Closing the show at An Event Apart Atlanta

I’ll be giving next year’s talk for the first time. I called it The Modern Designer’s Canvas. Here’s the summary:

Since designers began working on the web, we’ve followed processes and practices that were created decades earlier. In recent years, responsive design has shown us that we need to work differently—to find new ways to create designs for the modern web.

But designers have struggled to find new ways to work and new tools to work with. Discover how distilling a design into its ‘atmosphere’ of colour, typography and texture helps create designs that are layout independent. Learn how to create a responsive typographic design and how to base CSS3 media queries on content rather than device pixels.

Design ‘atmosphere’ has been something I’ve been talking about since before I wrote my chapter in Smashing Book #3: Redesign The Web. It’s a concept I’ve developed into part of the process we use every day at Stuff and Nonsense. It helps us while we design and clients love the way breaking down their designs into colour, typography, and texture helps us all focus and have better conversations.

Among the other fabulous speakers in Atlanta there’s Samantha Warren talking about ‘Design Decisions with Style Tiles’ and Jason Santa Maria on ‘The Nimble Process: Think Before You Design.’ It will be interesting to hear how my concepts match up with theirs as they’re both walking similar paths.

Speaking at An Event Apart is always an honour and a responsibility, but closing the show, filling the shoes of Jeffrey Veen and Jared Spool, definitely takes that pressure to another level. I am truly humbled—and quite, quite terrified—by the thought.

Here’s the full show line-up and where you can buy tickets.