Design and Build a Pattern Library

Workshop trainer should have stick to the plan and force attendees (mostly designers) to learn principles of building pattern library by coding no matter how hard it would be. This way it was little gain and no pain :)
It seemed like a good idea to do pair programming (one frontend developer + one designer). I guess it was not clear enough in the workshop description and that lead to unprepared attendees..

Although the trainer was charismatic and nice, this was in no way a good workshop, or workshop at all. The requirement for this workshop was to know basic html and css, which most of us did know, so it could have worked in our favor. Or write better requirements next time, so people won't apply for it. Most of the stuff on presentations were well know. But to be fair, first 2 hours were interesting and there were new things to learn, and that saves the workshop a bit. Still, it makes me sad we didn't go through with building the design library.

Earlier this year I attended the Design Systems Conference in Helsinki, where I also participated in Nathan Curtis' workshop. My reasoning to sign up for Bermon's workshop was to go beyond what I learned in Helsinki and get my hands "dirty" by doing some actual coding. All with the aim of getting a better understanding of the "other side" of the process.

Unfortunately, seems like Bermon didn't expect so many of the participants to be designers.

Now, I can only speak for myself, and I thought the title and description both implied that designers were the target audience: "Streamline the design process and improve collaboration with developers by breaking down pages into reusable modules." – being the very first line of the description.
Another confusing bit was that the description stated "A basic understanding of HTML and CSS is needed", but it felt like what was expected was significantly more than that.

The decision was made to change the plan for the workshop and it seemed to me like it turned into a more theoretical lecture on pattern libraries, and any serious coding was out of the picture. Hence why I decided to leave after the first hour, with the hopes that at least the remaining participants will get their money's worth.

A few friendly suggestions for next time:
1) Test the title and description of the workshop and see what your test subjects would expect to find there (a simple survey or a round of interviews amongst designers and developers would do);
2) After people sign up, send them an introductory email with all the instructions and again a survey, so that you know your audience *before* you've already started to present [ a) designer/FE developer/both? b) knowledge of html/css/js/xyz? c) expectations from the workshop? ];
3) If there are instructions for installing certain frameworks or setting up development environments – all the stuff that >90% designers never did before – it would be much easier for them if these instructions were offered in the form of a video.

Better luck next time!

//Davor