Workshops and Training

Matthias Ott conducting a workshop

Most teams don’t struggle because their designers can’t design or their developers can’t code. They struggle because the gap between the two disciplines quietly slows everything down – in handoffs, in misaligned assumptions, in web interfaces that drift from intent by the time they ship.

My workshops are built around closing that gap – through modern CSS, hands-on accessibility, design systems, and prototyping directly in the browser. Designers and developers build a shared language and the practical confidence to prototype early, validate ideas before committing engineering resources, and ship interfaces that hold up.

Every session combines theory with hands-on work – so participants leave with the confidence to apply what they’ve learned the next day, not just the intention to.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk about what’s right for your team.

How I Work

Workshops are available online or on-site, and can run as a focused half-day session, a full day, or across multiple days for teams who want to go deeper or cover more than one topic. Most sessions work best with teams of six to sixteen people – small enough for everyone to participate, large enough for the discussions to be genuinely useful.

Every workshop is shaped around your team’s specific context: their level, their stack, their workflows, and what they’re actually trying to change.

What’s included in every workshop: some preparation time to tailor the content to your team, all training materials, supporting notes, and a curated resource list shared after the session so the learning doesn’t stop when the day ends.

For multi-day engagements or ongoing training programmes, I’m happy to discuss a format that fits your team’s schedule and goals.

Workshop pricing depends on format, duration, and team size. Tell me a bit about your team and what you’re trying to achieve and I’ll come back to you with a proposal.

Focus Areas

These are the areas I work in most. None of these are off-the-shelf – every session is shaped around your team’s specific context, level, and goals.

Web Design Engineering – The discipline, the workflow, and the mindset

Most digital products slow down not because of bad design or bad code, but because the two disciplines don’t speak the same language. This workshop introduces web design engineering as a practice and a mindset – one that closes the gap between design and engineering by treating the browser as a design tool from the start. Whether you’re a designer who wants to work more effectively with code or a developer who wants to understand design intent better, you’ll leave with a shared vocabulary, a new way of working, and a clearer picture of what’s possible when design and engineering stop handing off and start collaborating.

What you will learn

  • What web design engineering is – and why most teams need it without knowing it yet
  • The browser as a design tool: why and when it beats static mockups
  • Prototyping early to validate assumptions before they become expensive mistakes
  • Progressive enhancement: building for the real Web, not the ideal one
  • Semantic HTML and the foundations of resilient interface architecture
  • How modern CSS reduces the need for JavaScript and design tool workarounds
  • Accessibility and performance as design values, not checklists
  • A shared language for design and engineering – and why it changes everything
  • How to introduce a web design engineering mindset into an existing team workflow

Modern CSS for Design and Development – A deep dive into the CSS features that are reshaping how we design and build for the Web

CSS has changed more in the last three years than in the previous decade. The features landing in browsers today – from container queries and cascade layers to scroll-driven animations and the new color functions – aren’t just small incremental improvements. They fundamentally change how we can design and build for the Web. This workshop cuts through the noise and focuses on what matters: the features that are ready to use, the mental models behind them, and the practical patterns that make CSS a tool you control rather than one you fight.

What you will learn

  • Modern CSS: the most powerful design tool for the Web
  • The cascade, specificity, and inheritance – finally understood, not just survived
  • Native CSS nesting: cleaner, more maintainable stylesheets without a preprocessor (and do you even need one anymore?)
  • Custom properties and how they power scalable, themeable design systems
  • Modern web layout: CSS Grid, Subgrid, Flexbox, and the intrinsic sizing principles that replace fixed breakpoints
  • Container queries: responsive components that know where they are
  • The :has() selector and what it unlocks for logic-driven design
  • Scroll-driven animations and view transitions: motion and navigation without JavaScript
  • CSS layers: bringing order to codebases that have outgrown their own rules
  • Modern color: oklch, relative color syntax, light-dark(), and more
  • What modern CSS can do that Figma and other design tools still can’t
  • Practical architecture: writing CSS that scales, ages well, and is easy to maintain

Web Accessibility in Practice – Hands-on accessibility for designers and developers – building inclusively from the start

Accessibility isn’t a checklist you run at the end of a project – it’s a quality standard that shapes every decision from the first line of HTML to the last design review. This workshop gives designers and developers the practical knowledge to build inclusively from the start: understanding how assistive technologies experience your interfaces, where the most common failures occur, and how to make accessibility a natural part of how your team works – not a retrofit, not a compliance exercise, but a signal that you care about building things right.

What you will learn

  • What accessibility actually means – and why it improves products for everyone
  • The business and legal reality: WCAG, BITV, and BFSG in plain terms
  • How assistive technologies work: screen readers, keyboard navigation, and beyond
  • Semantic HTML: the most powerful accessibility tool you already have
  • Focus management and keyboard interaction: getting the details right
  • Accessible forms, navigation, and interactive components done right
  • Color, contrast, and typography: designing for real visual diversity
  • ARIA: a little goes a long way, and more often than not, less is more
  • Testing what you build: tools, methods, and how to make auditing part of your workflow
  • Building accessibility into design and engineering workflows from the start – not as a retrofit

Design Systems and Scalable CSS Architecture – Building design systems that hold up at scale – without fighting the cascade

Most design systems are built with the best intentions and maintained with increasing frustration. They drift from the product, the CSS becomes a negotiation with itself, and the gap between the Figma library and the production codebase quietly widens. This workshop addresses the architectural decisions that determine whether a design system holds up or falls apart – from token structure and component architecture to cascade management and documentation – so your system grows with your product instead of working against it.

What you will learn

  • Why many design systems fail – and what the successful ones have in common
  • The shared language between design tokens and production CSS
  • Tokens, variables, and how custom properties power design systems in CSS
  • Component architecture: building for reuse, flexibility, and maintainability
  • Scalable CSS methodologies and when to use them
  • Managing complexity: cascade layers, scoping, and the end of specificity wars
  • Responsive and adaptive components: designing systems that work across contexts
  • Multi-brand theming and how to architect for it from the start
  • How to close the gap between your Figma library and your production codebase
  • Documentation as part of the system: making it easy for teams to use and maintain
  • What it takes to maintain a design system as both the product and team evolve

Every workshop starts with a conversation. Let’s have one.

Advanced Design and Prototyping with Adobe XD

Photo: Mattia Compagnucci
 

From 2018 to 2023, I ran in-depth workshops and trainings for Adobe on designing and prototyping with Adobe XD – at community events, in-house, and also remotely. All workshops were customized to meet the individual needs of design teams and teams collaborating with design. The workshops covered a broad range of topics like responsive web design, prototyping (voice) user interfaces, working with animation and video in Adobe XD, creating and maintaining design systems, improving workflows and remote collaboration, and much more.