Learn Through Experience, Connect With Purpose
Events are where ideas take shape. Our workshops, talks, and meetups bring together people who care about making better digital products. You'll work through real challenges, hear from designers who've been where you are, and build relationships that last beyond the programme.
We're running sessions throughout spring and summer 2026, mostly in Portsmouth but with some online options too. Small groups, practical focus, and proper conversations about UI/UX work.
What's Coming Up
We keep our events focused and manageable. Most run for half a day or an evening, so you can fit them around your schedule. Registration opens about six weeks before each event.
Design Systems in Practice
Stop reinventing buttons. Learn to build components that actually get used across teams. We'll look at three real design systems and understand what makes them work.
User Testing Without the Budget
You don't need fancy labs or expensive software. This workshop covers quick, effective methods for getting feedback when resources are tight. Bring a project you're working on.
Accessibility Fundamentals
Making interfaces that everyone can use isn't complicated, but it does require thinking differently. We'll test real websites together and learn what good accessibility actually looks like in practice.
Portfolio Review Sessions
Bring your work and get honest feedback. These small group sessions focus on what employers actually look for and how to present projects that tell a coherent story about your skills.
Mobile-First Design Workshop
Most traffic comes from phones now, but many designers still start with desktop. This hands-on session helps you think mobile from the beginning and scale up effectively.
Working With Developers
The designer-developer relationship can make or break a project. Learn to communicate your ideas technically, understand constraints, and collaborate on solutions that actually ship.
Hands-On Learning That Sticks
Lectures are fine, but you don't really learn design by listening. Our workshops get you working through problems, making decisions, and dealing with the messy bits that make real projects interesting.
We keep groups small on purpose – usually between eight and twelve people. That means you get actual feedback on your work and time to ask questions that matter to you specifically.
- Work through design challenges based on real client briefs
- Get feedback from instructors who've shipped actual products
- Learn tools and techniques you'll use the following week
- Take home resources and templates you can adapt for your projects
- Connect with other designers at similar stages in their journey
Most workshops include materials you can reference later – templates, checklists, and examples that help when you're working on your own projects.
Guest Speaker Series
We invite designers who've built real things to talk about what worked, what didn't, and what they learned along the way. No polished presentations about success – just honest conversations about the work.
Linnea Vestergaard
Lead Product DesignerLinnea has spent the past seven years designing healthcare interfaces – the kind where getting things wrong has real consequences. She's worked on everything from patient portals to clinical decision tools, mostly for NHS trusts and private clinics across the south of England.
Before that, she was freelancing and learning the hard way that good design isn't always obvious design. She's particularly interested in how we make complex systems feel simple without hiding important information.
Designing for High-Stakes Environments
Linnea will share three projects where she had to balance user needs with regulatory requirements, clinical workflows, and the reality that mistakes could genuinely harm people. It's a different kind of pressure than most consumer apps, and the lessons apply beyond healthcare. She'll talk about research methods that work in sensitive contexts, designing for stressed users, and how to push back when stakeholders want things that would make interfaces worse.
Why People Keep Coming Back
The workshops and talks are useful, but honestly? A lot of people tell us the connections they make turn out to be just as valuable. Finding other designers who understand what you're dealing with makes the work less isolating.
Meet Your Peers
Connect with designers at similar points in their career. Share resources, trade feedback, and occasionally commiserate about difficult clients over coffee.
Learn From Experience
Talk to designers who've been working for five or ten years. Ask the questions that don't fit into workshop time and get perspective on where your career might go.
Find Collaborators
Several projects have started because people met at our events. Whether you need a developer for a side project or a designer to split freelance work with, these connections matter.
Ready to Join an Event?
Registration for spring 2026 events opens in January. We'll send details about upcoming workshops, talks, and meetups to anyone on our programme mailing list. Most events fill up within a week or two, so it helps to know when they're announced.