VerneTaste

Last night we made a fun stop on the road to Fluxible 2014 with our Taste of Fluxible in Toronto. It was a great reminder of how much we love doing this kind of stuff - learning from talented speakers, getting to know other designers, and generally having a great time together under the guise of design learning.

Matthew Milan (@mmilan) of Normative kicked off the evening with his insightful talk on the design of networks. It was a thought provoking talk, drawing parallels on how the networked world building up around us is similar to the road infrastructure first instated by the Romans. This process of learning is much more of a discovery process than a prescriptive process, and we've only just begun!

Next up, Verne Ho (@verneho) shared his thoughts on how to create a healthy design culture. And he knows a thing or two about it - a co-founder of the design shop Jet Cooper, Verne built up the design organization to be a positive, talented and happy one, so much so that they were wholly acquired by Shopify last year. If you're not satisfied with the culture in your team, don't fret - there are things you can do about it: share a common language, base relationships off mutual respect and instil a feeling of shared ownership over the outcome.

We were thrilled to be able to bring this event to the Gladstone Hotel as it's just one way to continue to bridge the two design communities of Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto; as Bob pointed out, you can draw so many parallels between the San Jose-San Francisco and Toronto-KW corridors in terms of exciting design and technology work. Let's keep it going!

Thanks to all who came out last night, and a big thanks to Amrita Chandra (@amritachandra) and Elena Yunusov (@communicable) for organizing.

The good news is that, while this event was fantastic, best is yet to come - and we're super pumped. See you in September!

MMilanTaste