Speakers | Web Directions USA

Speakers

Interesting and talented people from the four corners of the web

• Jason Cranford Teague
• Juliette Melton
• Aarron Walter
• Jonathan Stark
• Ryan Freitas
• Zoe Mickley Gillenwater
• Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
• Esther Derby
• John Allsopp
• Dan Rubin
• Tom Hughes-Croucher
• Scott Thomas
• Brad Neuberg
• Brian Fling

Jason Cranford Teague

Presenting: 2010: The Year of Web Typography

Jason is a designer, writer and teacher, who helps people creatively apply technology to build a positive future. He has over 15 years of experience in the online world, and recently published Fluid Web Typography and Speaking in Styles: The Fundamentals of CSS for Web Designers. He has worked with the W3C CSS Workgroup, Yuri’s Night: The World Space Party and was the Director of Web Design Standards for AOL/MediaGlow. Jason is currently the Design Manager for Marriott International eCommerce, where he recently helped relaunch the marriott.com, the 7th largest transaction site on the Web.

Follow Jason on Twitter: @jasonspeaking

Juliette Melton

Presenting: Know Your Users: Develop effective user experience research plans (Workshop), Remote research: Running effective remote studies

Juliette Melton is a user experience researcher and design strategist based in San Francisco. Her background in web development and product management gives her a practical perspective on how to conduct effective user experience research. She advocates building products that delight users while supporting organizational realities.

Juliette holds a master’s in education from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She runs Deluxify, a boutique UX consultancy, writes about her various projects at juliemelton.com, and makes lots of terrariums.

Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j

Aarron Walter

Presenting: Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design

By day, Aarron Walter is the mild-mannered lead user experience designer for MailChimp, and by night he leads a team of education crusaders in The Web Standards Project who are the magic behind The WaSP InterACT curriculum.

Aarron is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond, and is a co-author and project manager of the book InterACT With Web Standards: A holistic approach to Web design.

Follow Aarron on Twitter: @aarron.

Jonathan Stark

Presenting: Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Workshop)

Jonathan Stark is a mobile and web application consultant who the Wall Street Journal has called an expert on publishing desktop data to the web.

He is the author of O’Reilly’s Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is a tech editor for both php|architect and Advisor magazines, and is often quoted in the media on internet and mobile lifestyle trends.

Jonathan began his programming career more than 20 years ago on a Tandy TRS-80 and still thinks Zork was a sweet game.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter: @jonathanstark

Ryan Freitas

Presenting: Balancing Data-Driven & 'Genius' Design

Ryan Freitas is the founder and principal strategist at Second Verse, an experience design consultancy in San Francisco, California. Second Verse specializes in combining superior interaction design with compelling product strategy for technology startups and global media companies. Ryan enthusiastically pursues the opportunity to work on emerging user experience principles, and he has a strong interest in informatics, empathic design, and democratizing access to technology. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Kristen.

Follow Ryan on Twitter: @ryanchris

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater

Presenting: Effective and Efficient Design with CSS3

Zoe Mickley Gillenwater is a freelance graphic and web designer, developer and consultant. She is the author of the book Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS and the video training title Web Accessibility Principles for lynda.com, and is working on the upcoming book Stunning CSS3: A Project-based Guide to the Latest in CSS. Zoe is currently a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) Adobe Task Force and was previously a moderator of the popular css-discuss mailing list. Find out more about Zoe on her blog and portfolio site.

Follow Zoe on Twitter: @zomigi

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

Presenting: HTML5-baked, half-baked, or ready for the table?

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DW CS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-monthly column for Web Designer Magazine, train corporate web departments, and speak at numerous conferences. Stephanie is the WaSP liaison to Adobe Systems, working with product managers to ensure the output of its web products continues to move toward today’s web standards. An admitted workaholic who rarely leaves the office, she frequently escapes to talk to the people inside her computer via Twitter. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @stefsull

Esther Derby

Presenting: Agile Meets UI, Agile Retrospectives (Workshop)

Esther Derby works with individuals, teams, and organizations to improve their ability to deliver valuable software. Esther is recognized as a leader in the human-side of software development, including management, organizational change, collaboration, building teams, and retrospectives.

She’s been a programmer, systems manager, project manager, and internal consultant. She currently runs her own consulting firm, Esther Derby Associates, Inc., in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Esther has an MA in Organizational Leadership, is the author of over 100 articles and co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management. At the moment, she’s working on a book about managing in team-based organizations.

She’s a founder of the AYE Conference and is serving her second term as a board member for the Agile Alliance.

Follow Esther on Twitter: @estherderby

John Allsopp

Presenting: The State of the Web Platform

John has been working with, on, for and against the web since the first half of the 1990s.

He’s a co-founder of westciv.com, and developer of Style Master, the most venerable cross platform CSS development tool, now more than 10 years old, and the author of numerous courses, tutorials, articles (including the still widely cited Dao of Web Design” from 2000), tools and resources for web designers and developers.

John is also the co-founder of the web conference series Web Directions. Web Directions is held in Australia, North America, Japan and the UK.

More recently still, John co-founded Scroll Magazine, a print, PDF and online magazine exploring the big ideas around designing and developing for the web, and is the co-chair of OWEA, a new XG at the W3C focussing on educating the next generation of Web Professionals.

John is the father of 3 girls, the light of his life, and in his copious spare time, does his best to do as much mountain biking, surfing and snowboarding as all these other activities allow, which is to say, very little.

John’s personal site is johnfallsopp.com.

Follow John on Twitter: @johnallsopp

Dan Rubin

Presenting: Creativity, Design and Interaction with HTML5 and CSS3

An accomplished designer, author and speaker, Dan Rubin has over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of user interface design and web standards, specifically focusing on the use of HTML and CSS to streamline development and improve accessibility.

His passion for all things creative and artistic isn’t a solely selfish endeavor either—you’ll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, philosophy, web standards, typography, psychology, and design in general.

In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft’s ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, friends of ED, 2003), technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006), The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007) and Sexy Web Design (SitePoint, 2009), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007), writes about web standards, design and life in general on his personal site, Superfluous Banter, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative, Webgraph and Black Seagull, consulting on design, user interaction and online publishing for Garcia Media, and speaking and teaching at events, conferences and workshops (including An Event Apart, @media, SXSW Interactive, Future of Web Design, Web Directions, and various Refresh and AIGA events) around the world.

Photo: © John Morrison / Subism Studios

Follow Dan on Twitter: @danrubin

Tom Hughes-Croucher

Presenting: An introduction to Server-side JavaScript

Tom Hughes-Croucher is an Evangelist and Senior Developer in Yahoo’s Open Strategy Group, focusing on Yahoo¹s Web Services and Cloud Platform.

Tom joined Yahoo! to work on the Yahoo! frontpage in Europe as a Front end engineer. He brought his experience from contributing to a number of Web standards for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the British Standards Institute (BSI).

Before joining Yahoo! he helped build the online music stores for some of the UK’s largest brands including Tesco, Three Telecom and Channel 4.

Follow Tom on Twitter: @sh1mmer

Scott Thomas

Presenting: Designing Obama

Scott Thomas is constantly seeking the simplest answer to complex problems. Scott began his design pursuits studying architecture before bouncing to graphic design and web development.

Prior to moving to Chicago, where he set his sights on user-experience design, Scott called London’s Shoreditch home. From products to websites, Scott works to simplify the experience of use. In 2006, he and five other creative types began a design collective, lovingly known as The Post Family. The group is devoted to supporting “family” member’s design habits—from silkscreen to letterpress, from illustration to blogging—in an effort to “get back to the hand.”

In 2007, Scott’s career took a dramatic leap when he was invited to join the New Media team at Obama for America. The chance encounter led Scott to becoming the Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign. He is currently writing a book that explains how an obscure senator rose to the highest office in the land and celebrity status with the aid of branding and design.

Scott plans to continue designing for social causes that might just someday change the world.

Banner photo: © Fotomattic.

Follow Scott on Twitter: @simplescott

Brad Neuberg

Presenting: HTML5 for Web Application Developers

Brad Neuberg is a software engineer at Google. Previously he was a developer advocate at Google for the Open Web and HTML5. He is the creator of a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks for expanding the capabilities of web applications, including Dojo Storage, Dojo Offline, Really Simple History, and SVG Web. Brad worked with Douglas Engelbart on the HyperScope project; explored deeply collaborative web browsers with Paper Airplane; worked on one of the first web-based RSS aggregators; and was a Developer Advocate for the Gears project. Brad also created Coworking, an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed.

Follow Brad on Twitter: @bradneuberg

Brian Fling

Presenting: Designing and Building Mobile Apps with Web Standards

Brian Fling is an authority in the field of in mobile user experience and designing for multiple contexts. He has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies to leverage a variety of mediums, like mobile devices, to design for the needs and context of real people.

Author of O’Reilly Media’s Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps, Brian goes in depth into the design principles involved in creating compelling mobile experiences for this new era of multiple devices and context. As well as explore the rapidly growing area of how to easily design and build a mobile site and web app, how to deal with devices practically and how to translate an experience to a variety of mobile devices.

Brian is a frequent author and speaker on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience, teaching people how to leverage mobile all over the world. Brian is also the founder and president of pinch/zoom, a design and development agency specializing on mobile experiences helping clients like Best Buy, Lonely Planet and others dive into the world of mobile.

Follow Brian on Twitter: @fling

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