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Web Directions North » Speakers

Web Directions brings together inspiring, high achieving presenters from the world of web design and development, and beyond. Many of them will be well known to you for their work on the web, and all of them bring years of experience building innovative, successful web applications, sites and services.

• Cameron Adams
• John Allsopp
• Daniel Burka
• Andre Charland
• Andy Clarke
• Douglas Crockford

• Anil Dash
• Kimberly Elam
• Brian Fling
• Derek Featherstone
• Tara Hunt
• Boris Mann

• Chris Messina
• Brian Oberkirch
• Eric Rodenbeck
• Dave Shea
• Walter Smith
• Jonathan Snook

• Jared Spool
• Gina Trapani
• Matt Webb
• Josh Williams
• Indi Young
• Jeffrey Zeldman

Cameron Adams

Cameron Adams — The Man in Blue — melds a background in Computer Science with over eight years experience in graphic design to create a unique approach to interface design. Using the latest technologies, he likes to play in the intersection between design and code to produce innovative but usable sites and applications.

In addition to the projects he’s currently tinkering with, Cameron writes about the Internet and design in general on his well respected weblog, and has written several books ranging in topics from JavaScript, to CSS, and design. His latest publication — Simply JavaScript — takes a bottom-up, quirky-down approach to the basics of JavaScript coding.

Cameron Adams is presenting The Future of Web Interfaces and Frontiers of JavaScript (workshop)

John Allsopp

Successful software developer, long standing web development speaker, writer, evangelist and expert, John has spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web. As the head developer of the leading cross platform CSS development tool Style Master, and developer and publisher of renowned training courses and learning resources on CSS and standards based development, John is widely recognized as a leader in these fields.

As a presenter and educator, John speaks frequently at conferences around Australia and the world. His idiosyncratic blog Dog or Higher covers a broad range of subjects, particularly in technology and innovation, and is widely read and referenced.

John Allsopp is presenting Where’s Your Web At? Designing for the Web Beyond the Desktop

Daniel Burka

Daniel is the creative director at Digg, a founder of Pownce, and a founder of the Canadian web firm silverorange.

At silverorange, Daniel worked with a wide range of clients including Mozilla, Ning, Revision3, and Sloan. He’s since been lured to San Francisco after Kevin Rose dangled the prospect of In ‘N Out burgers and the opportunity to develop the user experience for the social news website Digg. As Digg’s creative director, Daniel has helped the site grow from a niche technology news site into one of the leading media services on the web with a massive and passionate community. Recently, along with Leah Culver and Kevin, Daniel helped found Pownce — a social network that lets you share files, events, messages, and links with your friends. Daniel works on feature development and the user interface of Pownce.

Daniel Burka is presenting: The Why and How: UI Case Studies

Andre Charland

Andre Charland is the co-founder and CEO at Nitobi Inc. He’s been involved in Internet software development for almost a decade. As an advocate for usability and user experience, he speaks regularly on Ajax and web usability. Most recently Andre presented at MAX, the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, and the Ajax Experience. Andre is the co-author of “Enterprise Ajax”, published by Prentice Hall this summer, and maintains his own blog. Andre also plays with a ski blog in his spare time and will be buying beers for anyone who can keep up at Whistler during the ski trip:)

Andre Charland is presenting Developing with AIR and Silverlight

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include national and international businesses, charities and government bodies.

Andy is a member of the Web Standards Project where he redesigned the organization’s web site in 2006. He is also an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy regularly educates web designers on how to create beautiful, accessible web sites and he speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide. He writes about design and popular culture on his blog, All That Malarkey and is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.

Andy Clarke is presenting Transcending CSS (workshop)

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford is a product of the US public school system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!. He is the world’s foremost living authority on JavaScript.

Douglas Crockford is presenting Ajax Security

Anil Dash

Anil Dash is Chief Evangelist at Six Apart, Ltd, the world’s leading independent blogging company. Dash is a recognized expert on blogs and web technology, having founded one of the earliest and most popular weblogs on the Internet, and been named as one of MSNBC’s Best of Blogs. A frequent keynote speaker, Dash has given presentations around the world about the future of social communication online, the relationship between blogs and traditional media, and business blogging.

Dash’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, and on television, radio, print and blogs around the world. He has also had his work showcased in museums including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and lectured at universities including UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Prior to joining Six Apart as its first employee, Dash worked in online communications and technology development for the publishing and music industries. When he’s not traveling, Dash lives in New York City with his favorite dog, cat, and human.

Anil Dash is presenting Serious Business: Putting Social Media to Work

Kimberly Elam

Kimberly Elam is a writer, educator, and graphic designer. She is currently the Chair of the Graphic & Interactive Communication Department at the Ringling College of Art + Design, Sarasota, Florida, where she has developed an academic minor in the Business of Art and Design.

Her first book, Expressive Typography – Word as Image, identifies and analyzes methods by which words can transcend didactic meaning and become images. Geometry of Design – Studies in Proportion and Composition, visually illustrates the connection between classic proportioning systems and modern graphic design, industrial design, illustration, and architecture. Grid Systems – Principles of Organizing Type puts forth a clear methodology for understanding and learning the grid system of composition. Her most recent book, Typographic Systems – Rules for Organizing Type presents an innovative series of nontraditional, rule-based, visual language systems for typographic composition.

Her current work focuses on the development of a series of innovative ebooks and print-on-demand books for design education on her website, StudioResourceInc.com.

Kimberly Elam is presenting Five Essential Composition Tools for Web Typography

Brian Fling

Brian Fling is a leader in interactive strategy and both the web and mobile fields. He has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to help design and develop their web and mobile experiences. Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience.

He has authored the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first free publication to cover mobile web design and development from start to finish. Brian also runs one of the largest online communities focused on mobile design.

When he isn’t discussing mobile, Brian serves as co-founder and Director of Strategy of Blue Flavor, an interactive agency based in Seattle USA.

Brian will be presenting The Mobile Web Landscape in Canada and Beyond

Derek Featherstone

Derek Featherstone is a well known instructor, speaker and developer with expertise in web accessibility consulting.

Derek delivers technical training that is engaging, informative and immediately applicable. A high-quality instructor, he draws on his background as a former high school teacher plus seven years running his web development and accessibility consultancy Further Ahead.

His experience includes hands-on development, web accessibility consulting and training. He advises many government agencies, educational institutions and private sector companies, providing them with expert accessibility testing and review, and recommendations for improving the accessibility of their websites to all people.

As a member of The Web Standards Project, Derek serves on two task forces: Accessibility/Assistive Devices and DOM Scripting. He is a dedicated advocate for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Photo: Aaron Gustafson

Derek Featherstone is presenting Real World Accessibility for Real People

Tara Hunt

“Miss Rogue” defines herself as a customer first, marketer second. In 2005, Tara became the marketing director at Riya, where her community marketing theories resulted in huge gains, such as national news mentions before launch and over one million photos uploaded within 24 hours of launch. She doesn’t believe in PR, only in the power of building relationships with a community. She co-founded Citizen Agency in 2006 with the mission of teaching her clients how to work more effectively with the communities they serve. Tara has over seven years experience in non-traditional marketing planning. She maintains a successful blog over at HorsePigCow.

Speaking of community, Tara is a community-based movement evangelist, spending all of her free time on Barcamp, Coworking and Winecamp. She is also a supporter of the Open Source movement, the EFF, Creative Commons and the Intelligrid.

Tara Hunt is presenting Government 2.0: Architecting for Collaboration and The Enterprise & Government in the 2.0 era: what’s next? (workshop)

Boris Mann

A bona fide infovore, Boris co-founded Bryght in 2004 after convincing two of the world’s best Drupal developers to help build Bryght’s solution for turnkey online communities.

Boris is one of the founding organizers of Northern Voice, one of the first North American blogging conferences, now heading into its 4th year. He also is active in many developer communities, helping put on BarCamps and the Open Source CMS Summit on multiple continents.

Although Boris does all that CEO stuff at Bryght, his knowledge of user communities and the intricacies of online publishing also keeps him knee-deep in development and design architecture. He’s inspired by the team of people he works with and is driven by a passion to create “web tools everyone can use”.

Boris Mann is presenting The 3 Stages of Content Management

Chris Messina

Chris Messina moved to San Francisco four years ago and quickly landed a job as User Experience Architect with CivicSpace, a non-profit technology startup building organizing tools. As it happened, he also began volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, helping to start, then lead, the Spread Firefox community marketing project. During his nine month tenure with Mozilla, he helped raise over $220,000 in microdonations to put a two-page spread, which he also designed, in the New York Times, helping to increase Firefox’s download rate to over 50 million in its first six months.

Next, Chris went on to co-found web browser Flock and served as Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with his real life and professional partner, Tara Hunt, and was then named one of the Digital Utopians and People Who Populate Web 2.0 in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 after his work on WineCamp, and has since been quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times and Wired. Chris is well-known in the Web 2.0, open source, and startup worlds for his community advocacy and work on open standards initiatives like microformats, OpenID and OAuth. He is a key leader of worldwide community efforts such as Coworking and BarCamp.

Chris Messina is presenting The Enterprise & Government in the 2.0 era: what’s next? (workshop)

Brian Oberkirch

Brian is a marketing consultant focused on social media and product/service development. He does social media consulting and projects for companies and marketing agencies of all sizes, helping them use these new tools to have better conversations with those who matter to their business.

In his past lives, Brian was a marketing consultant and writer for hire, managed national brand accounts at large and small advertising and PR shops, started a social media consultancy called Weblogs Work and helped build a suite of applications for those clients, taught literature and creative writing, wrote newspaper articles, did the morning news at a radio station, and many other things.

Brian writes frequently on these and related issues at ‘like it matters‘.

Brian Oberkirch is presenting Plays Well With Others

Eric Rodenbeck

Eric Rodenbeck is founder and creative director of Stamen Design. He is a 10-year veteran of the interactive design field, and has spent this time working to extend the boundaries of online media and live information visualization.

Eric led the interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative effort at Quokka Sports, illustrated and designed at Wired and Wired Books, and was a co-founder of the design collective Umwow. He has lectured and spoken at Yale University, the University of Southern California, numerous O’Reilly technology conferences, Esther Dyson’s PC Forum, and South by Southwest, among others. Eric studied architecture at Cooper Union in New York City and received a B.A. in the History and Philosophy of Technology from The New School for Social Research.

Eric is presenting Information Visualization as a Medium

Dave Shea

Dave Shea is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential web site csszengarden.com, and co-author of the recently-published Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005).

The founder and design lead of Bright Creative in Vancouver, BC, Dave also writes for a large global audience of web designers and developers on his popular weblog, mezzoblue.com. His sites have won multiple awards, including Best of Show 2004 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, TX.

He speaks internationally at design and technology industry conferences, on top of being an organizer of Web Directions.

Dave Shea is presenting Where’s Your Web At? Designing for the Web Beyond the Desktop

Walter Smith

Currently co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, Walter spent over a decade at Microsoft as a developer, architect, and development manager on a wide variety of projects, including Internet Explorer. Prior to his time at Microsoft, Walter spent 8 years at Apple working on the groundbreaking Newton project.

Walter Smith is presenting Developing with AIR and Silverlight

Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook is currently a freelance web developer based in Ottawa, Canada. A Renaissance man of the Web, he has programmed in a variety of languages, both server-side and client-side. He also does web site and web application design. Jonathan worked for more than seven years with web agencies, getting to work with clients such as Red Bull, Apple, and FedEx. He made the leap to freelance back in January 2006.

Jonathan likes to share what he knows through speaking, writing books, writing for online magazines such as Digital Web and Sitepoint, and writing for his own popular blog at Snook.ca. He is the co-author of the acclaimed Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries, and of The Art and Science of CSS.

Jonathan Snook is presenting Working with Ajax Frameworks

Jared Spool

Software developer and programmer Jared founded User Interface Engineering in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques.

Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute and teaches seminars on product usability. He is a member of SIGCHI, the Usability Professionals Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE. Jared is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the annual CHI conference and Society for Technical Communications conferences around the country.

Jared Spool is presenting What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive? and Designing Really Usable Websites (workshop)

Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a web developer and the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the 2006 Wired Rave Award-winning daily weblog on software and productivity.

Gina Trapani is presenting Better Gmail: How Google Opened Gmail’s Web Interface to Any Developer Who Cares (And Why You Should)

Matt Webb

Matt Webb is a principal of the creative design consultancy Schulze & Webb where his work has included material prototypes for Nokia, Web strategy for the BBC, and exploration into the future uses of RFID. S&W works in near-term product R&D and, as embodied in the USB puppet Availabot, has a special focus on the social life of stuff. Matt speaks on interaction design and technology, is co-author of Mind Hacks, cognitive psychology for a general audience, and builds polite social software and Web toys. He can be found at Interconnected and in London.

Matt Webb is presenting The Web Directions Closing Keyonte

Josh Williams

A serial designer-entrepreneur, Josh Williams is the founder and CEO of several well known web related companies and communities including Firewheel Design, Blinksale, and IconBuffet. He is an authority on visual design techniques for rich web applications and an expert iconographer. Recently Josh has served as the design director for Project Agape (Causes on Facebook) and currently he in the process of launching another secretive iconic web company.

Josh Williams is presenting Bedroom to Boardroom

Indi Young

Indi began her work in Web applications in 1995 as a consultant in interaction and navigation design. A founding partner of Adaptive Path in 2001, she has worked with an impressive collection of clients, including Visa, Charles Schwab, Sybase, Agilent, Dow Corning, Microsoft, and PeopleSoft. Since 1995, Indi has constructed over 30 interview-based research projects, 22 of which included mental model diagrams. She considers this methodology she has developed another good way to be a “problem solver.”

Indi is the author of the soon-to-be-released Rosenfeld Media book Mental Models:

Aligning design strategy with human behavior

Indi Young is presenting Innovation is Overrated

Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman is the founder and executive creative director of Happy Cog, and the co-founder (with Eric Meyer) of An Event Apart.

In 1995, the former art director and copywriter launched one of the first personal sites and began publishing web design tutorials. In 1998 he co-founded The Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition that brought standards to our browsers. That same year he launched A List Apart “for people who make websites.”

He has written many articles and two books, notably the foundational web standards text Designing With Web Standards, now in its second edition.

Jeffrey speaks everywhere and sits on the Advisory Boards of the SXSW Interactive Festival, Rosenfeld Media, and the Dandelife Social Biography Network. He has a biographical listing in the Wikipedia Encyclopedia and is good for a quick hit at Google, Technorati, or Ask.com.

Jeffrey Zeldman is presenting the Return of the King of Web Standards (Opening Keynote)