Please join us on Tuesday, April 2nd for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

We’ll be starting around 6:30pm. When you get to the building, walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. The front doors will be on automatic lock for 7:15!

As usual, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

We have two great presentations lined-up for the evening:

Stop Writing CSS for Yourself, and Start Writing it for Other People.

Rob Wierzbowski

Css preprocessors (Sass, Less, Stylus, all that good stuff) are changing the way we author layout for the web. But it’s not just a little time saving here, a few less prefixes there. Rob will show us how preprocessors give our code meaning, let us design systems, not stylesheets, and are moving professional css development into the world of open source.

Rob Wierzbowski is the co-founder of SassyPgh. He gets his hands dirty with front-end architecture, development, and IA, and did this horrible thing recently where he learned a little Ruby and absolutely loves it. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Clients vs. Side Projects

Jay Fanelli & Nathan Peretic

Running a client services business is a full-time job. Developing your own products and side projects is also a full-time job. How do you keep it all going?

In 2009, Jay and Nate co-founded Full Stop, a Pittsburgh web design and development shop. In 2010, they co-founded United Pixelworkers, a worldwide collective and online t-shirt shop for web designers and developers. Somehow, they’ve found time for both.

Please join us on Monday, February 11 for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

We expect a large turnout this month, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

This month we’re talking a bit about typography and a bit about customer service!

Finding Your Perfect Web Font Match with Val Head

There’s a seemingly endless number of web fonts out there and it’s not just variety that makes it tough to choose one. We have browser rendering, file size and more to consider. In this talk Val will cover tips and tools for putting your potential web font selections through the paces before you commit.

Val Head is totally into design, type and code. She is a designer and consultant currently based in Pittsburgh where she works with agencies and small businesses to make fun and effective web sites. She speaks internationally at conferences and leads workshops on web design and creative coding. Val tweets too much, occasionally dribbbles, and blogs somewhat inconsistently.

Building Trust with Users with Stephanie Hay

Many products and services promise to be the easiest, smartest, and best things ever. The problem is, they’re not — and this disconnect between marketing and reality is building a web of skeptics.

Fortunately, anyone can build trust with users by setting realistic expectations and meeting them. And Stephanie Hay is going to help you get started in three areas: writing candid content, crafting helpful user experiences, and maintaining users’ confidence even when you “fail.”

Whether you’re redoing your portfolio or crafting your company’s website, you’ll leave Steph’s energizing talk with a renewed sense of confidence that being genuine is actually the best.

Stephanie Hay (@steph_hay) is a content and UX specialist whose clients include UIE and Happy Cog. She’s spoken at conferences from SXSWi to New Adventures, and her articles have appeared in A List Apart, UX Magazine, and Web Standards Sherpa.

Steph — who is a resident mentor at 500 Startups — co-founded FastCustomer, founded NovaCowork, and co-organizes the (Washington) DC Lean Startup Circle. She once dated a guy from Pittsburgh.

Thank you to everyone who helped make 2012 a great year for Refresh Pittsburgh.  We’ve seen our newsletter subscribers jump to over 500+ and our meeting attendance average around 60 people.  We’ve come a long way since our first meeting with 12 people in Kiva Han in Oakland.

First, thanks to everyone who presented or was on a panel this year.  Dave Olsen, Patrick Fulton, Rob Stinogle, Matt Griffin, Ryan Hamrick, Brad Colbow, Nate Bishop, Nathan Peretic, James Acklin & Josh Sager.

Second, thank you to all the attendees and speakers of this year’s Web Design Day who helped to make it the our best event yet.

Finally, thanks to everyone who comes to Refresh, attends our workshops and spreads the word about what we are doing.  We couldn’t do this without your support.

We already have some neat plans in place for 2013.  We have a few interesting workshops in the loop and a few out-of town speakers you may enjoy.  And don’t forget, if you would like to present at an upcoming Refresh meet-up let us know!

We’ll announce our next meetup sometime in January, until then, Happy Holidays from Jason, Val and Geoff.

Yay Pittsburgh!!!

Please join us on Wednesday, November 14th for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

We’ll be starting around 6:30pm. When you get to the building, walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. The front doors will be on automatic lock for 7:15!

As always, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

For November, we’re talking design all night along with Ryan Hamrick and a special guest from Cleveland, Brad Colbow.

Getting Started with Lettering

Ryan Hamrick

Custom hand-lettering isn’t easy, and it takes a ton of practice and dedication to get the hang of it. But if you’re set on learning and know a thing or two about design and design software already, you may be further along the path to lettering professionally than you might think. Pittsburgh-based letterer and designer Ryan Hamrick shares some tips and techniques to dive head-first into lettering with little-to-no experience.

Ryan Hamrick is a letterer and designer based in Pittsburgh, PA that specializes in branding and hand-drawn letters with a deep background in UI design. You can follow him on Dribbble, Twitter or read his regular column on custom lettering on The Industry.

The Little Things

Brad Colbow, Creative Director at Designing Interactive

We tend to be focused on really big things (launching a product, a big event, etc.) but where most sites/apps drop the ball are in all “the little things” that make up a good user experience. Join us as Brad gives and introduction to user research and how we can apply it to our work.

Brad Colbow is creative director at Designing Interactive in Cleveland Ohio. He might be better known for his comics that are published monthly in .Net magazine and “The Brads” a (almost) weekly strip found on his personal website. His work has appeared on the New York Time’s website, CNET, Smashing Magazine and elsewhere. You can find out more about him and his work on his website colbowdesign.com.

You can follow Brad on Twitter at: @bradcolbow.

Please join us on Monday, September 10th for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

We’ll be starting around 6:30pm. When you get to the building, walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. The front doors will be on automatic lock for 7:15!

As always, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

For September, we have a nice mix of a little code and a little design:

Let’s Git It On: Code Deployment and Backup with Git Hooks

Rob Stinogle, Manager of Web Development at American Eagle Outfitters

Rob’s presentation will show us how to setup git to automagically mirror to dropbox as a backup, and deploy to a remote server when you are ready to push.

You can follow Rob on Twitter at: @stinogle.

Designing Is Coding Is Designing

Matt Griffin, Principal, Bearded

Matt will discuss Bearded’s evolving process for responsive, in-browser site design, using real client project examples and code.

Matt Griffin is a designer and one of the founders of Bearded. He has a great love for letterpress printing, which he acquired while attending Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he received a BFA in Graphic Design. Matt is an avid advocate for collaboration in design, and has been published in A List Apart and .net magazine.

You can follow Matt on Twitter at: @elefontpress.