Speaking at conferences has been one of the best things that I’ve done over the past decade plus some. Not just the standing on stage doing the talking part, and the traveling to fabulous places (and Scarborough) part, but the coming up with stories to tell and lessons to teach part too.

I gave a new talk on designing inspired style guides last week at Design Exchange Nottingham. It was a really good night, a fabulous audience which was double their normal attendance and I also got the chance to sink a few drinks with my old friend Harry. It’s very likely that I won’t give this talk again in Europe this year, and I wanted to share it with more people, so I’ve written a transcript to accompany the slides.

NB: This page contains 8Mb of images. I’ve optimised them as much as possible, but you probably don’t want to load this page using your mobile data plan.

Flights are booked and visas are in hand^* and I’m getting very excited, because in only a few weeks, Sue and I are heading back to Australia to join Espen, Jina and Una, as well as our friends in Perth at the very first Mixin conference.

Do you know where you were or what you were doing exactly ten years ago (next week?) I do. I was speaking at my first, in fact the first Web Directions conference in Sydney, Australia. (I gave a talk called ‘Creating Inspired Design’ and there’s audio of it if you’re interested in listening.)

As I mentioned last week, I’ve written a new talk to help me cope with my obsession with making layouts that are different from what we mostly see on the web these days. It’s called ‘Art Directing the Web’ because in the talk I make the point that we should make different layouts not just for difference sake, but to better communicate the meaning of our content and to tell better stories.

I’ve joked before that unless a conference line-up includes Harry Roberts and Sara Soueidan it’s a Code Of Conduct violation. Or something like that. So oh how I laughed when earlier this year I was asked to join them on stage at Frontend Conf in Zurich, Switzerland.

Marc Thiele’s started posting videos from his excellent Beyond Tellerrand event in Berlin last month.

For someone who hasn’t travelled or done much conference speaking for the last two years, this past three weeks have been pretty busy with both. I’ve spoken at three conferences and hosted two workshops and I enjoyed every one.

I spent last Friday in Brighton attending the tenth, but my first dConstruct. It was a fabulous conference, in an elegant venue, thoughtfully organised by Clearleft and masterfully presented by Jeremy Keith. Every talk was excellent in different ways and all of them had been brilliantly curated by Jeremy, following, loosely in some cases, the theme of ‘Living With The Network.’ I’m writing a new talk and dConstruct was exactly the inspiration I needed.

Smashing Magazine have published an (edited for print) transcript of the ‘A Modern Designer’s Canvas’ talk that I gave at both An Event Apart in Atlanta and Smashing Conference last week in Oxford.

After some welcome time away, I’ve spoken at several conferences recently, notably An Event Apart in Austin, Milton Keynes Geek Night in, err and last week’s Smashing Conference in Oxford. With those events still fresh in mind, I have a few minor moans about lecterns.

Last week I came back from a lovely, if too short, trip to the American South that included me giving a talk in Atlanta. It felt fabulous to be back on An Event Apart’s stage and I’m humbled by every invitation. I gave a new talk, ‘A Modern Designer’s Canvas’ about finding your medium, not becoming intoxicated by your tools or a process and following your own, not someone else’s path. I gave it without a supporting Keynote slide deck.

The final Handheld conference in Cardiff last November was one of the best, and most memorable, that I’ve ever spoken at and attended. Standing on the largest stage in Europe in-front of 1200 people, pushing a dalek onto the stage with my friend Jon, the Welsh male voice choir, it was a wonderful day.

While we’re on the subject of unexpected conference talks, I’m stepping in to fill Sarah Parmenter’s high heeled shoes at Handheld Conference this month as Sarah’s had to unfortunately cancel.

I can’t quite believe I just wrote that, I’m pinching myself to make sure it’s still true. And it is. Next February, we’ll be heading out to Georgia again where I’m speaking once again at An Event Apart in Atlanta.

Today I’m over in Oslo, Norway, giving a talk at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link). My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps better, more accessible design.

My slides for the talk are already available on SpeakerDeck, but of course, you really had to be here.

It was lovely to hear Laura Kalbag talk about accessibility at Revolution in Shrewsbury a week or more ago. Especially as I’ll be doing the same in Oslo in a couple of weeks. I’m returning to conference speaking at Accessibility Day 2013 (Google translated link) run by those fine people at Northern Beat. My topic is “Designing an atmosphere of accessibility” and I’ll cover how I think focussing on content first as part of responsive design, and in particular working on design ‘atmosphere’ (typography, colour and texture) helps accessible design.

Then the following day (gulp) I’ll be in Scarborough at #TIDE 2013. I’m looking forward to this event enormously as I finally get to meet my CSS hero Harry Roberts and see a few old friends there too. I’ll be talking about “How to call your client an idiot without getting fired” (no guarantees) which is a lot more serious than it sounds as it’s all about encouraging better client participation in design projects. I’ve given this talk once before and this time, like the last, there’ll be no slides, just me.

It’s been a while and I’m justifiably nervous about both talks for different reasons, but it’ll feel good to be back.

Whenever I’m asked what aspects of design developers should learn, I always answer grid ratios and typography. From now on I’ll also point people to this great little slide deck by Dan Barber.

This year’s An Event Apart in Atlanta (the first of 2013) looks to have been filled with fantastic new talks. So much so that I’m considering attending one show this year. Once again, Luke does the web a great service by taking notes from the talks. I’d love to hear this one, from Josh Clark, in person.

Notes from Nathan Ford’s talk on grids and Gridset from what looks like an excellent evening at Port80 localhost in Newport, Wales.

You should design a grid based on your content’s constraints, not design your content based on a grid’s constraints.

Exactly one year ago, I linked to slides from a short talk I’d heard in Brisbane, Luke Brooker’s Future Friendly Style Guides. Again today, poking around SpeakerDeck I found slides from a more recent talk by Luke, Improving Your Responsive Workflow with Style Guides. It expands on his earlier thoughts and is well worth your time.

(Changing the subject slightly, it occurs to me that if you’re looking to get into speaking, writing a talk and sharing your slides even before you’ve given it is a great way to make conference organisers aware of what you have to say. Even better, give the talk as a screencast in the privacy of your own home and share the audio/video on YouTube or Vimeo. Everyone loves to find new talent, attendees, organisers and speakers.)

Thanks once again to all the folks from Smashing Conference for making my son and I so welcome during our visit. One, if not both, of us will be back to sit in the audience next year. Thanks also to Marc Thiele for his hard work to make these videos available.

My first article for Smashing Magazine is my (ever so expanded) notes from my talk at the fabulous Smashing Conference in Freiburg. The original title was “How to call your client an idiot, to their face, without getting fired, then have them thank you for it.” I still like that one best, but we didn’t want a controversial title to get in the way of the serious points I wanted to make.

I’ve also expanded on my notes from my talk for my first article for Smashing Magazine, to be published any day now. Read that, read this, then watch the video from the conference (also coming soon) and you’ll have me in 3D. Fancy that.