Speakers
Daniel Burka is a San Francisco-based product designer. He's currently a design partner at Google Ventures. He works with Google Ventures' many portfolio companies to solve their design challenges.
Previous to Google, Daniel co-founded Silverorange a Canadian web agency where he got to work with Mozilla (he helped draw the Firefox logo), Ning, Sloan, and did lots of e-commerce and government work to boot. One day Kevin Rose called up silverorange and had Daniel and his team design the early stage designs of Digg Soon after Daniel moved to San Francisco to become Digg's creative director as the site grew from a niche technology news sites to a leading news entity. Five years later, Daniel left to join a gaming startup called Tiny Speck with the founders of Flickr. Then, with Kevin Rose free to pursue new ventures, he and Daniel co-founded the mobile incubator Milk, which was acquired by Google a year later. After joining Google, Daniel led the mobile user experience team for Google+ before becoming a partner at Google Ventures.
When he's not obsessing about interfaces and the conundrums of mobile design, Daniel tweets as @dburka and speaks at conferences around the world.
Cameron Moll is a designer, speaker, author, husband, and father living in the coastal town of Sarasota, Florida. His work or advice has been featured by Forrester Research, Communication Arts magazine, HOW magazine, Print magazine, National Public Radio (NPR), and many others. He's the founder of Authentic Jobs, a targeted destination for web professionals and the companies seeking to hire them. He's also the artist behind a unique series of letterpress type posters that re-imagine buildings as if constructed entirely of type. Cameron is a sucker for anything that involves his four sons and sports equipment. He's also been known to spend a little too much time building, flying, and ultimately crashing R/C airplanes.
Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about user experience design, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and experience design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers. Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and UX Immersion Conference, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work. You can find his writing at uie.com and follow his adventures on the twitters at @jmspool.
Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman is a maker of awesomeness and a doer of good. She connects industry, education, and community through innovative design initiatives. As Co-founder of Center Centre, Leslie works to improve the state of design education and the field of design. She is also a Royal Society of the Arts Fellow. Leslie is a co-author and the creative director of InterACT with Web Standards: A holistic approach to web design and has written articles for A List Apart and .net Magazine. She has been a member of the Web Standards Project Edu Task Force (WaSP Edu TF) and was a founding member of the Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) where she served on the Executive Committee. Before co-founding Center Centre, Leslie served for five years as an Assistant Professor at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Leslie earned her doctorate in Learning and Leadership with a focus on design education and designing for good.
James White is a Canadian artist and designer based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He is the 1-man wrecking crew behind the Signalnoise Studio where he produces visual artistry for professional and personal projects. He began his career as a designer in 1998 but started drawing way back in 1981 at the age of 4. His creative path has led to him woking with clients such as Nike, MTV, Google, Wired, VH1, Kevin Smith, UbiSoft and more. He enjoys colourful stuff, nerdy things, Bezier points and a good metal song.
Greg is the CEO of Happy Cog, a boutique consultancy that designs and builds beautiful and highly usable digital experiences. Happy Cog's clients include MTV, Zappos, Nintendo, Ben & Jerry's, Thomson Reuters, and many of the world's most prestigious colleges and universities.
Greg received his BA in Management from Gettysburg College, where he now serves on the college's board of Marketing and Communications. He has worked in interactive design since 1994, and has been managing teams for 15 years. Greg and industry pioneer Jeffrey Zeldman extended Happy Cog's footprint in 2006 to Philadelphia, and later expanded further west with Greg Storey in 2010. Happy Cog now has three offices and employs 25 of the industry's best and brightest.
Greg Storey is President of Happy Cog where he oversees marketing, strategic partnerships, product development and events through the Bureau of Digital Affairs. He got his start in web design professionally in 1994. Since that time he has lead a number of design and development teams, creating websites for everything from NCAA sports tournaments to AAA game titles; telemedicine to Fortune 100 brands.
At the behest of his friend and mentor Jeffrey Zeldman, Greg started his own design studio, Airbag Industries LLC in 2005. Four years later, he merged Airbag with Happy Cog and joined a partnership with Jeffrey Zeldman and Greg Hoy. In 2011, he moved the Happy Cog San Francisco office to Austin, Texas where he enjoys living in a rapidly expanding metropolis.
Wren Lanier is a web designer and internet geek with a passion for creating smart, kick-ass sites that get the job done. She’s been building internet-things for fun and profit since 1999, with a passion for web standards and elegant user experience. Her favorite things include bagels, trouble-making, and pages that validate on the first try.
Matt Griffin is a designer and founder of Bearded. He is an avid advocate for collaboration in design, and has been published in A List Apart and .net magazine. He is also one of the creators of Wood Type Revival, a successfully Kickstarter-funded project which seeks out lost historic wood type and converts it into digital fonts for modern designers. Matt lives in Pittsburgh’s East End with his lovely and talented wife Elizabeth and their adorable son Argus.
J has been making websites and software for the web since 1998, and has been credited with creating several software features web designers and developers take for granted today. He’s passionate about efficient, usable, aesthetically pleasing design, and founded Nine Labs, an experience and usability consultancy, where he works with companies far and wide to improve their products and services. He’s also the President of the Atlanta Web Design Group and the creator of the Web Afternoon event series.
Laura helps individuals, organizations, and teams create a better world. Born out of the bond between social change and personal growth, She works with her clients to access their potential and accelerate their results. She believes that we achieve our greatest success when we align who we are with what we do.
Over the last decade, Laura has coached clients through barriers and across borders to unleash their greatness amidst uncertainty. With her extensive training in group facilitation and dialogue, She has guided an 100-year old organization to a 21st century vision that gave them relevance and meaning for the next generation. She has gone from rural farming villages in Brazil, to fishing ports in Fiji, to forests ravaged by wildfire empowering activists + advocates, lawmakers + communities, artists + entrepreneurs to build and realize their fantastically bold dreams.
President of Sparkbox and founder of the Build Responsively workshop series, Ben shares his ideas about the web on the Sparkbox Foundry and other industry blogs like .net Magazine and Smashing Magazine. His leadership at Sparkbox has driven the team to be a pioneer in responsive web design techniques, and he continues to push for great user experiences outside the context of specific devices.
Patrick Haney is not a sausage. He's a developer turned designer who works from his home office just north of Boston, rocking client projects with his wife and business partner, Jenna. Together they form Hanerino, a design studio focused on creating beautiful, usable interfaces for websites, mobile devices and more. As board members for AIGA Boston, they've also taken charge of the chapter's web presence.
Before going out on his own, Patrick lead the design effort for Harvard's custom CMS, iSites, which is used by a large percentage of the university. He's spoken at numerous conferences on design and development, including Web Design World, Future of Web Design and SXSW, and has been organizing monthly events for Refresh Boston over the past 7 years. As a Buffalo native, he's a wing snob and is on a never-ending quest to find the perfect chicken wing.
Jenna Marino is a Boston-based designer who's focus is on providing superior user experiences across all device platforms, especially when it comes to mobile and television applications. She's the sensible half of Hanerino, a design studio she and her now husband started over 3 years ago. Together they work with clients big and small, and until recently was working on Univision's plethora of video offerings on iOS & Android devices, TV apps, the Xbox & Windows 8.
Jenna's experience over the years has taken her from print design to interactive applications for all devices. She spent time at agencies like TMP Worldwide and Saatchi & Saatchi before moving to Boston, eventually working (remotely) on Blockbuster Digital's apps for iPhone, Android and Samsung devices and currently as Creative Director for Univision. When she's not working or engaging with the design community in Boston, Jenna pushes herself to be a better runner while training to qualify for the Boston Marathon.
Jenn Downs is a Design Researcher for MailChimp. She is passionate about consistency and simple workflows and loves meeting with users to observe interfaces in the wild.
Bryce Bigger is an interactive designer/developer. He is the Principal of The Bigger Design, creating interactive magic for clients including the U.S. Navy, Oracle, Ping Golf, Lockheed Martin, and the National Institutes of Health. He created The Sentinel Project, an open-source autonomous foam dart gun system, which was shown at the AdobeMAX tradeshow to spotlight its innovative use of Adobe AIR technology. Recently he’s produced other weaponry for clients including email marketing leader MailChimp. His forthcoming book "Build Your Own Autonomous NERF Blaster" is the framework for which this class is based.
Brian is on a mission to bring good beer to the people. UntamedBeer.com is his megaphone to the world, and he's not afraid to evangelize on a local street corner.
A Certified Cicerone Beer Server and seven-time homebrew competition medal winner, Brian is the president of the Upstate Brewtopians homebrew club in Upstate South Carolina. He has been a contributing writer on Ratebeer.com's HopPress and the Southern Brew News.
Brian's devotion to the creative aspect of hand-crafted beer and the tight-knit brewing community borders on obsession. Fewer things get him more jazzed than introducing people to new beer, finding the perfect beer and food pairing, or pouring beer at a festival.