It's been on my mind for a while. In the last few years I've been one of the luckiest web designers on this planet (and probably others) because I've been asked to travel all over the world to talk about web design, CSS and even comic books. I love every minute of it.
I love speaking at web conferences and teaching design and CSS at workshops and I've got a lot of people to thank for my travels and the opportunity to do what I love so much in so many cool places. Gulp, here goes.
Thanks to Patrick Griffiths for allowing me to be the only person to have spoken at every one of his @media events since 2005. Thanks to John Allsop and Maxine Sherrin for enabling me to travel twice to Australia to their amazing Web Directions conference and to Dave Shea and Derek Featherstone for putting me on the bill twice at Web Directions North in Vancouver. Thanks to Ryan Carson for inviting me to speak at three Future Of Web Design events and three CSS workshops. Not forgetting of course my heroes, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, for letting me take to the stage twice at An Event Apart in 2008.
I've learned a lot about web conferences and particularly about web design and development workshops along the way too. It's been on my mind for a while and a long time in the planning and now it's time to share my own series of workshop events.
For A Beautiful Web
I'm calling them For A Beautiful Web because for this series of web design master classes, I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to focus on the creative aspects of web design and development, mix in the most up-to-date ways to use web standards technologies including best-practice mark-up and progressive CSS and cool Microformats. I also wanted to focus on web accessibility as part of the creative process, not just as a checkbox ticking afterthought. But most importantly I wanted to create a series of events where people can learn in a creative atmosphere. I know that we have done all these things with our plans for For A Beautiful Web.
Visual Web Design Master Class
We are launching For A Beautiful Web with a very special event that I am really excited about, a Visual Web Design Master Class, in London on 1st December. For this master class we are focussing on visual design for the web and covering topics including inspiration, grid-based layout design, typography and other subjects that often get forgotten when other, newer, cooler subjects are on everyone's lips. This event will be like no other that I have attended and I am so pleased to announce that our star guest speaker and co-host for this event will be the one-and-only Mr. Brendan Dawes.
Registration is now open and places are limited, so I hope that you'll grab your seat before it's taken.
Master-classes
Next year we will be spreading our wings a little further and presenting a series of master classes across the UK. Every master class will be held in an amazing, distinctive venue and will feature not only the best training but also a different star guest speaker who will entertain you over lunch with their wit, repartee and a unique insight into the topic of the day.
We will be announcing dates and venues early next year and I would be very happy if you would take the time to tell us where you would most like these master classes to take place. We are really excited about these events and to meeting new people along the way. We hope we will see you there.
More than just events
I wanted For A Beautiful Web to be more than just about events. If you remember my old blog, And All That Malarkey, you might also know that I stopped writing there a couple of years ago as, to be honest, I had lost my passion for it. My passion for writing returned a while ago and I have really missed having an outlet of my own for it. So on the For A Beautiful Web blog I will be posting articles on creative web design related topics and linking to other articles from web designers who inspire me. I'll also be trying my hand at this new-fangled screen-casting malarkey.
I've started adding one or two new articles on how I designed this site, plus links to the example files and slide materials from new previous I Keep Faith CSS workshop and the snappily titled Activate The Death Ray Microformats workshop, both from earlier this year. So you haven't already done it, add the RSS feed to your feed reader. I'd be very chuffed if you did.