Modern principles of web design focus most heavily on the user experience and being able to successfully assume and satisfy the user's needs. From menu headings to links, skim friendly and hierarchical written copy to clear functionality, web designers make hundreds of decisions to craft a perfectly intuitive web experience so the user doesn't have to think. Brutalist websites, by contrast, are abrasive and grungy with many rough edge interactions. With no clear discernment for comfort, they seem to throw out the playbook on intuitive design, or do they?

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View this talk from NERD Summit's 2020 virtual conference. 

From front end mechanics to the back end meta data work, learn how to make your website user friendly, purposefully intuitive, and connect with the right audiences and organically grow reach. We’ll talk about usability principles, accessibility, different hosting platforms, and niche group search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for higher Google ranking. This workshop will end with a collective website review for participants who submit one.

Employers spend only a few second reviewing a resume. In a hyper saturated internet, web design is hinged on making content quickly digestible and impressionable. Learn how to make a better resume and CV with these principles. Walk away with the ability to professionally market yourself with a resume that is more skim friendly, better visually formatted out, and bold with language that is sharp, heavy hitting, and without filler. This class will include a full lecture full of tips and tricks and end with resume workshopping.

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View a shortened version of that workshop.

Your website needs to meet certain baselines and standards such as color contrast, alternative text, video captions, and more. These help ensure that those with vision impairments can utilize tools like screen readers. Some of these standards are costly, but necessary, yet many businesses are not aware of or heeding the requirements.

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Failure to do bars some users from accessing information they need and can lead to lawsuits.

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Is your site up to snuff?

What does a data guided strategy mean and how do you do it? Learn about user demographics, secondary dimensions, asking good data questions, interpreting results, and making web design choices based on those findings. You'll get an overview covering everything from the differences between bounce and exit rates to user segmentation. 

Learn how to make your business more inclusive, from contact forms to hiring practices, media campaigns to in person practices. This is a 101 and 102 level course looking at rhetoric and representation. We'll look at the text on your website, job postings, and contact forms to see how they can be refined. We'll talk about some aspects of queer culture and what you can do to be more cognizant of the spectrum of people out there.

Learn qualities of light, different lighting tools, and lighting placement to better shoot stylized portraits, couples, and groups. Gain better control over your images from dark and moody to bright and airy. We’ll teach you many one and two light setups for lighting a scene using affordable gear in this hands own workshop.