So long, and thanks for all the fish.
They say that all good things must come to an end. Today we’re announcing that after six wonderful years, Jam is closing down.
To this day, we have thoroughly enjoyed everything we’ve done together. Our events were fun, different, and a pleasure to organise and run. You brought them to life and we couldn't be more grateful for all the great moments we enjoyed in your company.
In this announcement, we’d like to share the rationale behind this decision.
2020 has had a disastrous impact on society and the economy as a whole. From a business standpoint, companies operating in the events industry have been hit particularly hard.
Our revenues crashed, and we lost a considerable amount of money in deposits paid to venues – including Hawker House, who we were saddened to hear, are also in the process of closing down.
We successfully ran several online events throughout the year, but it quickly became clear to us that it was going to be impossible to recreate the experiences we'd created in the past, online.
But we didn't throw in the towel. At the end of the year, we attempted a pivot, and launched – Jam Club – an online community for our most committed members.
Our vision was to build a thriving space for growth-minded product leaders, offering intimate virtual workshops every month.
Pivoting from an in-person events company to an online community has proven significantly harder than we’d originally hoped, and the losses we accumulated in 2020 have proven too significant for us to overcome. And so now we’d rather stop here, celebrate the journey, and say a proper goodbye.
What now?
We’ll keep Jam Club open for the next six months. We won’t be moderating it or running any workshops, but you'll be able to access all workshop recordings, discussions, and member profiles. We hope you’ll be able to use it to reconnect with friends made at past events.
To claim your free invite just drop us a note at hello@makingjam.io.
You can also find all past talk videos on our YouTube channel.
Thank you
A huge thank you to our amazing team of staff and volunteers; Marta, Sunil, Jessie, Maria, Francesca, Stephen, Joan, Monica, Ecem, Steve, David, Michael, Mahtab, Eva, Gizem, Antoine, Jeff and all those that helped run our events every year. We’re deeply grateful for the friendship, shared memories, and support you’ve shown us over the years. We couldn’t have achieved everything we did without you.
Thank you to Doug and Chris at Intelligent People. You supported us from day one, and have always been a pleasure to work with.
Thank you to all our speakers and workshop instructors for all the brilliant content you’ve delivered over the years.
And thank you, for the good times we created together.
Seb & Mathilde
About
Blog
Creating design systems with Figma
Learn how to collaboratively design and prototype a UI by creating reusable components, shared across a Team Library in Figma.
Summary
Summary
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that completely transforms the way you work with your team. It combines the best of everything in the world of UI design tools – prototyping, file version control, developer handoff – and adds some cool features such as live embedding and real-time collaboration.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to design and prototype an app’s user interface and how to create a design system from scratch, using reusable styles, icons and components that can be shared across your team.
Who is it for?
This course is really for everyone, aimed at beginners as well as more experienced users, such as design professionals. If you are an experienced Sketch, InVision and/or XD designer, this course is also for you: you’re going to learn how Figma can positively change your daily workflow and improve your team collaboration. Please note that if you’re an advanced user of these tools, you may already be familiar with some of the concepts we’ll be discussing, so the main benefit of attending the course will lie in learning Figma as a new tool and the underpinning design systems methodology.
Key takeaways
- Learn by doing: initially we’ll cover all the basics, and very quickly you’ll be putting your hands-on and work collaboratively on a real design project during the day
- Improve your design workflow and discover more effective ways of collaborating on a project in real-time with your team
- Learn how to implement the Atomic Design methodology to create UI components
- Gain in-depth understanding of the anatomy of a Design System
On the day
Morning
- An introduction to design systems and the Atomic Design methodology.
- Learn how to organise your files and projects.
- Create and manage a team.
- Getting started with Figma: Pages, Frames, Layers, Layout constraints, Vectors and Shapes, Text, Shared Styles, Components, and so on.
- Learn more advanced features like layout grids, Team libraries, real-time live collaboration and file version control.
- An introduction to Figma plugins and those useful to improve your workflow.
- Prototype your app with Figma: link screens, add overlays, animations and page transitions.
- Share your designs with stakeholders: use the Figma Mirror app to preview your designs on your phone.
- Hassle-free developer handoff with Figma.
Afternoon
We will create our very own small design system as a set of reusable UI components in our shared Team Library. With these components we will then create an interactive prototype of a banking mobile app. Since Figma is a breakthrough collaboration tool, all the attendants will be asked to work together and collaboratively on the same project.
Requirements
Just bring your shiny MacBook Pro or your PC laptop, that’s all you need for the day. Figma is a web-based application, so it can run either on Windows or on a Mac, as well as in the web browser.