I'm Dan Mall I'm a creative director and a founder of my own design collaborative
in Philly called super friendly
I've been really lucky to work with that I have and they're all so generous
and I think maybe that's maybe the best way that I can the best thing that I can
take from it and maybe the best thing that I can pay forward to is generosity
I think all of those people are incredible in what they do and what
they've done but I think more so what stands out even above that is just how
generous they are in terms of sharing you know I think the I grew up in in the
web and a culture of sharing which is why I do what I do is speaking at
conferences and writing blog posts and teaching and is because people did that
for me and I wouldn't be where I am today had they not done that both
publicly and and directly with me and so I feel like it's it's all I can do to
kind of pay that forward
so super friendly it's almost seven years in the making that's longer than
I've done anything I've always worked the jobs for about three or four years
at a time so super friendly is is great it's doing great
um I think we're working with clients that are adventurous I think that's one
of the things that I've always wanted to do is with clients that want to take
risks and sometimes that risk is doing something ultra simple or doing
something that maybe they were scared to do otherwise and I feel like our teams
do a good job of sort of help helping our clients just give them confidence
about what they're gonna do and why it's gonna be okay and that comes from
research and experience and design and collaboration and all of those things so
I'm having a blast doing that stuff it's been it's been a while to try to build
up to that point and I'm glad that it's there
my conference talk is about collaboration I find that a lot of
designers and developers think that they collaborate but really we're stuck in
this kind of waterfall process and I think that work is fun when you work
with people I think that's the best part about it is just having fun with the
people that you're working with and learning from them and being able to
teach them things and just having a good time and I and so part of my message in
my talk and just like this generally is how do we get to have more fun by taking
the best of what we know and sharing it with everybody else so I like to share
like really actionable takes tips and tricks that people can take to their
jobs they can start doing this tomorrow or start trying this I don't mean to to
preach it as Dogma but for people that are like well we're having a tough time
doing this you know what I hope to share is well here's a way that you could try
that's different you know and maybe this will work for you
part of the business model of super-friendly is that I'm the only
employee and I create bespoke teams for clients what that means is we can't
really rely on process that's like well let's just do it the way that we did the
last project because the team doesn't know what the last project was like and
so I think the process and the tools are really about asking everyone on the team
how should we do this that's usually the first step is what should we do and how
should we go about it and then what naturally follows from there is well
what tools do we use to accomplish that and I think every project one of the
things that is my favorite about it is that we do use new tools because
sometimes the thing that we're trying to achieve we haven't tried to do that
before and it's a little bit of reinventing the wheel but I think we get
some benefit out of that is every time we are deciding together this is how
we're gonna do this one and these are the tools we're gonna use and these are
the processes that we're gonna use and personally I get a lot of exposure to
things that I wouldn't have done on my own whether that's you know we're gonna
try this one waterfall we're gonna try this one scrum
fall or we try do this one you know whatever the process is or we're gonna
try these new tools and I find out a lot of energy from that
I don't know a ton about progressive Web Apps but I do think from what I know
about them I think they're only valuable you know I think they're like there are
things that sort of are no brainer that like why not create offline modes for
the things that we're doing why not cater to experiences that aren't exactly
the one that we designed for I think it helps build empathy and inclusiveness
and so while I don't know a lot about the technical details of how to build
progressive website Web Apps and how to design for them I think its principles
are really great and I wish that more of our work shared that stuff
it's an interesting time for designers because especially graphic designers and
UI designers we're used to making things that are represented through pixels now
we have to think about experiences that you could only hear or only see or only
touch or only smell you know maybe and I think that that still fits in a
designer's skill set and so as I think about what we're doing and how we
prepare for that you know I went to design school but I don't know how to
design a voice anything in class on how to design for voice lots of people are
teaching about that and writing about that so I think that's that's great I
think the skills that prepare us for that kind of world are skills about how
to how to listen to people you know skills about how to care about what
other people are doing especially if they're different than we are I think
that we have a somewhat of a myopic tech society right now I think the more that
we care about well what happens when people can't see this or what happens if
somebody has an impairment and and I'm thinking about those kinds of things I
think we'll make our world better and I'm excited for how designers can grow
if they're if they continue to focus on those things