Speak­ing of the Web …

I’ve been speaking at web conferences like beyond tellerrand, CSS Day, and Smashing Conference, at meetups, and at corporate events – on stage in front of a few hundred people, in workshops with a dozen, and occasionally via podcast or webinar to an audience I can’t see but very much feel. The topics shift, but the thread stays the same: the craft of building for the Web, the relationship between design and engineering, and why both of those things matter for the people on the other side of the screen.

Featured Talks #

Painting With the Web #

beyond tellerrand, Düsseldorf 🇩🇪, May 2025 – 📺 Video · 📊 Slides

Twenty-five years after John Allsopp wrote “A Dao of Web Design,” we are still approaching the Web with a mindset of control – designing in fixed artboards, handing off static pictures of websites, and separating design from engineering in ways that cut us off from the material itself. In this talk, I use Gerhard Richter’s painting process as a way into a different relationship with the Web: one where you give up some control, work directly with the material, and end up with something far more honest and alive.

Web Design Engineering With the New CSS #

CSS Day, Amsterdam 🇳🇱, June 2024 – 📺 Video – 📊 Slides

CSS has become genuinely extraordinary – fluid typography, OKLCH colour spaces, container queries, subgrid – and yet most design workflows still treat it as an afterthought rather than a design tool. This talk is a live tour of what’s now possible when you work with CSS as a first-class material: from sinusoidal fluid type scaling to perceptually uniform colour palettes to layout patterns that no static design tool can even represent.

Invite Me #

I love speaking at conferences. Not just for the obvious reasons – the stage, the slides, the talk itself – but for what happens around the edges of it. The conversations in the corridor. The hallway track. The dinner where someone mentions a problem they’ve been wrestling with for months and suddenly three people at the table have something to say about it. That’s where the real exchange happens.

If you’re putting together an event and think I might be a good fit, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. A few things that help me respond well:

• What’s the event? Name, website, rough date and location.
• What’s the audience? Designers, developers, design engineers, a mix? What do they care about?
• What are you hoping I’ll bring? A keynote, a workshop, a panel? A specific topic from my existing work, or something new?
• What’s the timeline? Even a rough sense of when you’d need confirmation helps.

You don’t need to have all of this figured out yet. I’m happy to think through it together.

What you can count on from me: I’ll prepare properly. I’ll promote your event to my community before and after. I’ll be around – for the hallway conversations, the speaker dinner, the questions that don’t fit into the Q&A. I’ll share my slides and, where possible, the recording, so the talk keeps living after the event ends.

I also have a Speaker Rider – a short document covering the practical conditions I ask for when I speak. If you read it and still want to have me, I’m confident we’ll work well together.