It’s only three weeks until I’ll be flying down under to Australia to escape the British winter. While I’m there I’m hosting four Fashionably Flexible Responsive Web Design workshops — one in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

• Perth: February 14th
• Melbourne: February 17th
• Sydney: February 24th
• Brisbane: February 28th

This Fashionably Flexible Responsive Web Design workshop’s completely new and I’m excited because as well as talking about hot responsive topics, I’m putting the focus of this workshop onto design. In particular we’ll cover how to make the design decisions that designers (and developers) need to make everyday in the responsive workflow:

• Designing from the content out
• Responsive typography
• Content or navigation first
• Adapting navigation
• When to apply layout
• Content inspired breakpoints

This workshop will be more hands-on than anything I’ve done in the past. There’ll be plenty of practical tasks to get involved with, plenty of sketching and even some light coding so we can experiment with what you make. I’ve been evolving the format over the last few months at private events for NRK and Finn.no, both in Oslo, and if the reaction of those folks is anything to go by, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane will be a blast.

“Thank you for a great day. It really inspired our developers and we’ve just rolled out the first of our responsive pages already. If our developers get this excited every time you’re, here I think we’ll need to have you come over every other month.”

Espen Dalløkken — Finn, Oslo, Norway.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be refining the workshop’s content some more and building some brand new boilerplates for attendees to take away. While I’ve been busy, my friends at Web Directions have extended the Early Bird price until January 15th. Book before then and save a lovely $100AUS off the regular $549AUS price.

• Workshop day schedule
• Web Directions
• Register now

I hope I’ll see you there.

I can’t quite believe that it’s been six years since Drew MacLellan first published 24 ways. Now ably assisted by a talented team of volunteers, Drew’s made his magazine a web designer’s stable read.

I’ve had the honour of writing a little something for it every year. My contribution, There’s No Formula for Great Designs is out today.

Andy Clarke re-examines the formula used to convert static to fluid grids, and describes how he adapts it within his own custom grids to maintain connectedness in designs across devices. Like great design, there’s a perfect Christmas out there somewhere, but there’s no formula for it.

Every year, I agonise over what I write for 24 ways, because the overall quality of articles just keeps on getting better. My top pick of this year has to be Front-end Style Guides by Anna Debenham.

24 ways is a shining example of people volunteering their knowledge and time, giving back to our industry to help others. I’m proud to have contributed again.

(I’ve gathered links to all my articles, including past writing for 24 ways, onto one new page.)

I’ve just come off stage at An Event Apart San Francisco where I delivered ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’, my talk about CSS3 animations, for the last time. The talk uses a a mad, mad, mad, mad manimation as vehicle to explain CSS3 animations and encourage people to use them (and other emerging CSS properties) for more than for cool, edge case demonstrations. For everyone not at An Event Apart this year, I’ve uploaded my slides on Speaker Deck.

Five Simple Steps are holding a Christmas sale, with 30% of all their books in all formats. There’s plenty of gifts for all the family, but you know what everyone wants, don’t you? That’s right. Hardboiled Web Design.

The Hardboiled Web Design Digital Edition (PDF, ePub & mobi) is only £12:00, but there’s nothing quite like the smell of print on Christmas morning. So get the one you love the Paperback & Digital Edition for only £29:00.

Ho, ho, ho.

There’s been much written about responsive design, but so much of it has focussed on aspects of technical implementation rather than about the design decisions that responsive design demands. So next February (2012), I’ll be travelling down-under to Australia to host four, yes four, ‘Fashionably flexible responsive web design’ workshops.

I gave my first talk of the year at An Event Apart in Seattle. I’m speaking at all six of the events this year (and hosting two workshops ). I called the talk Smoke Gets In Your Eyes after the first episode of Mad Men because I was showing, for the very first time Madmanimation, the Mad Men opening titles recreated using CSS.

When we created our Hardboiled Web Design workshops, we wanted to work with partners who give our customers something extra. So we can’t be more pleased to have three amazing partners for our workshops in the UK — Microsoft, VPS.NET and Campaign Monitor.

It’s been two months since my new book, Hardboiled Web Design, was published by Five Simple Steps and a few weeks since the paperback started arriving on desks and shelves around the world. It’s been incredibly exciting to read how much people love it. Now preparations are in full swing for what comes next, Hardboiled Web Design workshops across the UK.

No it wasn’t a revolutionary new device. It wasn’t even the release of The Beatles music in a lower quality, more expensive format. Oh no, it was much more exciting. Hardboiled Web Design workshop dates in 2011. Yeah! No kidding!

After a year in the planning and six months in the making, my new book, Hardboiled Web Design is available to buy from Five Simple Steps

Although writing a book might appear to be a lonely occupation, in reality it’s a team effort. For Hardboiled Web Design I’ve been lucky to work some incredible talent, including cover artist, the one and only Kevin Cornell.

A large part of writing a book about website design, markup and CSS is designing and producing the example files that accompany the book. For Hardboiled Web Design, this meant several months of designing, coding, redesigning, recoding and testing.

Writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design provides a fantastic opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators or a mixture of the two like Elliot Jay Stocks.

One of the nicest parts about writing and producing a book like Hardboiled Web Design in partnership with a boutique publisher like Five Simple Steps is having the opportunity to work with other, amazing designers, illustrators and photographers.

Want to learn from the best about jQuery and Designing for Mobile with CSS3? Places are still available on For A Beautiful Web workshops: Designing for Mobile with CSS3 with Dan Rubin and jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

I would like to share some very exciting news about Hardboiled Web Design.

In other conference news, this time of the online kind, I will be broadcasting from my orbiting space-station for The CSS3 Online Conference,  organised by Carsonified on March 22nd.

The conference that got it all started for me as a speaker comes back to London on June 10th and 11th for a sixth year, this time with a new face — Web Directions @media.

A month ago I tweeted about my own frustrations with learning jQuery. If you’re a designer or developer and you feel the same way, I’m over the moon to announce a new For A Beautiful Web workshop: jQuery for Designers with Remy Sharp.

After traveling from the USA for An Event Apart to Australia and Japan for Web Directions in 2009, I had expected 2010 to be quieter. I was wrong. 2010 is going to be busier and more hardboiled than ever.