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Ben Callahan, president of Sparkbox, sits down with Treehouse to discuss responsive design, the web design process, and the Build Responsively initiative.
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[? Music ?]
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[Treehouse Friends]
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[? Music ?]
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Hey guys, it's Allison Grayce here for another episode of Treehouse Friends.
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I'm here in Orlando, Florida at the In Control Conference
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with Ben Callahan, the president of Sparkbox.
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Ben, thanks for being here today.
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My pleasure.
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So tell us a little bit about Sparkbox and also the Build Responsively workshops.
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[Ben Callahan] [President, Sparkbox] Let's see, we started officially in 2009.
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There were 4 of us at that time,
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and we went by a different name at the time, Forge,
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and that's actually still the company name, but we work as Sparkbox now.
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We kind of reinvented ourselves in the beginning of 2011,
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and we really started to feel like there was some space
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available for us at least to specialize a bit more
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on trying to build sites that worked at any resolution,
1:02
responsive web design in particular.
1:06
At that same time, we had purchased a domain called Build Responsively,
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jokingly thinking about the idea of drinking responsibly,
1:12
and weren't quite sure what to do with it,
1:15
and we had been learning a ton the year previous about how to do this stuff,
1:18
and somebody had suggested that we start to share some of the things we were doing,
1:22
and so we started to do that on our blog The Foundry on our site.
1:28
And we just really got the itch for this idea of a culture of learning
1:33
in our office itself, and so we started to speak a bit more about it
1:37
and organize the whole workshop series that we did last year.
1:43
We mostly focused in the Midwest, but we did maybe 6 or 7 events,
1:47
and they were 2-day events, which took a lot of work.
1:51
This year we decided to try and attach to some bigger conferences,
1:55
like In Control, actually, and so that's worked out really well.
1:59
We've got at least half a dozen lined up for the year.
2:02
We're really excited.
2:05
We try to think about the techniques that are needed in responsive web design,
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but we try to think about it from an approach of
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looking for common problems that exist in the industry
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and ways that we can solve those problems with these techniques.
2:16
That way we're able to bring multiple disciplines into the conversation
2:20
as opposed to just speaking to front-end developers
2:25
or people who write CSS.
2:27
I think the goal is to try and keep more people engaged.
2:29
We're trying to invite some of the rest of the disciplines into the process with us.
2:31
So how involved are you with putting on the workshops?
2:35
Is that something that you do by yourself, or do you have a team of people?
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The first one we did was in Cincinnati.
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We had every single person from my company speak.
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At that time, I think there were 8 of us,
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and it was an amazing time.
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Most of my team hadn't spoken in public before,
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so I was asking a lot of them to get up in front of people
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and share what they'd learned, but everybody really did it.
3:01
I mean, it was really neat.
3:05
Since then, there are 2 or 3 of us who really enjoy presenting a lot more,
3:07
something that we're pretty passionate about--
3:12
there are actually 4 of us probably--
3:14
and so the 4 of us focus on doing most of the presenting,
3:17
but everybody helps with content development,
3:20
and we have 2 or 3 folks in the office who are really organized
3:22
and can help make sure things are running smoothly
3:25
and on schedule and getting the events planned and all that.
3:29
Well, while we're on the topic of speaking,
3:32
have you always been comfortable with speaking in front of people
3:35
and sharing your knowledge, and what advice can you give to people
3:37
who are thinking about maybe teaching or
3:40
starting their own workshops or starting a blog?
3:43
How do you find the confidence to start sharing what you know?
3:46
You know, it's funny.
3:49
For a long time--I actually haven't done much speaking, to be honest.
3:51
Let's see, I guess last year in January was the first time I ever spoke in public,
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and that was at CodeMash up in Sandusky, Ohio,
4:02
which is a bunch of devs that get together and eat a ton of bacon, basically.
4:04
But it feels natural to me, so I don't know that I have anything to say
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that's wisdom for how to do it.
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It's just I guess at some point enough people told me
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that we were smart, and so I don't really feel like
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we're that far ahead of other people, but I do think that
4:25
we're just willing to share everything that we know.
4:29
The truth is as I've traveled around and met a bunch of people
4:31
who come to these workshops and other conferences,
4:34
everybody that I meet has something that I can pull from,
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and so these engagements for us and what we're speaking
4:40
are more--we get just as much out of them from speaking
4:44
and learning from the people who attend as they do from us,
4:48
maybe even more, so encouragement, I would say
4:52
you have something that you're good at, and if you're good at it,
4:55
write about it to start with, just start documenting what you do.
4:59
It's good for you.
5:02
Even if nobody reads it, it's good for you to be able to go back and find that stuff,
5:04
but you'll see that you'll quickly get an audience,
5:06
because there are people hungry for this information.
5:08
Speaking of an audience too,
5:10
you're currently redesigning the Sparkbox website live
5:13
for everyone to see.
5:16
Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do that.
5:19
Most people don't invite people into their process like that,
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so that's a really cool idea.
5:25
Why did we do it? Let's see.
5:27
There are probably a handful of reasons.
5:29
Like I said before, I feel like we're trying to build
5:31
a culture of learning, and so for us, it's not easy
5:34
to write all of the time, but we require everybody in the office to write,
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and this gave us some really poignant subject matter,
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I think, to cover, in terms of writing.
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It's an opportunity to introduce the rest of the team
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to writing more about the things, the problems that they're solving.
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It's also a little bit of accountability for us.
5:56
If you're out there and you had to redesign your own site,
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you know how hard that can be.
6:03
And putting it out there for the rest of our peers to see
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and give feedback on has been an opportunity to say to us,
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"Look, this is important to do."
6:13
"We have to make time for this."
6:15
We have to make sure that--we have obligations to clients obviously,
6:17
but this is just as important as that work too.
6:22
And for a year, we've been using our website
6:25
as an example of some things not to do in our workshops
6:28
because it's one of the first sites that we built with some of these techniques.
6:32
We've learned so much in a year or two,
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and so it was time to do it.
6:37
Yeah, I bet that pressure too of letting everyone see your timeline
6:41
and opening it up for people to see really makes you stick to it and get it done.
6:46
Yeah, I mean, the holidays hit right in the middle,
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so we've actually been a little quiet,
6:53
but later this week we're kicking it back up.
6:55
But to be honest, if you have the illusion
6:59
that what you're doing on the Web is private,
7:04
then you're probably mistaken, because all of our work is out there.
7:06
People can view source on pretty much anything we do,
7:10
so it's kind of the nature of the industry too.
7:13
You mentioned how your site was an example of what not to do.
7:16
What do you mean by that?
7:19
A perfect example.
7:21
If you go to the Sparkbox Foundry and go to any post,
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and you're on, say, a small device,
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what you will see will actually look more like a 404 page
7:29
than an article, and that's because we didn't think so much
7:32
about the usability of the site when we did it.
7:35
We were obsessed.
7:38
We got caught up in the 3 prime techniques of responsive web design.
7:40
What we ended up doing was taking a big site
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and cramming it on to a small device, which is not how this should work.
7:47
There is a lot more to it than that,
7:52
and that work was primarily done by front-end developers,
7:54
and so one of the things that we talk a lot about in our workshop
7:59
is that you have to invite the rest of the team into the conversation,
8:02
and we speak about this idea of collaboration.
8:08
Obviously, everybody who has talked about this stuff and has done it
8:11
knows that you've got to have the right team members
8:13
in the room to make decisions.
8:16
We've actually found that we end up--
8:18
we do something--I don't even know if this is new or not,
8:21
but we call it natural decisions, because in a more linear process,
8:24
a more traditional process, what we've seen is one person
8:27
or one discipline feels like they need to finish their thing
8:30
and get to the deliverable and hand it to the next person.
8:33
They feel like they have to make all of the decisions
8:36
about that specific discipline early in the process.
8:38
What we try to do is delay decisions as long as we can.
8:41
We're waiting until it's the right time to make those decisions,
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so I'm not forcing my UX people or whoever is doing wireframes or whatever
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to have all of that done and figured out before we've gotten into the code.
8:52
That just doesn't make any sense. Things are too dynamic, too fluid.
8:55
I was talking to Samantha Warren last night,
9:00
and she said, "There is no responsive process."
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"The process itself has to be responsive."
9:05
"It has to change for the project," and that's very true, very true.
9:09
So speaking of the process, there is all this about designing in the browser
9:14
and trying to figure out that process, because I think saying that
9:20
a process is responsive, bosses and clients don't like that, right?
9:24
So how do you think that's going to work moving forward?
9:28
Do you think that designers--there is less of a deliverable at the end for them?
9:33
Do you think that maybe--like how do you envision that process changing?
9:38
I said a little bit earlier that I feel like it's really more about collaboration.
9:43
For us, we end up putting front-end developers with designers.
9:46
If you know about pair programming, we do that with
9:52
content people and technical people.
9:55
We do that with every person, every discipline in our office
9:57
pairs with other disciplines, and we do that because
10:01
I want all of my team to broaden their knowledge
10:04
about the Web as a whole.
10:07
That gives them the ability to be informed at least
10:09
and help make better decisions when they're tasked
10:13
with doing something on their own.
10:15
But early in the process, I'll put my technical director
10:17
and my content director in the room, lock them in the conference room together
10:20
with a projector and let them figure out how to get a basis
10:23
for the site started.
10:27
Those are the 2 people that really need to be there at the beginning.
10:29
Somebody has to get the architecture of the thing,
10:31
something functional built, the technical director,
10:33
and somebody who understands the content early in the process.
10:36
Those are the 2 that have to figure out how this stuff is going to actually live together,
10:39
so we put them together early.
10:42
They get something built that we can actually use
10:44
during our dev process, and then we do something called style prototypes,
10:47
and we run that in parallel with something called a content priority prototype.
10:52
These are both deliverables that happen in the browser for us,
10:55
so it's HTML, and it's some CSS, and they're separate at this point.
10:58
We try to make sure that deliverables we offer
11:02
that aren't intended to focus on design
11:05
look as ugly as they can,
11:08
because I've been in too many meetings with beautiful wireframes
11:11
where my clients are commenting about colors
11:14
or layout or something, and it's like, "Okay, let's just cut this stuff out."
11:16
We show pretty much unstyled HTML
11:22
in what is like a prototype but with real content,
11:25
as much real content in it as we can very early,
11:28
and we do that in a linear way
11:30
so that they can see priority.
11:32
The linear nature forces us to prioritize things.
11:34
And then at the same time, we're working on a style prototype,
11:37
which is like an evolution of style tiles from Samantha,
11:40
but it happens in the browser.
11:43
Just a basic, basic HTML page, no real content at all,
11:45
and it's really about typography, color, texture,
11:49
some of the core design principles that we have.
11:51
Our designers build those on their own.
11:55
If they need a little help, they'll work with somebody who is a specialist in CSS,
11:58
but we're trying to get them to build these on their own,
12:01
because they need to know CSS.
12:04
I mean, there is a big conversation. I don't want to open up that can of worms.
12:08
But I actually believe that it's very true if you're going to design
12:11
for the Web, you need to learn some CSS.
12:15
I think this is true too.
12:17
If you're going to write content for the Web, you should probably learn some HTML.
12:19
That's semantics, right?
12:21
Yeah, because you used to be able to get a job as a web designer
12:23
knowing just a few CSS, a little bit of CSS, a little bit of HTML.
12:27
Now it seems like the expectations are so much higher
12:32
with having to know HTML5, CSS3, LESS and SASS
12:35
and all this stuff, so what do you think
12:38
a web designer needs just to get into the door these days?
12:41
A web designer?
12:44
What does that even mean? [laughs]
12:47
I mean, do you think there is a bigger gulf now between
12:49
a front-end designer and then maybe someone who is a front-end developer
12:51
than there used to be, or do you still think that someone should wear both hats?
12:55
My technical director is Rob Harr,
12:58
and he keeps saying this thing in the office
13:01
where he says that SASS--or LESS I think is one of the more popular
13:03
first preprocessors, but he says, "These preprocessors for CSS
13:10
were like a gateway drug for front-end devs."
13:15
What he's trying to say is that this whole front-end development thing
13:18
has gotten so complex.
13:21
I feel like front-end devs who lean technically,
13:24
technical in their nature are shifting towards all of this complex
13:27
local build process stuff with running node and grunt
13:31
and all this stuff to get a really cool, easy-to-use front-end development.
13:35
Well, easy to use if you're a technical person,
13:38
a front-end development tool, or environment running.
13:40
But then you have designers who started maybe branding in print
13:43
and are trying to move into this space, and they're going to learn CSS.
13:46
They're going to learn some HTML. That's great.
13:49
But they're going to shy away from even using something like SASS,
13:51
if they have to install Ruby or use the command line.
13:54
Andy Clark goes on about this.
13:57
"Why is this a command line?"
13:59
"Make this easy for me to do."
14:01
He's got a really valid point, which is at some point
14:03
the tooling that we use for doing this stuff
14:06
is going to settle a little bit I hope,
14:08
and we'll start to see there are some clear winners
14:10
in terms of what you should be doing.
14:12
And then I think the people who are less technical
14:14
will be able to come into that and embrace it a bit easier.
14:17
So there still is a place for them to co-exist.
14:20
It's not like-->>Oh, yeah, absolutely.
14:23
What is the biggest mistake you see web designers making
14:26
when designing responsive websites?
14:29
Designers like to control things,
14:31
and if you're going to design for the Web, you have to let go of that.
14:35
That's probably the biggest thing is I talk to people all the time about this,
14:40
and they say, "Well, when do you actually design the site?"
14:44
"When do you design the site?"
14:47
And we still do a lot in Photoshop,
14:50
but it's becoming more like a sketch pad for us.
14:54
And the implementation of that is happening in the browser,
14:57
and that's where it needs to happen.
15:00
We're trying to get away from making pictures of websites
15:02
as so many people are saying these days and actually building sites themselves.
15:06
I don't know if that answers the question.
15:10
So you think designers maybe get too fixated on perfection
15:12
of every single pixel and then the type,
15:16
and then they get uncomfortable when they see it actually live in its environment.
15:19
We used to--oh, gosh, we were so ridiculous about this stuff.
15:23
My creative director, Jeremy Lloyd, is obsessed with type, typography.
15:26
He loves it.
15:33
He comes from a branding background, and he cares about this stuff.
15:35
And I can remember times where the type in Photoshop
15:37
looked beautiful, but as soon as we would move it to the Web,
15:42
obviously it's going to look different,
15:44
and then the client, we were showing static comps
15:47
that were exported from Photoshop,
15:49
so clients get an expectation about type and color
15:51
and how these things are going to look, and I can remember times
15:53
when we would literally move this stuff into the browser,
15:57
get the Web font rendering, do a screen cap of the type
15:59
in the browser and bring it back into Photoshop
16:03
so that we could show accurate web type.
16:05
That's ridiculous.
16:07
Why don't we just put it in the browser?
16:10
I think it's really about letting go of control.
16:12
That's the biggest thing that I see, because we've wasted so much time
16:15
making things perfect in Photoshop
16:18
knowing that they're never actually going to look like that.
16:21
It's just not realistic.
16:23
So as far as responsive images go,
16:25
there are a few things out there, like picture fill
16:28
and some great options but nothing really solidified or set in stone.
16:31
What do you think is the best solution right now?
16:34
Well, things are getting solidified.
16:38
I think the first draft is out for both picture and source set,
16:40
if I recall, very recently.
16:45
Those things are happening.
16:47
There are lots of heated dialogue still happening about those things,
16:49
and I think that in the end, that's going to be what we really need.
16:56
There are tons of solutions for this stuff, though.
16:59
There is everything from proxy-based solutions
17:01
where you've got Resrc It, R-E-S-R-C dot I-T,
17:04
which I haven't actually tried yet, but I know that it's similar
17:09
to some of the stuff Sentia was doing.
17:12
And what that does is basically you can modify the URL of your image,
17:16
so it's easy to implement,
17:19
but it does come along with some other interesting implications.
17:23
What happens is you're modifying it by changing a server,
17:27
putting a new server basically on the front of the URL.
17:31
Someone else gets the request, a different server.
17:33
They parse out your image, which is still in the URL,
17:36
take it to their server.
17:39
Also, they inspect user/agent stuff, so they're doing some device classification,
17:41
scaling that image, sending it back to you.
17:45
Performance concerns obviously.
17:51
You're dependent on someone else to solve that problem for you.
17:55
Maybe you don't want it to be set to the size of the resolution of the device.
17:58
But a very easy to use kind of solution.
18:02
You can also do that same kind of thing on your own server
18:06
with a little bit of htaccess and basically grabbing
18:09
any image type and doing the exact same kind of thing
18:13
but doing it on your box.
18:19
Actually, picturefill is a really good solution.
18:21
Scott has done a fantastic job with that,
18:24
and if you're going to implement it, I would say do something
18:27
where you in your CMS give the ability
18:30
to at some point in the future generate the actual picture syntax
18:33
when it's ready.
18:36
But it's very well tested.
18:38
People are using it with great success,
18:41
so I think that's a very valid solution right now.
18:43
There are all kinds of other crazy things that people are trying,
18:47
but in the end, I think we need a little bit better HTML element.
18:51
Yeah, definitely. They're working on it, right?
18:55
What do you think will be the major improvements
18:57
to responsive web design this year?
19:00
Well, I feel like some bigger organizations are finally starting to get on board
19:02
with some of this stuff, so some of the requests that we're getting
19:05
for 3 or 4 ROI case studies we'll finally start to have some of that data available,
19:09
which I think will only encourage more to do so.
19:14
I think there is going to be that move from some bigger companies,
19:18
some big e-commerce type stuff that's going to be happening this year I know,
19:21
so that's really exciting.
19:25
I talk about this a little bit, and I wrote an article called
19:27
"The Responsive Dip," and it's based on the idea of how
19:31
humans learn things, and you move through these 4 stages of learning,
19:34
and I feel like we are at a stage where we
19:39
are finally starting to actually understand that
19:42
we're not really doing this quite right.
19:45
We have to rethink a lot more of what we've done.
19:48
Sometimes you actually get worse at doing something
19:51
before you get better, but that's kind of the idea.
19:53
I think for us as an industry that's part of what's happening here.
19:55
In Jakob Nielsen's study not too long ago
19:59
where there was so much--and Josh Clark responded--
20:03
so many people wrote back about--
20:05
Jakob said based on data of testing,
20:07
mobile-specific sites versus responsive sites,
20:10
he found that the usability of the responsive sites was much worse,
20:14
and his recommendations were to do something like
20:17
build a mobile site, cut content, cut features,
20:20
and give them a link to a full site.
20:23
Obviously, many people in the industry said, "Wait a second."
20:25
"What are you talking about? That's a bad idea."
20:27
"You're making a lot of assumptions about context and all these things,"
20:30
which I agree with.
20:33
But I understand how Jakob arrived at the conclusion that he did,
20:35
and that's because we've built very non-performance sites
20:39
with lousy user experiences.
20:42
We're learning.
20:45
I think in some respects we've gotten worse at doing web design
20:48
by trying to figure this stuff out.
20:53
But we're going to come out of that dip of learning,
20:56
and we're going to be, I think, in a much better place.
20:59
We're starting to see some sites come out that are demonstrating
21:01
that this stuff can really work, so I think this is going to be the year
21:05
where we start to see some really creative responsive type solutions,
21:09
and we start to see real organizational change,
21:14
which is required to invite this kind of process to happen,
21:18
at a bigger company in particular.
21:23
I think there is so much happening there,
21:26
and so for me, the future of this stuff, at least for the next year
21:28
of what I see, it's really more about the hardest stuff to figure out,
21:32
which is not the technical stuff.
21:37
It's the politics of the organization that has to adjust.
21:39
That's the hard stuff.
21:43
All the people who build sites, they see this stuff,
21:45
and it's obvious.
21:47
This makes sense. This is how it should be.
21:49
We're finally embracing the fluid nature of our medium.
21:51
But it's the people who aren't as technical
21:55
but who are making money decisions, financial decisions
21:57
in an organization and have to say, "Yes, it's okay
22:01
"for you all to sit together in the same room
22:04
"and for me to not know exactly how long this is going to take
22:07
the first couple times you do it."
22:10
That's a hard decision for a financial person to make,
22:12
business person.
22:16
Well, I think that's a great place to wrap it up,
22:18
with the future of responsive web.
22:20
Where can they keep up with your work and keep up with you?
22:23
The Sparkbox website, SeeSparkbox.com,
22:26
and on Twitter, just BenCallahan, all 1 word.
22:29
I have BenCallahan.com if you want to see
22:33
where I'm going to be speaking or what I'm writing about,
22:35
those kinds of things, and then the Build Responsively
22:37
workshop is coming around, so try to find one of those,
22:41
and we'd love to meet you guys there.
22:43
Cool. Well, thank you for joining us today.
22:45
My pleasure.>>Until next time.
22:47
Thanks for watching.
22:50
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22:52
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