Sessions

Full session schedule

Design 4 Drupal, Boston is celebrating its 12th Anniversary this year and we have a great lineup of sessions for all attendees. An incredible selection of design-focused sessions over the years have helped keep D4D, Boston on people's list of must-attend Drupal events each year.

Keynotes

Design for Longevity (D4L): Service Innovation through System Thinking

People now not only live longer but also want to be healthier when they age due to more advanced emerging technologies, socioeconomic changes, education platforms, healthcare systems, and other socioeconomic factors. But what does longevity mean for designers and design leaders? The concept of design for longevity (D4L) has recently played a critical role in our society. D4L is not about adding labels for older adults on the products we design. D4L is also not only talking about how the new fabrication technologies can make the material last longer.

UI/Visual Design

Beyond Breakpoints: Designing for the Modern Web

Create designs that maintain their visual integrity at every screen size, by learning modern advancements in CSS. No code required!

Figma, Drupal, and Design Systems

Learn about the benefits and challenges of building large design systems in Figma, via a case study for a large university with a Drupal 9 component framework.

Figma-Foundational principles you want to know

Figma is an intuitive prototyping tool that allows you to collaborate with your team, share reviews with your clients, and connect you directly with development. Working efficiently in Figma does not just involve creating buttons, text, images, and other UI. You must change how you create graphic elements to build reusable content that eventually ends up in a design library. In this session, you learn the basics, and along the way, you learn tips and tricks that will help you manage your reusable elements and styles.

From brand experiences to brand relationships. How to create relevance, in a modern world.

Learn how to up your marketing game by creating relevance and communicating on values your audience is looking for. Understand how to create a brand story that merges your business goals with your audience's needs with concrete examples and actionable steps you can start taking right away. You will leave this session with ideas you can put into practice.

UX/Project Strategy

Death to Personas: A Mindset-Focused Approach to Designing Inclusive Web Experiences

User Personas have been a mainstay of UX design since practically the beginning of UX design. But they’re actually not great tools for designing and building inclusive digital experiences. This session will introduce some alternative approaches to replace traditional User Personas.

Designing navigation for humans: information architecture techniques to organize a website effectively

This session introduces approaches that will help you make confident decisions about website navigation. Beyond guessing, brainstorming, or even card sorting, we'll discuss how effective information architecture (IA) is guided by principles of human information-seeking behavior, and how it is grounded in core conceptual models for the business and its audiences.

Designing User-Friendly Drupal Modules

Learn how to apply design justice and product strategy principles to your Drupal module to ensure it is user-friendly and accessible.

How We Use Notion to Enhance Our Discovery Process

Have trouble making personas actually useful? Struggle to make sure all your planned features are serving both the user needs and the business needs? Learn how to use Notion to enhance your discovery process.

Practical User Experience

Understanding a problem is one thing but knowing how to solve it is a completely different challenge. How do you know which exercises or activities to use to answer the questions that come up frequently while building or maintaining a website?

Triangulating Your Data for Design Work

Discover how the Acquia UX team assumes responsibility for comprehending the goals, behaviors, and needs of their users. Explore the process of transforming a vast array of data into meaningful metrics that can be effectively communicated to stakeholders.

Theming

Do you still need Sass in 2023?

With so many new features being added to CSS in the past couple years, is Sass still needed in 2023? In this session I will go over when to use Sass and when you don’t need to, the advantages to using native CSS over Sass, and what modern CSS can do now that may cause you to not need Sass.

Single Directory Components in Core: A Modern Approach to Drupal’s Front-end

Twig was introduced into Drupal core over 10 years ago. Since then, improvements to Drupal’s front-end API have been minimal. Drupal’s front-end has some catching-up to do, and we believe Single Directory Components (SDC) is the answer!

Understanding Project Browser's Svelte Front-end

In this session, we intend to pick apart the front-end code of the Project Browser and show a real-world use case for Svelte and how its concepts are applied.

Site Building/Front End

CKEditor 5 / Drupal 10 can be Easy out of the Box!

A major part of the Easy out of the Box Initiative is the integration of CKEditor 5.
This session will cover how with very minimal interaction with the command line a sitebuilder can have a usable site, with a modern, attractive interface for content authors.

Drupal Distributions & Recipes Initiative Update

Join us for and update on the Distributions & Recipes core initiative.

Increasing accessibility with components and design systems - 4 Steps to be an inclusive designer/developer

In this accessibility focused session, you will learn about the concept of inclusive design and how to apply it to your work with 4 simple steps.

Intro to Svelte

In a world of dense Javascript frameworks, Svelte is here to simplify things. Learn about the framework adopted by Drupal's Project Browser, how to use it, and why we love it.

Low-Code methods for optimizing your Drupal Site

Optimizing a Drupal site does not always require a developer. Many optimizations can be implemented by site builders using the Drupal admin interface. Through practical demonstrations and examples, attendees of this session will learn how to leverage low-code methods to improve site performance and enhance user experience of their Drupal website.

Optimizing the Design-to-Implementation Workflow

Learn about processes, tools, and workflows that keep the team running smoothly and collaborating in harmony from the design phase handoff to the architectural breakdown of components and foundational site-building of the website.

Writing sustainable automated tests

Learn how good automated tests go hand-in-hand with good design.