Annual conferences in locations like New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Freiburg, London and Barcelona are the stage for experts working on real life projects to share practical techniques, ideas, strategies, failures, lessons learned, and successes in an informal, open-minded, welcoming environment.

I lived and worked in Spain for 12 years and have a working knowledge of the language and after a few weeks of western media banging 'Catalan Independence' down our throats and images of police brutality appearing on our tv screens every few minutes I was keen to find out if the Barcelona I love would be different this time, but even the hustle and bustle of this amazing city was unchanged, albeit the locals appeared to be in a reflective mood after the recent violent events. 

The talk in the cafes was vocal and unswerving though, the Catalan flag was flying and the independents were on the streets and making themselves heard at every opportunity.

After filling my face with a variety of traditional Catalan fayre, numerous 'vasos de vino' and the varied opinions of a few locals I decided to retire to my apartment to get ready for the following morning when I would be making my way on foot to the IED Barcelona Design University, located in the nearby neighbourhood of Gràcia for my workshop with Brad Frost, entitled Atomic Design: Process and Patterns.

I arrived after a brisk and somewhat humid and sweaty journey on foot at the IED Barcelona at 8.30am on the dot and was immediately impressed by the location.

The IED Barcelona is located in a space of more than 5,000 m2 and was inaugurated in 2011. The building, conceived by the studio Franconi González Architects in collaboration with ProA Solutions studio, is the result of reforming and restoring a former textile factory of Gràcia, a neighbourhood with a strong personality and a long industrial tradition.

The building gives priority to open and flexible spaces, distributed over the first and second floor, which facilitate intervention and collective work. 

The rest of the building houses the classrooms, the Media Library and the workshops; adapted to the different training areas of Fashion, Design, Visual Communication and Management for Creative Industries. Some of its spaces, such as the Aula Magna and the Open Space, are also devoted to conferences and events.

In addition to co-hosting the Style Guides Podcast, he has also helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, Style Guide Guide, This Is Responsive, Death to Bullshit, and lots more.

After a hurried registration in the foyer and a quick coffee, I sat down and rifled through my freebies, listening to Brads' interesting Spotify playlist of funk anthems in the background, as we all settled in and made quick introductions to our neighbouring seats.

The full-day session with Brad didn't disappoint, even with his jet-lag in full effect, he tackled all that goes into making and maintaining successful interface design systems with enthusiasm and plenty of wit, a never ending repertoire of slides that he finally, thankfully ran out of time before showing us them all.

Promising more slides (groan) in his opening speech at the main conference in the morning, we all left with our ears ringing, but with a spring in our step as we contemplated the mass of knowledge we had acquired on a very informative day.

To go into a bit more detail, Brad covered the following list of subjects, which goes to show why all of us that attended had a variety of aches and pains in our brain pans as we tried to process and slot it all away in the relevant boxes on the journey back to our digs.

This former beer factory is now a space for concerts and other performances related to the world of live music and has a wonderful design throughout.

If you haven't heard about Shopify yet, just over a decade ago they started an online store to sell snowboard equipment directly to those who loved the sport as much as them. They could have listed their products on a number of marketplaces, but they wanted to own their own brand and build relationships with their customers, alongside just selling their goods. Such a tool didn't exist, so they built it themselves. They soon realised a number of other stores were in need of a hassle-free platform to build their retail business, and so Shopify was born! They focus on making commerce better for everyone, so businesses can focus on what they do best: building and selling their products. Today, merchants use their platform to manage every aspect of their business - from products to orders to customers, selling online, in retail stores, and on the go.

'Unlocking Creativity' was a presentation on how to build beautiful websites with Shopify templates by Liam Griffin, Shopify's Partner Education and FED Advocate who braved hurricanes in Ireland to give us a view under the hood of Shopify's new sectioned themes and to learn how we can use them to build highly customisable websites.

I especially enjoyed 'Building lighthouses through design' a presentation by Bastian Koch, Creative Director at Haufe Group who recently developed a holistic design system for their 86 year old company and in 'The good, the bad and the ugly' by Mathias Eckert we heard about the basics of communication and feedback and looked at examples of good and bad feedback and got some useful tips to improve both within your team.

The 'amateur' presentations were informal but very informative and chatting with the presenters afterwards confirmed how genuinely passionate they were for their work. A good sign of things to come in the professional presentations coming up over the next few days!

Stuffed with nibbles, slightly unfocused because of copious amounts of beer (did i mention it was free?), I decided to finish off a busy but productive day by strolling back to my apartment, but found that I started to up the pace as I was brought back to reality by being confronted by images of a city in the middle of an identity crisis and becoming increasingly surrounded by numerous pedestrians adorned with separatist flags, shouting and jangling their keys.

My perambulation was suddenly interrupted by the crashes of pots and pans on the looming balconies above and the blaring of car and motorbike horns in the street as the independents made their feelings heard to all who would listen.

Picking up the pace so I wouldn't become surrounded by a massive crowd that was coming down the road, I turned to move out of the way and came face to face with a line of Policia Local and Guardia Civil advancing from the other direction!

Not keen on becoming a slightly squashed but independent 'bocadillo', I sprinted the final 100m to the safety of my apartment and probably the fourth shower of the day. Did I mention it was humid?