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Design advocacy & talks

Talks and workshops on design, bridging developers and designers at events across France and internationally.

Skills: Design advocacyDevRelPublic speakingWorkshopsFigmaUX/UI
Roles: Design advocateSpeaker
Teams: Antoine CANDYSimon MERCIER
Period: 2023 - Present
Duration: 3 years 8 months

Overview

I speak at developer conferences and meetups to advocate for design within tech teams. Together with Simon, we deliver talks, hands-on workshops, and multi-day trainings that make UX/UI tangible for engineers.

Sessions delivered

Conferences

500+

Attendees

Antoine presenting a talk on stage at Devoxx Morocco

Antoine and Simon presenting at a developer meetup, facing the audience

Problem

On the front-end side, and even more so for full-stack profiles, design is often a blind spot. Basics in UX/UI are missing, interest is not always there, and the temptation to jump straight into code is strong. CSS in particular tends to get pushed to the back burner: hard then to ship clean, coherent implementations.

Without a shared framework with designers, « pragmatic » decisions pile up, a button added because there is room left, a component tweaked because « it works », without weighing the impact on the interface as a whole. Design is seen as a layer of pixels, not as a design discipline.

That is the gap we want to close with our talks and workshops: help developers understand UX and especially UI (with Figma as a through-line), discover our craft, and use the same tools to integrate better, showing them that it is not just a pixel story, but a broader design discipline.

My role

Co-design and deliver talks and workshops as a duo
DevRel-style advocacy: demystify design for developers and explain technical constraints to designers
Prepare slide decks, software training, live demos, and interactive, playful exercises in Figma
Engage with the community at events, Q&A, sponsor booths, and conversations with attendees

Approach

Each session starts from a problem developers recognize. Talks like Science, Design, Code: everything you need to know about dark mode blend color science, accessibility, and implementation patterns. Workshops such as Wait, you're not using Figma?! get attendees hands-on with the tool within a few hours. We also run longer trainings (Figma for everyone) over two days to go deeper. We refine content after every event based on audience feedback.

Outcome

Since 2023, we have presented at Devoxx France, Devfest Nantes, MiXiT, Paris Web, Riviera Dev, and other events, reaching hundreds of developers. Our site centralizes talks, replays, and photos from each edition.