Being invited to speak at any conference is an honour and a privilege and every event that I have spoken at holds special memories. The friendliness of the Australian audience and the organisers, Sydney itself and the no small fact that it is such a damn long way down makes Web Directions very special. This year I'm helping to pretend that this is a work trip by doing three things.

Workshop | Transcending CSS: For A Beautiful Web

There is a packed and varied workshop schedule during the two days before this year's conference. On Wednesday September 26th, Blue Flavor's Brian Fling will be presenting Mobile web design and development and my Web Directions North partner and Transcending CSS's technical editor Aaron Gustafson will be presenting Progressive enhancement with JavaScript; tough choice.

On Tuesday September 25th I'll be presenting a brand new CSS workshop, Transcending CSS: For A Beautiful Web. Although the title is shared with my book, the content is all new and extends many of the concepts from Transcending CSS. This will be a day packed full of content-out markup, Microformats, CSS positioning trickery and of course a little CSS3.

In this full day workshop, challenge yourself to think differently about creating inspired design for web using meaningful markup and CSS. This workshop will be packed full of visual inspiration, backed up by practical techniques for creating amazing work for the web.

This workshop is already very well subscribed, by I'm sure that if you haven't already booked that there may a few places available.

Session: Think Like A Mountain

Presenting last year's opening keynote was a blast and I'm looking forward to speaking this year even more. I'll be presenting another brand new talk,Think Like A Mountain.

Once seen as unsophisticated, childish and of low artistic value, comic-book art and culture has inspired artists and designers for generations and are now are often untapped resource for web design inspiration. In this session Andy Clarke will examine comic book layout, conventions and colour in the context of making inspirational designs for today’s web.

I've had tremendous fun putting Think Like A Mountain together (title taken from Paul Chadwick's Concrete series) and I hope that everyone attending enjoys it too.

Off down-under

So, toothbrush (check), iPod,(check), passport (check), nicotine patches (check).