I’d intended to go to The Digital Barn this weekend, but having just come back from Freiburg, I couldn’t make it. My main reason for attending was Harry Roberts and his talk about Big CSS.

I’ve linked to Harry a lot recently. I’m a big fan of his work, so I was disappointed I wouldn’t hear his talk. That’s why I was so pleased to find a rehearsal run through on YouTube.

It’s great when conference organisers record audio or video, but speakers shouldn’t rely on that. Like Harry, more people, particularly younger or newer speakers, should record their talks. It makes them more widely available, spreading the word about what you have to say and about you. It’s exactly what conference organisers are looking for when seeking out new speakers.

A couple of months ago, Smashing Magazine’s Vitaly Friedman, Marc Thiele and I were talking over email when he asked if I’d fill an open speaking slot at Smashing Conference. I was already hosting two ‘Fashionably Flexible Responsive Design’ workshops there, so I hesitated because, as you might remember, I’m cutting down the number of conferences I speak at and I’d planned to speak at only An Event Apart in Austin this year.

I’ve just come home from a ten hot days in Texas, where I had the honour, again, of speaking at An Event Apart alongside some of the best speakers in the industry. I enjoyed the trip, and especially the conference, enormously.

I’ve spoken at conferences regularly since my first time (again alongside Jeremy and Jeffrey) at @media 2005. (I’d never have guessed then that we’d still be friends, still doing this thing, all these years later.) But in the last couple of years I started to enjoy speaking less and emotional risk/reward ratio that goes with public speaking tipped too much toward risk. So I decided to not speak at all in 2012. That is until Jeffrey persuaded me to speak in Austin.

Unlike Jeremy, this wasn’t my first not-SXSW visit to Austin as Elliot, Simon, Tim and I and a bunch of design globetrotters went there to redesign a bank a few years ago.

I’m glad I went. Every An Event Apart conference feels special, but at this one the (unplanned) recurring themes were spooky. My talk was about designing, design process and particularly how our conventional design tools — drawing tools like Fireworks and Photoshop — are not equipped for designing today’s web. They’re ‘Bringing a knife to a gunfight!’ From the website:

In the mid-nineties, when designers started making their mark on the web, they did it with software tools and processes that they’d brought with them from print. But the web’s a different place now than it was ten, five, even two years ago; the tools and processes we’ve relied on for years are no longer capable of properly designing today’s flexible, responsive web. In this session, we’ll find new ways to design that better serve the needs of today’s responsive web, and investigate better, alternative tools and approaches to design. We’ll learn too how new tools and approaches can improve communication between designers and developers and our clients.

I hear that the talk was well received and I had a great time giving it. In fact, it’s definitely helped me to get my speaking mojo working again.

For everyone not at An Event Apart in Austin:

• I’ve uploaded my slides on Speaker Deck
• Here’s a list of the URLs from the talk too.

While we’re talking about talks about design, here’s a recent one by Adobe’s Divya Manian from Web Directions Code in Melbourne.

The talk’s called ‘Designing in the browser’ and while Divya delivers it well (except, speakers please remember to take your conference badge off when you go on stage) and she hits all the points you’d expect to hear, what struck me was how little of the talk was actually about the ‘designing’ from the title.

Take a look at the list of resources and what you’ll find are developer tools that I’ll bet you would leave most designers scratching their heads.

Now I fully understand that the lines between designing and developing are being redrawn. I know I also said in my talk at An Event Apart in Austin:

Design doesn’t work when it’s separate from development.

But for me, Divya (and others) gets something fundamentally wrong when talking about this subject. We would never expect a developer to learn bezier curves in Illustrator in order to work with a designer. On the flip side, the notion that designers should learn Docpad or Jekyll demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how designing and developing involve different experiences, knowledge and skills.

This is something that toolmakers like Adobe need to consider when making new tools, and a subject I think I’m going to write a lot about another day.