time for our summer edition of up.front! We look forward to talks by Martin Klepsch and Mike LaVigne. Doors open at 7pm at co.up’s third floor. See you there, and feel free to share and spread the word on Twitter, Facebook or Meetup.

  • Martin Klepsch CSS, Interfaces and What We Can Do About It

    When HTML was first formulated it was strongly influenced by a documentation format used at CERN. It then often contained information about the visual appearance of documents which “cluttered” the source with secondary information not relevant to the document’s content. Soon thereafter CSS was drafted to separate these two concerns.
    Today the web has evolved and it’s no longer just a source for documents but provides rich interfaces to consume and create a wide variety of content.
    Still, the underlying mechanics to build these interfaces haven’t changed much, and complex, responsive layouts require significant effort and code that is not always easy grasp.
    Let’s take a look at a different approach and how we might be able to level up our toolset to build complex interfaces for the web.

    Martin enjoys eating, drinking, talking and programming. Currently developing a deep love for Clojure.

  • Mike LaVigne Anti-segment Approach to Product Development

    When is not segmenting your audience the right thing to do? Mike will talk about the research that lead to an unconventional decision to ignore segmentations when creating an app for women. Clue is an app used by women to track their monthly cycles.

    Mike LaVigne is currently product manager for Clue and formerly a creative director and strategist at Frog Design and Fjord.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, May 13, 7:30pm

We are excited to announce our lineup for May, with talks by Burak Son and Allard van Helbergen. Join us and learn about mobile performance and how to boost the workflow in your UX design team. Doors open at 7pm at co.up’s third floor. See you there, and feel free to share and spread the word on Twitter, Facebook or Meetup.

  • Burak Son Performance Matters: Mobile Websites

    Have you ever thought whether users have smooth and fast experience on your mobile website? This talk aims to shed light on the factors that affect bad user experience on mobile web products. It will also guide you through how to get the best out of countless devices and platforms. The talk briefly covers the main practices for performance optimization in front-end development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) as well as generic tips that need to be taken into account.

    Burak is a front-end developer, currently working at Sociomantic Labs in Berlin. He enjoys working on standalone client-side development with different technologies and environments.

  • Allard van Helbergen Design Thinking from the Trenches - Introducing Phased Design Sprints into Scrum

    How can you ensure that you are making informed design decisions and aren’t wasting time on building the wrong thing? How can you maximise the decision making power that UX Design has? For all the jargon flying around regarding Agile Processes, Scrum Methodologies and Lean UX, there is surprisingly little guidance available on what it means to bring Design Thinking and User Centered Design into your daily grind when working on an established app. Building off of existing concepts, Allard proposes tweaking the workflow that UX Designers have in a Scrum team so as to maximise the impact that design has for the product.

    Allard is a UX Designer at Brandwatch, ex-Googler, frontend afficionado and general process geek. As an avid wind-/kite-/snow-/skate-/everythingboarder he loves the rush of adrenaline as well as watching cartoons on Sunday morning with a bowl of cereals.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, April 08, 7:30pm

The countdown is on: On April 8th, support for Windows XP will officially end! Come join us at the 46th up.front meetup and let’s celebrate together. More details to be announced soon. You can follow us on Twitter for updates.

  • Loren Baxter Changing Behavior with Design

    Many of the products we make try to impact lives, from health to education, finances to entertainment. How do we help people make great choices or develop new habits? Let's talk about examples, methods, and frameworks for designing products that have a positive impact on people’s behavior.

    Loren Baxter is a freelance UX & UI designer based in San Francisco. He spent the last few years helping to build ReadyForZero.

  • Lena Reinhard Confessions of an Alien: Attracting Non-coding People to Your Open Source Project

    Code is usually the core product of an Open Source Project. It is relevant, and coding is amazing. But there can be more than code, and this “more than code” can help you further your project. This talk will show you what you can do besides coding, the cultural setting and steps to attracting and keeping experts in those fields and why it is a crucial question which kind of commits are welcome in your project.

    Lena is a freelance writer and photographer specializing in marketing, project management and communications. She joined the Open Source project Hoodie one year ago and works for various magazines and small companies besides. She’s a traveller, surfer and she likes trees.

  • Lorenzo Pilia and Jerry Belich A Video Game Revolution is Happening… In Your Browser

    Browser games have existed for quite some time. A more recent phenomenon though is the emergence of browser-based game making tools, such as Twine and PuzzleScript, which are allowing people (non-coders in particular) to easily develop and share their creations. In this presentation we’re going to find out why that’s revolutionary (hint: it has to do with diversity) and get to know the Choosatron Deluxe Adventure Matrix, an interactive fiction arcade machine that provides players a tangible artifact from their unique journey through one of its stories.

    Lorenzo Pilia is a graphic designer turned product manager in love with indie games. He’s the A MAZE. / Berlin 2014 festival program manager and organises the bi-monthly Talk & Play meetup. Jerry Belich is the founder of Monkey with a Mustache, a company focused on interactive media, digital storytelling, and invention with devices like the Choosatron interactive fiction machine. He wants people to look up and use their imaginations!

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, March 11, 7:30pm

At our March meetup we’ll have talks by Jeanny Wang, Jennifer Geacone-Cruz and Bastian Albers.

  • Jeanny Wang: Design for uncertainty

    In today’s increasingly demanding, connected marketplace with ever-changing technological possibilities, uncertainty is no longer an exception, but a norm. Whereas build first, fail fast and often is the name of the game, this talk proposes and asks whether it’s possible to apply a fail forward approach using human-centric, collaborative methods of inclusion to connect with, rather than confront, uncertainty in today’s fast-paced business landscape.

    Jeanny Wang is a seasoned product and service designer, strategist and manager with a decade of experience in the disruptive space spanning across startups, large corporations and creative design industries. These days her interests lie predominantly in looking at ways to bring interdisciplinary teams to work together in solving problems and creating new opportunities in an effective way.

  • Jennifer Geacone-Cruz: The not-so-Zen art of the Japanese website

    Oceans of text, long load times; Japanese websites are hardly minimal and often not user-friendly. But why are Japanese websites, so, well... Japanese? The answer is very much cultural and only a little bit technical. This talk will provide a foot in the sliding shoji door of the sometimes frustrating, but fascinating world of Japanese websites and frontend.

    Jennifer is a freelance consultant specializing in publishing infrastructure design and all things related to fashion and Japan. After nearly a decade in Tokyo working for Harper's Bazaar Japan and Time Out Tokyo, she relocated to Berlin in 2011. She creates online media outlets, print publications, content strategy and provides regionalization services with a highly editorial approach.

  • Bastian Albers: Responsive Web Applications, Javascript and Media Queries

    Responsive Web Design has been winning the internet. For content heavy sites adding some more CSS wrapped in some media queries works surprisingly well. But in web applications there are some technical challenges you can't (yet) solve with pure CSS. After a quick walkthrough of RWD basics we discuss some possibilities how to keep the design in the CSS and use JS to help only where needed.

    Bastian Albers works as a Frontend/JavaScript/HTML5 app developer.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, February 11, 7:30pm

Our February meetup featured talks by Vitaly Friedman, Martin Petersen, Jose Salguero, and Nico Hagenburger.

  • Vitaly Friedman: Real-Life Responsive Web Design

    Download Slides

    Responsive Web Design challenges web designers to adapt a new mindset to their design processes as well as techniques they are using in design and code. This talk provides an overview of various practical techniques, tips and tricks from real-life projects and discusses front-end techniques, maintenance issues and performance considerations for lightweight responsive design.

    Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. From Minsk in Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, discovered the passage a passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online magazine dedicated to design and web development. Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of all Smashing books. He currently works as editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine in the lovely city of Freiburg, Germany.

    Martin Petersen: Self-publishing in post-digital times

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    Martin will talk about paper smell pleasures, the matter of publishing your own ideas and why screens are boring.

    Martin Petersen works as a graphic designer, art director and publisher in Berlin. Through his love for photography and paper, he founded the self-published photography and art magazine Sova in 2010 in Sweden. In 2011, he joined the artist collective Cabinet Gold van d’Vlies where, together with four friends, to make conceptual art books, workshops, and performances. As an early child of the Internet, he coded his first hacks and created his first websites at the age of 12. Today, he works as an UI Designer at EyeEm and still codes & designes websites for fun. He tries to always go for an editorial approach in his digital designs, with love for minimalism and creative research in typography and photo curation.

  • Jose Antonio Salguero: Listen to Your Users

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    Development give us best practices to create our products, patterns on how to develop, but not what features to make, what is important for the user. We must find a way to let users drive us to create a better product for them using all the data we can gather through tracking and A/B testing.

    Jose Antonio is a software engineer with 10 years of experience, originally from Spain now living in Berlin. He’s passionate about technology, travels, music and too many random things to be able to focus on any.

  • Nico Hagenburger: Powerful Living Style Guides with Sass

    Live Coding

    Create impressive front-end style guides with Sass, Compass, and the LivingStyleGuide gem and learn how to write and document your code for maintainability.

    Nico currently focusses on creating living style guides for big websites as well as designing iOS applications. Working on design and front-ends with Sass, he created Compass Sprites and works on new Sass extensions.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, January 14, 7:30pm

Did you make the New Year’s resolution to be more active in your local community? Now is the time to get started! We kick off 2014 with a great line-up: Join us on Tuesday and hear talks by Michiel Slot, Gunnar Bittersmann, Victor Mark and Ed Macovaz.

We are looking forward to see you there, and you are welcome to spread the word and invite friends via Twitter, meetup.com and Facebook!

  • Michiel Slot: Product Ownership: Captain Obvious speaks about owning and shipping

    Are you a Product Owner? Maybe not by all definitions, though Michiel believe every developer or designer involved in a project is a Product Owner. Michiel found some obvious stuff about dealing with product ownership he will share with you.

    Michiel has lengthy experience both as project manager and frontend developer on projects large and small. He likes smooth user interfaces and appreciates nerdy tricks. Besides leading a team of interactive heads at Viacom he organises WebVisions Berlin 2014.

  • Gunnar Bittersmann: Sassematics

    Sass + mathematics. Many web developers nowadays use CSS preprocessors, and do simple calculations like ($a + $b) * $c in them. But we can do more. Much more: sin, cos, tan, … and calculate square roots like the ancient Babylonians. A short trip into geometry. Bring your rulers and compasses!

    As a frontend developer on the whatever-first path, Gunnar aims at a better understanding between humans and machines. He helps organizing the World Usability Day Berlin and struggles not to forget how to play the guitar.

  • Victor Mark: Working with human beings

    Victor will share some observations about the nature of creating and working in teams gleaned from his time at Hyper Island, EyeEm, and now How.Do.

     

  • Ed Macovaz: Making instruments for musicians

    What do you do when you expect users to invest as much time mastering your product you spent building it? Ed will share some stories of how Ableton’s design process has evolved to deal with making complex products for very talented people.

    Ed is a Product Designer at Ableton where he works with other designers to make hardware and software behave like a musical instrument.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, December 10, 7:30pm

2013 flew by quickly, didn’t it? It’s already the last up.front.ug of the year! Don’t miss our December meetup with talks by Regine Heidorn, Frank Leue and Michael Pieracci, and join us for a cozy pre-holidays get-together afterwards.

  • Regine Heidorn: CSS – Best Practices and Maintainability

    While working with precompilers and CSS frameworks one often gets to reflect about the necessity of programming language features within CSS. Looking at the CSS basics like cascade and inheritance helps to get a better understanding of writing good cascading stylesheets. We can see some artifacts remaining from the print era, but we can also put a spotlight on how great CSS can be used. Regine will discuss the following thesis: Everything that helps the browser to interpret CSS in a performant way also helps developers to write better, more maintainable code and facilitates a smoother workflow. If you ever were curious as to why the :hover in CSS works this talk will be perfect for you.

    Passionate frontend developer, author of CSS – Best Practices und Wartbarkeit (German only). Will bring some copies.

  • Frank Leue: Building shapeshifting interfaces

    Building things on the web is great. Especially just now as responsive design solved lots of our problems. But taking a glimpse at the near future you’ll see not only desktops, tablets and phones. There will be watches and super large TV sets. Interaction with those devices will not necessarily include your fingertips anymore but very likely gestures and voice control. While the emerging internet of things is going to surround us with connected devices constantly providing or collecting data, we need to think about how to build consistent experiences throughout the day. This talk is about how to build frontends that adopt to contexts and provide consistent information and a continuity of your brand across devices.

    Frank is a Berlin-based web enthusiast. Crafting code for frontends and backends has been his passion since 1997. Working on the web provides him endless opportunities to express creativity, and put some bright moments in other peoples’ life. He’s currently Technical Director at Hi-ReS! Berlin.

  • Michael Pieracci: A Presentation About Presenting

    Throughout his life Michael has always struggled to explain his work and hobbies in clear and concise ways. "You work where?" "What does your company do?" "You like 'tea'?" One of his favorite ways to deliver detailed, complete, and clear information is through presenting. By creating a presentation he can deliver information in a tailored way for the topic and the audience. Michael encourages others to find their niche and develop their voice through presenting too.

    Michael Pieracci lived in San Francisco for the last 8 years doing project and event management at FontShop. He recently moved to Berlin and is on the hunt for new opportunities.

    • Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

    Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

    You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, November 12, 7:30pm

Days are getting colder, nights are getting longer and we are just getting started! Don’t miss our November meetup with talks by Jack Wild, Nico Hagenburger and Nasia Makrygianni.

  • Jack Wild: How to be a Jack of all trades, and master of some.

    How can singing lessons make you a better graphic designer? What can a project manager teach you about Web Design? How on earth are drama classes relevant to designing great UX? Using practical examples we’ll see how skills we learn doing one thing can be easily manipulated and transferred to other areas. It’s never been easier to go out and try your hand at something new, so why aren’t we all doing it?

    After trying his hand at Journalism, Acting, TV Production, VFX, Concept Development, Graphic Design and Front End Development, Jack somehow ended up as a Digital Designer. He’s currently working with Bacon de Czar here in Berlin.

  • Nico Hagenburger: Why You Might Immediately Fall in Love with Sketch

    Sketch is a powerful alternative to Photoshop and Illustrator when it comes to web and especially iOS 7 design. Learn how styles, effects and slice settings speed up your workflow. And know where to stop, as Sketch.app is not perfect yet.

    Nico currently focusses on creating living style guides for big websites as well as designing iOS applications. Working on design and front-ends with Sass, he created Compass Sprites and works on new Sass extensions.

  • Nasia Makrygianni: Design and Develop Performance

    We all know that size and time matters. We live in a world where everything and everyone is moving fast. We always surf a site or open an app, seeking information while on the road, at work or in our free time. Millions are lost from sales which didn’t happen because of half a second delay. Being part of the IT community that delivers such an experience to people might be stressing. Is this a one person’s job? Let’s not drown in a sea of technical details and talk about how united forces of frontend developers and web designers can make good performance happen. Nasia will share with you her experience from improving KaufDA’s loading times.

    Nasia is a front-end developer at Kaufda - Bonial International Group who thinks out of the box and appreciates clean, reusable code. She loves cartoons and can’t wait to put them into action on browsers.

Stay tuned and follow us on Twitter or Google+!

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, October 08, 7:30pm

For our October meetup we go beyond product and development techniques and learn about what it takes to manage and communicate in projects and what it takes to make your product stand out.

  • Rebecca Conrad & Lisa Passing Rails Girls SoC - All for one and one for all

    Rails Girls Summer of Code is a global event which focuses on bringing more women into the world of open source software and helping participants to further expand their knowledge and skills in programming. 33 students got the chance to work paid and full-time on their projects, attend tech conferences and even speak on them. This all wouldn’t haven been possible without a great team of volunteers, organizers and sponsors. Lisa (implementing the webdesign) and Rebecca (adding illustrations) will talk a little more about the organisation and their involvement.

    Lisa Passing is a frontend-developer, Rebecca Conrad is a graphic designer and illustrator.

  • Behrad Mirafshar: Design Habit

    Our digital life is bombarded by apps. However, we use few of them on a daily basis. This does not mean that the other apps are not well-designed, this is basically because they fail to make a mark in our life and to create a habit for us. This talk endeavors to explore what we deliver behind our apps.

    Behrad is an UX/UI designer. He always likes to partake in interesting projects. He loves cafes. He is a proud Neuköllner.

  • Lindsay Eyink Nothing is Perfect. Eveything is Hacked.

    Surprise lightning talk!

  • Francesco Kirchhoff “That’s not what I meant”: On empathy in our work

    Besides the skills specific to our job, a huge part of building digital products is about communicating with other people. The better we understand our clients, bosses and colleagues, and the better we are at helping them understand us and what we do, the better the project will turn out and the less stress we are likely to generate. Some general thoughts on a more empathetic approach to communication and a list of specific ideas to improve understanding and avoid communication breakdowns.

    Rome-born, Berlin-based Francesco is a caffeine addict who toils away day and sometimes night as a freelance UX designer and project manager for various web agencies and startups in Berlin in order to support his tragic habit. He tries his best not to increase the pervasive ugliness and thoughtlessness, for bad design makes him weep.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, September 10, 7:30pm

September is a very exciting time for the Berlin web community: With events like CSSconf.eu, JSconf EU, NodeCopter, and Reject.js happening, the city will be packed with web designers and frontend developers from all over the world. We are happy to contribute with an awesome up.front lineup!

  • Leila El-Kayem: How Technology Enables Greater Storytelling

    Leila loves to tell stories. Stories about journeys, city walks and people she meets. So Leila turned her love of story telling into a way for Brands to tell their story. This talk is about how the best stories start with experiences and how technology can be used to share them.

    Leila is a Creative Director at Razorfish.

  • Tiffany Conroy: DOM? What about the CSSOM?

    Have you read the crazy stuff in the CSSOM spec!? There is some super interesting stuff in there. Come over here and let Tiffany show you some pretty neat things she learned, and some fun things she made.

    Tiffany is a Canadian living in Berlin doing front-end development and interaction design at SoundCloud.

  • Valentina Montagna: Designing for Ephemeral Technology

    What happens when innovation in technology is faster than your ability to learn new skills? What happens to the design process in a world of planned obsolescence? This talk will help you to slow down things (a bit) and see them from another perspective.

    Valentina is a designer and co-founder of urli.st.

  • Angelina Fabbro: Firefox OS: It's coming, it's here.

    Firefox OS is a brand new open mobile platform built with web technology that front end developers are already familiar with. In this talk I will explain the benefits of developing for this platform (even if you don't reside in one of the first launch countries) as well as demonstrate how easy it is to get started from the perspective of a front-end developer. Light live demo to be provided to show the simulator in action.

    Angelina is a programmer based in Vancouver, Canada and works at Mozilla. Angelina has a background in cognitive science, building clever robots and researching what people pay attention to. Her record as a web developer is balanced with modern iOS experience and a keen sense of design. Angelina also both teaches and mentors for the Vancouver chapter of Ladies Learning Code.


We recommend checking out CSSconf.eu, a conference dedicated to CSS and the designers, developers and engineers who build the world’s most engaging user interfaces.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Friday, August 09, 7:30pm

We have one more speaker slot! Write us on twitter or send us an email if you have a design or frontend topic to discuss, or if you have a speaker to suggest.

It’s the summer edition of up.front! In the summer, many of us try to take some time off and maybe reflect on the things we do. We would like to pick up on that theme, with two personal talks, aimed to help us define ourselves as professionals, freelancers, designers or developers, and maybe as humans.

We hope this will spur a lot of discussion, and as usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open at 7pm, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat!

Follow us on Twitter for updates.

  • Sven Ellingen: Always be Building

    Sven loves to start things. And then grow them. Ideas, things, projects, products, teams. And lately: a company — after 5 years at Edenspiekermann, he decided to start from scratch, on his own. This talk is about leaving something great behind to make room for something that’s even better. It’s essentially about the beauty of building things.

    Sven is a designer bridging disciplines across business, design, and technology. Co-founder of @acolorbright. Previously: Creative Director at @edenspiekermann.

  • Kilian McMahon: Embracing what you're not

    Kilian has spent the last couple of years fumbling around as a designer trying to figure out how to become the people he admired but to no avail. This talk is about getting away from the idea of fitting yourself to others, recognising that you don't work like everyone else and understanding that being different is so much better.

    Kilian is a designer from Dublin who works on a ticketing app called Tito and a conference called Úll.

  • Fabian Mürmann: How not to get killed as a freelancer

    Fabian spend nine years working as a freelance front- and back end, product / concept guy for a bunch of different, international, companies & startups.
    In this talk he’ll share a few things that he learned on the way: Infos on how to deal with taxes, clients from hell, working remote, that kind of stuff.

    Fabian is a Creative Technologist, working in the web since 16 years and currently co-managing an innovation lab at the Bertelsmann DirectGroup.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, June 11, 7:30pm

Don’t miss our June meetup with talks by Karolina Szczur (@fox), Cath Richardson (@ohrworm) and Natalia Berdys (@batalia). Doors open at 7pm at co.up’s third floor. After the meet-up there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open at 7pm, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat!

Follow us on Twitter for updates, and tell your friends on meetup.com and Facebook.

  • Karolina Szczur Designing with Color

    “There’s more to color than a swatch in a book” – a wise man said once. Color is one of the most powerful, emotion evoking weapon in designer’s toolbelt, yet sometimes we fail to recognize its importance. From perception, psychological and cultural meaning of color to systems, optical illusions, usability restraints and useful tools.

    Karolina is a designer and front-end developer. She worked with numerous startups, curated a lesson at Hack Design course and helps out as an editor at Smashing Mag.

  • Cath Richardson Embracing the mundane

    Sometimes to make something amazing, you have to start with something boring. This talk is about embracing the mundane problems which surround us everyday. Thermostats, workflows, print infrastructure – we’ll look at how fundamentally dull, pedestrian things can turn into the most fascinating and rewarding design challenges.

    A reformed Londoner, Cath moved to Berlin this year after 2 years working in service design and customer development at Made by Many. She now leads product at ezeep, a company changing the way the world prints.

  • Natalia Berdys The web experience in the autistic spectrum

    Designing with cognitively-impaired users in mind can be very illuminative, leading to a broader understanding of the role of UX/UI design in general. In her talk, Natalia will focus on Asperger syndrome and high-functioning autism, the perceptual issues involved for such web audience, and how their web experience can be the most sensitive test of good design.

    Natalia Berdys develops iOS apps, plays a lot of video games and gets high on information. She’s obsessively interested in language, numbers and hardware. Pinkish hair, oddball ideas.

Tuesday, May 14th 2013, 7:30pm

  • Paulo Zoom Words of Matter

    Words are living things. We shape them with our collective usage, and we perceive them differently as we change. As people, they’re our interface with one another. And as designers, our most essential tool.
    In this talk, Paulo will explore how words impact our interfaces, affect our users’ behavior, and have the power to surprise and delight, but also to annoy and frustrate.

    Paulo designs websites. He’s working on The Manual and XOXO. That’s not his real name.

  • Hany Rizk UX & Product: How lean can you go?

    F**k it, ship it they say — but does that also apply when you’re working on a completely new product? This talk will revolve around releasing a Minimal Viable Product and all the complications that come with it: How do you know when your MVP is ready, and is less really more?

    Hany is a UX and Interaction Designer driven by minimalism, product strategy and bringing interaction beyond the screen. As a pianist with a passion for music, design, arts and humanities, Hany mixes those sources of inspiration with the technical challenges he faces to design intuitive and innovative solutions that are fun to use, shaken not stirred!

  • Daniel Mierzwinski Learning through goals

    With 2 months left of a 7 months internship Daniel wondered: Did he learn what he wanted to learn? His answer was no. In this talk Daniel will give you an insight into how he decided to spend the last 2 months of his internship and maximized his learnings.

    Daniel is a frontend developer with a passion for user experience and entrepreneurial business.

Tuesday, April 9th 2013, 7:30pm

At our April meetup, we had talks by Emma Rose Metcalfe, Tom O’Doherty and John Sebastian Hussey.

  • Emma Rose MetcalfeSocial Objects - the centre of our universe

    Whether it’s photo sharing, loops or tweets, the social object reigns queen of the web. Starting with Jyri Engeström as our centre point I’ll walk through findings from our own development in seeking the balance between accessible and precious design around social objects. How can we design platforms that lower barriers to create objects with long term social value?

    Emma Rose Metcalfe is a designer and co-founder of HowDo, a mobile platform where people capture, collect and share micro guides about the world around them. She heads up the product team and has a background in service and experience design.

  • Tom O’DohertyZombie video

    We all know that video is changing the internet, but we don’t think very often about how the internet is changing video. A short talk about a moving target.

    Tom is a freelance design and video person, originally from Ireland. He’s interested in design minimalism and succinct storytelling. And Japanese noise-rock.

  • John Sebastian HusseyWeb Performance as UX

    The mobile web audience is now huge. Mobile devices accessing the web, typically over a 3G connection, should have a lightening fast experience. This talks focuses on why web performance is more important than ever with some quick and easy ways to make sites faster and lighter.

    Full stack pancake engineer. Enthusiastic creative coder and web developer. Big hair, big ideas.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, March 12, 7:30pm

Just like the first rays of spring sunlight after the long, drab Berlin winter, we too are finally reappearing in full force! Join us on March 12th for up.front 34, with a range of talks that could only be broader if it included something on hydroponics or dinosaurs.

After the meet-up we’re heading to Lugosi (Reichenberger Straße 152), our favourite moody hideout, for casual lounging and tasty, discounted drinks.

  • Natalie HankeIntroducing Hexels, a new kind of art tool

    Developed by Hex-Ray Studios, Hexels is a new grid-based art program for Mac and PC, which allows you to paint with shapes. Since it launched a few days ago, this short talk will show you Hexels in action, provide some examples of already existing funky artwork and give some information on the two awesome guys behind it.

    Natalie is a freelance graphic designer who drinks a lot of coffee.

  • Alex FeyerkeHoodie - Building complete webapps without a backend

    A short presentation of a new app architecture for front-end people, and how you can use it to build web apps without worrying about the backend.

    Alex is a freelance web developer and internet generalist, and also one of the organizers of up.front.

  • Momme FundaLegal issues for web workers

    A quick run-through of various relevant aspects of German internet law, covering topics like imprints, coding in order to avoid copyright violations, “Abmahnungen”, contracts with clients and employers and copyright laws.

    Momme is a freelance lawyer specializing on media law. He works in a law firm made up of various other freelance lawyers, and he won’t be wearing a suit.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, February 12, 7:30pm

Let’s get together!


We will have a little get together at Lugosi (Reichenberger Straße 152) for casual lounging and tasty, discounted drinks. Join us to discuss the latest news or talk about your ideas.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

Tuesday, January 08, 7:30pm

Happy New Year everybody! Up.front will kick off 2013 with a panel discussion, starting on Tuesday, January 8, 7:30 pm at our favourite coworking space co.up.

Follow us on Twitter for updates and RSVP on Facebook.

  • Skeumorphic Mess vs the Boring Flatlands: What’s a “Digitally Native User Interface”?

    Over the past years, we’ve witnessed a constant debate about competing trends in our field: Mimicking real world objects in user interfaces versus a revived flat approach, which the proponents label as more content-focused, digitally native and even honest.
    It’s time to put this into perspective. Is there more to this new flat trend than just a different level of polish and angry designer youth re-discovering modernism? How can a user interface be native and honest in the first place?
    We’ll look at different approaches and whether they’re relevant. To get a broader contexts of terms used in the discussion, we’ll not only discuss interaction design and usability, but also will have a look at art history and architecture.

Up.front is a free event, and you do not have to register anywhere. However it gets packed sometimes. Doors open half an hour before the event, talks do not start before 7:30pm. Come early to make sure you get a seat! As usual, after the talks there’s time for conversations and tasty, discounted drinks at Lugosi, a cosy bar in walking distance from our venue.

Accessibility: If you would like to use the elevator, please tweet @upfront_ug when you arrive.

You are required to follow our code of conduct.

» See archive for previous events