I first heard about Creative South from my friend Dave Clayton after our podcast together in 2022. After our interview he started raving about this design conference in America, where everyone hugs you, you get stuffed with great food and you get to watch talks and do workshops with absolute design legends.

A couple of years later, my friends Kristy Campbell and James Martin are there as speakers. Kristy posts a teary vlog on her social media about how wonderful this conference is; about how you ‘come as friends and leave as family’.

So when the wonderful Mike Jones, founder of Creative South, invited me to do a speech at this year’s conference in Columbus, Georgia, I jumped at the chance.

*I went via Canada because it was $1000 cheaper! That turned out to be a big mistake… 😬*

The first hurdle was the distance. This was a monumental trip, which started on the Gold Coast, went through Vancouver and on to Montreal where I missed my connection and ended up staying the night. Then a flight to Atlanta, followed by an hour long bus journey to Columbus. It took 56 hours, door-to-door, and it was brutal.

But when I finally arrived at my hotel at 1am, Mike was in the lobby waiting to give me my first of many hugs that week.

If you’ve never met Mike before, he’s a 6’ 4” man mountain (former football player) and when he hugged me I felt like a baby. By the end of the week (and after a few drinks), Mike would be picking me up and carrying me like a Disney Princess. He is huge, and would be incredibly intimidating, if it weren’t for the fact that he is one of the warmest and most-generous people on the planet.

Creative South is a two-day event, packed with speeches from design legends from all over the globe. I would be joining the likes of the lovely Elle and Arabella from Weekend Creative (who I’d met a couple of times at Adobe MAX), Mike and Chara from the legendary Smith & Diction, Katie and Ilana from Goodtype, Scott Fuller from Studio Temporary and Dan Lee, an incredibly-talented lettering artist who I’ve followed for some time.

But the highlight for me was to finally meet my hero Allan Peters in person.

Allan and I have become fast friends over the past couple of years (Al leaves me the cutest voice notes on a regular basis), but we’ve never met, so to hang out with him IRL was a true blessing (we ended playing darts and Mario Kart on the last night until the early hours).

On top of this, Shawn and Massimo from the Angry Designers Podcast were there all week. And I spent almost the entire trip hanging out with these two, from the bus journey in, recording two live podcast episodes and many many drinks.

As someone who lives on the other side of the planet, I found myself in familiar company among friends and colleagues I’ve had the pleasure of chatting to and working with over the past few years. And it was a truly wonderful experience getting to know everybody. There was a huge range of creative people there, from students just getting started (and working with the Creative South Foundation) to older, more-experience professionals looking to recharge their creative batteries.

I ran my Beyond the PSD Template workshop on the first day to a room full of designers hungry to learn about levelling up their Photoshop game and making customised mockups for their logo clients. And on day two, the enegmatic Andrew Hochradel introduced me on stage where I would perform my talk, See One Do One Teach One: Master your software by sharing your learnings.

Everything went down without a hitch and I left the conference about 5kg heavier, with a bunch of new friends and a suitcase full of stickers.

Watch my wrap-up video here 🍑