Mail.Ru Design Conference + Dribbble Meetup 2018

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    Mail.Ru Design Conference + Dribbble Meetup 2018 was held in Moscow on June 2 . We are holding the event for the seventh time and it has finally grown from the format of the mitap into a big conference on product design. Norde, RealtimeBoard, Rambler & Co, Grid, Alfa-Bank, Phase, Future London Academy, Mail.Ru, BEM Design, S7, Mentor Forces, as well as Dima and Leta Stolz, Taras Brizitsky and Ilya
    Sidorenko performed on it .



    Last year we broke our own record and gathered 1,000 people in the hall. This is the ceiling of the Mail.Ru Group's capacity, so this time it was the same (about 750 at a time, which was noticeable along the aisles occupied by the ottomans and sitting on the floor). The number of viewers of the broadcast is about 20,000 (2000 on YouTube, 70,000 in VK, 160,000 in Odnoklassniki, but in social networks there are not unique users). And they raised the bar to our afterparty - there were hundreds and a half people.

    Conference for seven years


    2012 - 70
    2013 - 400
    2014 - 550
    2015 - 600
    2016 - 900
    2017 and 2018 - 1K
    speakers - 103
    T-shirts - 4100
    beer - 1420











    Kirill Kulikov and Mila Dine from Norde opened the program . They quickly soared in popularity on Dribbble over the past year and a half and formed their recognizable style of illustration. Mila and Cyril told about where the trends in the illustrations come from and what historical roots of modern approaches, how different the visual style of designers from different countries. They also uncovered Dribbble mechanics that helped them break into the tops.





    Vlad Zelinsky fromRealtimeBoard talked about how a visual team interaction tool is created. How the design team is organized, how they see the future of the tool, how to use it in practice. The product has grown great in recent years and is in demand around the world.





    Alexandra Yermolenko, Elena Liseeva, Evgeny Novazheev and Olga Pigolitsyna from Rambler & Co told about the renewal of the brand, which took place in recent years. The overall strategy of redesign, work with individual leaving the visual language and their implementation in the design system, as well as work on specific products. It turned out the optimal command format of the performance - we want to make it the main one.





    Roman Hudonogov - co-founder of the publishing tool Gridwhich grew out of the internal editorial CMS Look at Media (this report is also compiled using it). He spoke about the visual storytelling, which helps to create juicy and vibrant longreads, and also shared the best practices for working with materials.Vladimir





    Zimin, Evgeny Sergeyev and Alexander Tolstov from Alfa-Bank told about their design system, which they recently opened to the outside. It has both components in the code, and a description of the principles of design, as well as templates in Sketch - one of the best examples in our market, and even successfully accompanied by their new style of illustrations. One more team story came out from the side of product design, development and illustration - we will refer to it when preparing the next year’s program.





    Nick Budden, the founder of the new tool for designers Phase , spoke about his main idea and the problems of designers that he will solve. A public launch will take place in the coming weeks, and after the performance Nick managed to visit half a dozen national design teams, showing a small demo (unfortunately, its more recent version stopped working earlier because of the Sketch update).





    The founder of the Future London Academy course, Ekaterina Solomeina, spoke about how British design studios work. It turned out a pack of insights about the processes, methods and other work approaches based on hundreds of visits to design companies and the team of London. This year I will go to the course on UX and product design for the fourth time - it turned out to be so useful and productive.





    Mail.Ru design team told about the work on the visual style and the organization of the conference. Evgeny Dolgov, Daria Gantseva, Daria Prokhorova, Viktor Salomakhin, Pavel Karpov, Katerina Nikulina and Nadezhda Titova showed sources of inspiration, and I described where the design activities of the company are generally moving.





    Julia Muzafarova presented the Whitepaper Tools framework to create declarative non-component design systems. The initiative group of front-tenders and designers Yandex Money launched the BEM Design framework at the beginning of the year, and this summer it was renamed and plan to be widely promoted. Julia told about the tasks of the tool and examples of prototypes that can be done with its help.





    Dima and Letha Stolzthey closed the main program with a story about their style of illustrations, interesting projects and other hobbies. They worked with VKontakte and Pornhub, where carbon plots and characters turned out - an excellent field for creative imagination.



    This year we tried to expand the program and conduct a series of performances in the framework of afterparty. She is in her second year at the Kraftwerk bar.where there is a projector and a microphone, so both the speaker and the listeners communicate informally over a beer. It turned out mixed - on the one hand, the informality turned out and the presentation for beer goes merrily. On the other hand, the room should be completely different - the bar is noisy and the projector is far from visible to everyone. And the broadcast with the photographer must be organized separately. On the other hand, the majority of Dribbble Meetup is just a meeting of a few dozen people for a beer, so we returned to its original idea.



    Alexey Shaihelislamov from S7He opened our 'experimental format with a great story about UX-strategy in practice - as the design in the company becomes more mature. He perfectly reworked my concept of the UX-strategy on three levels (operational, tactical and strategic) and presented it in a successful format. Article based on speech .





    Semyon Boboshko spoke about his service MentorForces , which offers expert design advice. An interesting and useful format that helps products without a designer.



    Taras Brizitsky showed the best practices in his design tool on the iPad. It turned out quite a bar format - the audience surrounded him around.





    Ilya SidorenkoHe closed the after-party program with a story about how to grow a designer. He writes many articles on this topic and it was interesting to listen to it live. Article based on speech .



    This year the event is called Mail.Ru Design Conference for two reasons. First, we do a lot of activities - the conference, the Russian Design Cup competition, the UX-Medium meetings, the intensive in the British and the Contented online course (in addition to my personal initiatives like Product Design Digest). But to carry it all out separately is quite clear - different brands, different communities, there is no clear graphics between them and stupid overlaps happen. The transformation began with the conference, will continue with the rest of the activities. The main mission is to develop domestic design. To a decent amount of beginner and experienced designers, these useful activities help to grow, and we are also spurred on by ourselves. Let's see what we have in a year.

    Secondly, we grew out of the pits of an informal mitap into a large conference and the program did not have time for the wrapper. 1000 guests in a well-decorated hall with a rather complex organization created appropriate expectations, and we still tried to simply acquaint the
    community with those designers who had never really performed before.

    We consider and will consider this task - to bring non-public talents to the stage - one of the main ones, but this year they tried to work more closely with the program. Something worked out - for example, the team performances of Rambler and Alfa-Bank fit perfectly into our original idea and we will use them as a guide for the future. Something did not work the way they wanted (in some places, help in the preparation is useful, and performances at the afterparty should be done on another stage). But in general, we like the direction and we will thoroughly polish it, and all the topics will remain within the framework of the “how to do well” idea - emphasis on cases and tools.

    Thanks to our enchantingly steep event team, and especially Dasha Prokhorova, they implemented a bunch of planned things. The decoration of the hall became even bigger (in 2016 it was just a ball on the stage, in 2017 it became more integral, and now they beat the walls too), got rid of long queues at the entrance (well, except for the very beginning), broke with the queues for T-shirts (although, apparently, it will never work out with the sizes - every year we adjust the circulation and every time someone doesn’t have enough), we brought two wagons with food (Burger Heroes and BB & Burgers). Thanks to the weather - afterparty passed as planned, and the beer was enough for a long time (less displacement and more circulation, well, the distribution is more intelligent). We also collected a bunch of jambs, which we will correct (echo in the broadcast in the cinema hall, connecting computers of speakers, performances at the afterparty, etc.), but much more pleasant.



















    This time they focused on broadcasting . Since we can’t bring more people into the hall, we have been actively working to spread it (thanks to Kira Grichanina and SketchApp.Me with Awdee for
    increasing coverage). Sasha Okunev led an elegant text translation in the Telegraph (there was an archive). Unfortunately, the after-party performances were not filmed, but they drew conclusions from the first experiment and significantly improved the format the next time.









    PS Thanks to everyone who spoke and came to listen - it was you who made this conference. Designers: Evgeny Dolgov, Daria Gantseva, Victor Salomakhin, Katerina Nikulina, Nadezhda
    Titova, Denis Shumov and Slava Yashkov - they invented and implemented all these crazy ideas according to the unified style of the conference. None of this would have been possible without our insanely cool team of internal events, and especially Dasha Prokhorova - she’s with us from the first meeting and helps to realize the most insane ideas at the last minute :) The administrative team, the administrative service with Anna Latkina-Turkova - all event infrastructure Olya Alekseeva made our last-minute website, and Igor Markovsky and Mitya Osadchuk brought the concept of video savers to a decent look. And, of course, those who help us with the budget, without which we would have remained a modest mitap.


    In order not to break off with the weather next year (we were lucky enough to get into a warm window between the cold weeks), we decided to postpone the date to June 29, 2019 - by the middle of summer there should be guaranteed norms. Record in calendars :) Well, watch for announcements in convenient channels:

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