The next Refresh Meetup will be Wednesday, December 14th at 6:30 PM at Left Field Meeting Space.  This month’s meet-up will be  joint meeting with our friend from Loop Pittsburgh.  We’ll be hosting a panel discussion:

Should Web Designers Know Code?

There was once a day when a designer could pass along his PSD’s to a developer, and get a well coded website that worked as the designer intended and followed the best of web standards.  Nowadays, with new developments like css3, web-fonts and responsive design, those days are far behind us.  Can a web designer thrive, or even call themselves a web designer if they don’t understand html or css?

How about web developers? Can web developers do their jobs to the best of their abilities without design skills? Can you trust a web developer to implement web-fonts when they don’t know the meaning of the word “kerning”?  Do we really want to put more design power with css3 into the hands of a developer who doesn’t know the basics of design theory?  Let’s not even begin to talk about transitions and motion!

What is expected of web designers and developers is rapidly changing.  Tonight, we’ll have an open panel discussion to find out what the prevailing opinions are and find out just want a web designer and developer should learn about in order to have a long lasting career.

Joining us on our panel will be:

Nate Bishop
Designer at MAYA Design
@natebishop
natebishop.com

Rob Stinogle
Manager of Web Development, American Eagle Outfitters
@stinogle
stinogle.com

Nathan Peretic
Co-founder of Full Stop
Front-end developer, writer, jack-of-all-trades.
@nathanperetic
nathanperetic.com

James Acklin
Front-end Developer at Smith Bros. Agency
Illustrator / designer-turned-developer
@acklindesign
acklindesign.com

Josh Sager
Program Director for Multimedia Technologies at PTI
@joshsager
joshsagermedia.com

Submit Questions

Help us prepare for the panel by submitting some questions in advance.  You can add them as a comment to this post, or send an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org.

As always, please RSVP with an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or, let us know on the Facebook event page!

For our next meet-up, we are planning on trying out another panel discussion.  We’ve had great success with them in the past, and it really helps to encourage discussion among the group.

The topic for our next discussion? “Should Designers Know Code?”

Web design and development is rapidly evolving.  These days, a designer needs to understand not only the web, but also mobile platforms, tablets, and even devices we don’t have yet!  Responsive design is  a fantastic tool – but if your designer doesn’t understand the underlying code can they properly design for the medium?

This seems to be a hot topic in the industry these days, and we think it would be a great time to get the group together to discuss the ideas and see what the opinion is.

We’re looking for panelists!  We have a few people in mind, but it would be great to get some new people involved.  If you are interested or have some suggestions, please email us at info@refreshpittsburgh.org.  Spread the word.  As soon as we finalize our panelists, we’ll get this scheduled!

Wow! Registrations for Web Design Day opened yesterday and sold out in about 10 hours. We’re really excited for our little conference and look forward to seeing all of you who have registered!

This year’s line up includes:

• Jason Beaird, Sitepoint Author & UX Designer at Mailchimp
• Brett Harned, Senior Project Manager at Happy Cog
• Val Head, Independent Designer at Northmaple Studio
• Matt Griffin Designer & Co-founder of Bearded Studio
• Jenn Lukas, Interactive Development Director at Happy Cog
• Samantha Warren, Senior Designer at Phase II Technologies
• Brad Frost, Mobile Developer at R/GA

You can learn more about Web Design Day at webdesignday.com

This year’s Web Design Day will be held on Saturday, October 1st.

We’re currently finalizing our speakers and have a few more slots to fill. If you are interested in presenting this year, submit a session at our website.

We hope to have our final speakers announced soon. If you are on the Web Design Day mailing list, you’ll be the first people to know when registrations open!

In association with our flagship event, Web Design Day, we are proud to announce an upcoming workshop that we have been working on for a while.

Developments over the last few years have completely changed the way we build websites. For those too busy to read specs and approach it academically, we’ll spend a good portion of the day together, learning how to build a modern website in a practical, efficient way. If you can already hack your way through HTML and CSS, this workshop will be perfect for taking those skills to the next level.

We’ll cover new HTML5 tags and their semantics, learn a few new key CSS3 features, implement some non-standard fonts with and without Typekit, try out transitions and translations with with CSS and JavaScript (using jQuery), and pick up a few best practices along the way.

At the end of the day, we’ll have built a fully functioning site you’ll wish you could put on your mantelpiece.

Registration opens on Monday, April 18th at noon and there are only 30 seats available.

Check out our workshop page for complete event details!