We are pleased to dedicate this volume to Win Means, our dear friend, formidable scientist and respected colleague.

The WDM volume brings together 19 contributions to honour Win's 65th birthday. The contents (quite a few are not papers in the traditional sense) bring a tribute to Win's wide-ranging interests in his professional life: field geology, high pressure rock deformation, deformation experiments in transmitted light, analysis of natural microstructures, theoretical models, teaching and fun.

Publishing the volume's content on a CD allows us in an easy way to communicate ideas about complex time dependent processes using moving colour pictures. It is meant to be distributed at low-cost, allowing access by a wide audience. It highlights Win's continuous efforts to improve the communication of ideas, and it also allows publication of material which was difficult to access until recently.

In 1999 we presented the first draft of the volume to Win at the Neustadt conference on Deformation Mechanisms, Rheology and Microstructure, organized by Georg Dresen and Mark Handy. As usual with a Festschrift, there were early submissions and very late ones. We thank all contributors for their patience with some of the rate limiting steps.

We thank Wouter van der Zee for invaluable assistance with the intricacies of HTML, and the audio-visual department of RWTH Aachen for assistance with converting 16 mm film and videotapes to digital movies.

Melbourne and Aachen, November 2000

Mark Jessell   Janos Urai