Matthias Ott
Matthias is a designer, web design engineer, and educator who has been building for the Web for over two decades. He works at the intersection of design and frontend engineering, with agencies and his own clients, teaches interface prototyping at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, and runs workshops on modern CSS, design engineering, and accessibility. And he wants the Web to stay open, independent, and personal – something he practices on his own site and writes about in Own Your Web, a newsletter about building your own corner of the internet.
Talk: The Web We Make
We are all makers. Making is how we learn and grow. You shape a thing, and it reacts, it pushes back, and that’s how you find out what it’s made of. Nowhere is this more true than on the Web. You only learn how to design and build for this fluid, unpredictable, edgeless medium by making things with it. You write a line of CSS, the material answers – immediately, honestly, in the browser – and you know something you didn’t know a minute ago. Do that for years and you have judgment: you can tell whether something merely works or is actually good.
Now we’re told that coding is solved and that the models can design. That we’re the human in the loop now. But what does our work become when we stop touching it? What does the Web we make become? And what do we become?