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.

A few weeks ago I was writing content for my speaking information for conference organisers page and I wondered about other speakers’ ‘terms of business’ and how much—if anything—they charged. To get a feeling for how people approach the business of speaking, I set up a quick survey.

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.)

I know very few people who curate better conference line-ups than Marc Thiele and I was proud to speak at his first event in Berlin last year. It’s great that he’s written up how he thinks about conference schedules so that hopefully others can learn from him.

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.

Last years’ Handheld Conference in Cardiff was an incredible event. A bearded me even got to push a dalek with my friend Jon, as well as deliver a talk and host a sell-out workshop. This November I’ll be back in Cardiff for Handheld’s successor, The Web Is… I’m a last minute addition to the speaker line-up (again) and back workshopping with a new ‘CSS3 For Responsive Web Design’ workshop.

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.

In all my travels I’ve not yet been to Berlin. That’s changing in November when I’ll be appearing at the fabulous beyond tellerrand.

Jeremy posted links to all the videos from dConstruct 2013. I wasn’t there but I’ve listened to the audio before now. Even so, it’s good to see video of my favourite talk, ‘Don’t Feed The Trolls’ by Nicole Sullivan.

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.

Talking with Dan on this week’s Unfinished Business got me thinking about photography and workshops and wanting to learn to make better photographs.

I’m not going to link to all of the videos from Handheld Conference, but if this one doesn’t make the hairs on your neck stand up, there must be something wrong with you. In fact, the only criticism I have of the conference is that the audience didn’t stand to applaud the end to that excellent day.

How could you follow this? (With a male voice choir, obviously.)

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.

2012’s Smashing Conference in Freiburg had the best atmosphere of any European conference I’ve been to and, while I wasn’t there, I hear this year’s was pretty special too.

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.

Slides from Chris’ excellent talk on CSS3 layout modules at today’s Camp Digital in Manchester. He covered, Flexible Boxes, Multiple Columns and more.

Handheld is “the conference for all things mobile” that’s happening in Cardiff, Wales on 27th – 28th November 2013 at the Wales Millennium Centre. Handheld has a fabulous line-up of speakers and tickets go on sale on March 1st, St. David’s Day. (You can get get 10% off your ticket with the offer code unfinishedbz.) If you needed another reason to head to beautiful Cardiff Bay, I’m hosting a new workshop, “CSS3 for Responsive Web Design.”

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.

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.

Yesterday, when I appeared on The Web Ahead, I issued this challenge to anyone who complains about hearing familiar faces speak at web conferences:

Being in Freiburg for Smashing Conference helped me regain my confidence for speaking. I was thrilled and honoured to be a part of it in a small way. Now Smashing Magazine are publishing interviews with all the speakers and videos of their talks. The first three excellent talks by Jeremy, Rachel and Stephen are available now.

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.

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.

Some conferences just have ‘that’ special feeling. @media was the first for me in 2005. The An Event Apart in Seattle in 2010 where Ethan Marcotte first talked about responsive design, another. Most recently, the first New Adventures also in 2010.

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.