Speakers | Web Directions South 2010

Speakers

Inter­esting and talented people from the four corners of the web

• Craig Sharkie
• Matt Balara
• Ben Schwarz
• Simon Pascal Klein
• Juliette Melton
• Patrick Lee
• Josh Williams
• Dan Rubin
• Steve Souders
• Max Wheeler
• Darren Menachemson
• Scott Thomas
• Michal Migurski
• Paul Hagon

Craig Sharkie

Presenting:

A degree in Fine Art may seem an odd stepping stone to a career in coding, but its a step that’s led Craig Sharkie on a journey lasting over 15 years. With tenure at the Australian oper­a­tions of Ziff Davis, AOL, Yahoo! and Atlassian, Craig’s seen the Internet bubble, burst, and be rein­vented, and at each turn his foun­dation in visu­al­ising the Web has stood him in good stead.

Focussing on acces­sible, exten­sible, and usable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript solu­tions to both leading-​​edge and legacy devel­opment issues, Craig continues to use the best of his disci­plines to deliver inter­faces that marry a user’s goals with corporate aims. From onclick to Unob­trusive Scripting, via the DOM and Ajax, he enjoys coding stan­dards based solu­tions even more than cham­pi­oning them, but perhaps on par with writing about them.

Follow Craig on Twitter: @twalve

Matt Balara

Presenting: Flogging Design – Best Practice in Online Shop Design

Matt Balara is a free­lance web designer, was a child prodigy violinist and is unin­ten­tionally bilingual, all of which has been vitally important to his success in designing for the web since 1993. Despite years of expe­rience, he still can’t under­stand why so many websites are so useless and ugly.

Follow Matt on Twitter: @MattBalara

Ben Schwarz

Presenting: Building a better web with HTML5, HTML5 right, now (Workshop)

Ben Schwarz is a well known Melbourne Rubyist who funds his love of good food (at home) and sake (in bars) by designing sophis­ti­cated web appli­ca­tions using standards-​​based tech­nology. More than anything else, he is driven by a maniacal desire to produce not only elegant code, but also beau­tiful software in the hands of its users.

Simon Pascal Klein

Presenting: Setting standards-friendly web type

Simon Pascal Klein is a graphic, web and interface designer, front-​​end developer, rampant ‘typophile’, UI and acces­si­bility aficionado. Born in Mainz Mainz, Germany — the birth­place of Gutenberg — he now works in Canberra as a free­lance designer while studying at the Australian National University. Simon is actively engaged in the Open Source community and local web industry, notably as one of the unor­gan­isers to first bring BarCamp to Canberra. He also co-​​hosts a podcast on all things web, and publishes occa­sionally on things type on his site.

Follow Simon on Twitter: @klepas

Juliette Melton

Presenting: , 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

Patrick Lee

Presenting: JavaScript Sprachraum

Patrick is a computer programmer and inter­action designer. Usually at the same time.

He thinks JavaScript is an important language.

He works for Thought­Works.

Follow Patrick on Twitter: @boundvariable

Josh Williams

Presenting: Where Are We Going?

Josh Williams is CEO and co-​​founder of Gowalla, a mobile and Web service that gives people around the world a new way to commu­nicate and express them­selves through the everyday places and extra­or­dinary settings they enjoy. Gowalla empowers everyone to capture and share their journey as they go while following the happenings of family and friends. Josh is respon­sible for building and growing the business while leading the product design team. Gowalla was launched in 2009 and is backed by notable investors including Greylock Partners, Alsop-​​Louie Partners, Founders Fund, and other prominent angel investors.

Josh is a self-​​taught designer and artist who has been creating online for over 15 years. Josh loves mid-​​century modern design, archi­tecture, skiing, snow­boarding and long­boarding. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two young daughters.

Follow Josh on Twitter

Dan Rubin

Presenting: , Real World CSS3 for Designers (Workshop)

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

Steve Souders

Presenting: Even Faster Web Sites

Steve works at Google on web perfor­mance and open source initia­tives. He previ­ously served as Chief Perfor­mance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Perfor­mance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the perfor­mance analysis plug-​​in for Firefox. He serves as co-​​chair of Velocity, the web perfor­mance and oper­a­tions conference from O’Reilly, and is co-​​founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught CS193H: High Perfor­mance Web Sites at Stanford University.

Follow Steve on Twitter: @souders

Max Wheeler

Presenting: Location, location, geolocation

An inter­action designer with a passion for emerging tech­nologies, Max believes the web should function as beau­ti­fully as it looks. He currently resides in Canberra where he works with Icelab, a media-​​agnostic design agency with a team of good people.

In his spare time Max takes photographs, travels the world, and builds web appli­ca­tions that do useful things. His latest pet project is Decaf Sucks, a site for helping you to find the good cafés and avoid the bad ones. He also happens to be the current world champion in the sport of beach ultimate.

Follow Max on Twitter: @makenosound

Darren Menachemson

Presenting: Designing interactions using enriched storytelling

Darren Menachemson has worked in the design field since the late nineties. During this time, he has archi­tected websites, designed complex person-​​to-​​Government interactions/​user expe­ri­ences, lead user research and eval­u­ation processes and worked with senior exec­u­tives and project teams to turn fuzzy concepts into inte­grated product and service blue­prints. Darren has estab­lished and led design capa­bil­ities for a number of major Government agencies.

Darren currently leads an agency-​​based design group that provides (among other services) enriched story­telling to big projects, and has previ­ously estab­lished similar successful capa­bil­ities in other agencies.

He is also the Chief Design Officer of Designerly, a company that makes tools for designers.

When he’s not working, Darren plays guitar, Irish fiddle, and he draws and writes things. He is a jogging enthu­siast and a cycling nut. He is happiest when he’s trav­elling some­where interesting.

Follow Darren on Twitter:: @thoughtpod

Scott Thomas

Presenting:

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

Michal Migurski

Presenting: Let's see what we can see

Stamen partner Michal Migurski has overseen the research and devel­opment of Stamen’s tech­nology work since 2003, from running delivered code to proto­types and exper­i­ments to far-​​left-​​field disruption. He main­tains an active weblog, and likes to talk in front of groups. You may remember him from such projects as Oakland Crimespotting, Walking Papers, Maps From Scratch, Digg Labs and API, Modest Maps, Mappr, and Reblog.

Follow Michal on Twitter: @migurski

Paul Hagon

Presenting: Enriching large data sets

Paul is the Senior Web Designer at the National Library of Australia and has been working on the web in cultural insti­tu­tions since 1999. His job entails a mix of design, coding, and acces­si­bility. He is a thinker and “ideas” man. He finds cultural insti­tu­tions fasci­nating because of what they bring to society, they are rich resources of infor­mation and provide vast potential for exploring hidden trea­sures. Paul enjoys making these items available and telling their stories in ways that may not be the most obvious. He likes to use tech­nology in a relevant way to enrich the way we can interact with these resources.

In 2010 Paul was named a “Mover and Shaker” of the library world by Library Journal.

Follow Paul on Twitter: @paulhagon

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