Slides from my full day CSS3 For Responsive Web Design at Smashing Magazine
I’ve just come back from a trip to beautiful Freiburg in southern Germany where I hosted my new CSS3 For Responsive Web Design workshop at Smashing Magazine. I went to Freiburg last September when Alex and I attended Smashing Conference and we had a brilliant time. The folks at Smashing Magazine were genuinely welcoming and I jumped at the first opportunity to work with them again.
This was the first time I’ve hosted this particular workshop, so I was a bit apprehensive how it would be received. Preparing a good workshop is about finding the right balances. The balance between information and inspiration. Between talk and take aways. Between what’s useful now and what will be available soon. I think this workshop struck the right balances.
In the past, many of my workshops have been more inspiration than information, because I was trying to inspire people to think differently about using new technologies by showing them what was possible. That style of workshop can be hard on my voice and the attendees’ ears so I wanted to include more practical, hands on time. I’ve attended coding workshops with practical segments and I’ve always found those parts awkward and poor value. This time I wanted to try something different, so I sent the example files to attendees the day before the workshop so they could dig into them in advance and experiment with them as we went along, as much as or as little as they wanted. It was a really good compromise and I’ll be taking that approach at future workshops.
It took around three months to research the content, code the example files and make the 340 Keynote slides. Not three months solid, obviously, but pretty much every evening and couple of solid weekends on top of client work. But I think that preparing content like this is an investment and a platform for other things, so don't be surprised if you hear me talking about this stuff in one form or another in the future.
I’ll be updating the content of this workshop in the months to come with new examples, updated information and just to keep myself amused. As I’ve done with past workshops, I’m publishing the full set of slides on Speaker Deck for everyone. Of course information is only a part of the workshop experience and you really had to be there.
I hope you’ll join me for a future workshop. The next one’s in Cardiff in November and there are still a handful, but only a handful of tickets available.