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!

Please join us on Wednesday, April 20th for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

Presentations

First, Jon Dascola will be presenting one of the better presentation titles we have seen:

If You’re in the Shit Up to Your Neck, the Only Thing You Can Do is Sing

Inevitably, the projects we work on get bogged down by tight deadlines, watered down by client demands and wrought down by our own frustrations. We need to remember to keep our excitement high and our perseverance higher. If we’re not excited about what we’re making, why should we expect anyone else to be? We’ll talk about how to keep our work fresh and to find awesomeness in the details.

Jon Dascola is currently an Interactive Designer at Elliance, Inc, where he designs to forge connections between visual design, technology and human computer interaction for clients in higher education, non-profit, manufacturing and business services.

He previously worked at sunKING creating award winning work for global brands like the Coca-Cola Company, Heinz, Transitions Lenses and Bath & Body Works. Prior to that, he worked as a Designer for American Eagle Outfitters. A native Pittsburgher, Jon graduated from La Roche College with a degree in Graphic and Communication Design.

You can follow jon on twitter @dascola.

Next, Jay Fanelli of Full Stop Interactive will be talking client relations with his presentation:

Stop Hating Your Clients

Do you hate your clients? Probably, right? Guess what…it’s all your fault. OK, maybe it’s not all your fault, but there are certainly things you can do to make the relationship better. Whether you’re a freelancer, a shop owner, or working at a larger agency, Jay shows you ways to make your client interactions a little more bearable.

Jay Fanelli is the co-founder and designer at Full Stop, a Pittsburgh web design and development shop. You can also find him on twitter @jayfanelli.

Left Field is location directly across the street from PNC Park. There is plenty of street and garage parking. Get directions here! A very big thank you goes out to Smith Brothers Agency for supporting Refresh and allowing us to use this awesome space!

’’ll be starting promptly at 6:30pm. When you get to our building, simply walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. Please be on time as the front doors will be on automatic lock for 7:00!

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!

Please join us on Wednesday, February 23rd for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up.

This month, we will be meeting at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore. Left Field is location directly across the street from PNC Park. There is plenty of street and garage parking. Get directions here! A very big thank you goes out to Smith Brothers Agency for supporting Refresh and allowing us to use this awesome space!

We’ll be starting promptly at 6:30pm. When you get to our building, simply walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. The from doors will be on automatic lock for 6:45!

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!

Presentations

First, Val Head will be giving us a sneak preview of her upcoming SXSW talk.

“My Title is Web Designer, Now What?

As our industry has matured, the role of the web designer has become more nuanced. The skill sets of people who call themselves web designers can vary greatly from one to the next. One may never touch code; the other may have their hands in every step of building out their designs. And there’s even more to it than that.

What sorts of things should we know how to do as web designers? what skills should we look to pick up next? Can we really be expected to be experts in all of these things? And how will this affect our future careers?

Val will discuss these questions and more in an effort to help clarify what the heck a web designer does these day. Caution: This talk contains opinions, and we want to hear yours too.

Val loves design, code, and crafty things. She is currently the Sr Designer/Developer at Agency 1903. She likes to keep things interesting by organizing two local conferences, Flashpitt and Web Design Day, and co-managing the LoopPittsburgh user group. Val blogs at thisisportable.com, tweets at @vlh, and aspires to one day have more twitter followers than her cat, @thedignan.

Next, Geoff Barnes will be making his long anticipated return to the Refresh Pittsburgh podium!

Become a UX STAR: Simulate, Test, Adjust, Repeat

Q: When are best practices not?
A: When there are real users involved.

When you get right down to it, the only person you really know how to design for is yourself. If you’re going to design for anyone else, sooner or later, you’re going to need validate a whole mess of assumptions you’ve been carrying around in your back pocket with your creative license since god knows when. Using a no-bull case study, I’ll paint a vivid picture of how iterative user experience design can take you to the promised land – and ensure you’re good and crazy when you arrive.

Geoff Barnes is currently Senior Information Architect at Elliance, Inc, a Pittsburgh E-Marketing company where he works to articulate the inevitable intersection of content strategy, information architecture, and interaction design for an array of clients from higher education, non-profits, community banks, and the manufacturing sector. He was previously the lead UI designer for Collaborative Fusion, Inc, Professor of Painting at The Savannah College of Art and Design, and co-founder of San Francisco web services firm Trendmedia. Geoff moved to Pittsburgh in 2001 to help create and launch the BFA of Media Arts Web Design program at Robert Morris University.

Please join us on Thursday, June 17th at 6:30 pm for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up. We’ll be back at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. We’ll be in room 320. Take the gold elevator up to the third floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meet-up.
We have two presentation on tap for this evening:

First, Norm Huelsman will be starting the evening with a review of WordPress 3.0.

WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for release on June 14th. Norm will be showing us what is new, and what has been improved. He will also review some of the new features including; multi-site, menus, installation, and child themes.

A co-organizer of Podcamp Pittsburgh, Norm is a long-time blogger at his site normhuelsman.com and a popular Magic: The Gathering blog, Casual Magic. During the day, Norm focuses on visual communication and branding in the PR department at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

Next, Sean Geng will be presenting, “The Future of Web Design”.

Web design is a fickle industry. In this constantly changing field, there are always new techniques being invented, and technology that is always being upgraded. In this presentation, he’ll cover topics including HTML 5, CSS3, designing for mobile devices (including the iPad), and some of the latest techniques. He’ll also showcase some upcoming trends and discuss what lies ahead.

Sean Geng is a freelance designer located here in Pittsburgh. He runs the online design community at Designmess. For more information, you can check out his website or follow him on twitter.

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!

Let’s get thing back on track!

Our next Refresh Meetup will be Thursday, May 6th.  We realize that there may be a Penguins playoff game this night, that’s why we’ll be kicking everything off at 6:00 PM in room 740 at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

AIP is located downtown at 420 Boulevard of the Allies. Take the gold elevator up to the seventh floor. Take your first right and the room will be a few doors down on the left. We’ll be in room 740. There may be a security guy at the door – if there is just let him know you are there for the Refresh Pittsburgh meetup.  As always, A HUGE thank-you goes out to our friend Norm Huelsman for offering to host a Refresh meeting at AIP.

We have a an interesting presentation this month.  Jon Dascola will be joining us and presenting:

“A Designer’s Take on Apple’s iPad SDK”

While Apple’s iPhone SDK provides a wealth of information for developers, designers are often at a disadvantage when it comes to getting started building mobile apps. I’ll talk about what documentation a designer should understand, the basics of application architecture and show working examples from an iPad app currently under development.

Jon Dascola is an Interactive Designer at Elliance, Inc in Pittsburgh PA.  You can learn more about him at his website or seek him out on twitter @dascola .

We look forward to seeing you all this Thursday!