ConvergeSE 2013

Raised in the Michigan Northwoods, schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and currently hunkered down in the mighty Pacific Northwest, the Draplin Design Co. proudly rolls up its sleeves on a number of projects related to the Print, Identity, Web Development, Illustration and Gocco Muscle categories. We make stuff for Coal Headwear, Union Binding Co., Field Notes, Richmond Fontaine, Nike, Wired, Timberline, Ford Motor Co., Viva Voce, Hutchco, Patagonia, Chunklet, Incase, Giro, Cobra Dogs, Burton Snowboards, Hughes Entertainment, Megafaun and even the Obama Administration, if you can believe that. We pride ourselves on a high level of craftsmanship and quality that keeps us up late into the wet Portland night.

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.

Carl Smith is the Chief Keeper Upper of nGen Works and irreverent ditcher of the nine-to-five.

Owner and founder of nGen Works, Carl Smith runs an unconventional distributed team that works with businesses to redefine their identities and ideals. Carl has made a name for himself in client services by creating a new framework for how we get things done, and by enabling us to realign our creative communities. When he’s not conducting riveting business experiments with his nGeneers or consulting for global trendsetters, he’s busy sculpting a new face for the world of work.

Chris is the force behind CSS-Tricks, previously he was with Wufoo and SurveyMonkey as Lead Hucklebucker.

Chris is a Wordpress expert having authored the Digging into Wordpress book and the Lynda.com Wordpress 3 tutorial series.

He is also the host of a kick-ass podcast the Shoptalk Show

Jenn Lukas is the Interactive Development Director at Happy Cog in Philadelphia. She writes for The Nerdary, has a regular column in .net magazine, and is a contributor to The Pastry Box Project. She has spoken at a variety of conferences including dConstruct, JSConf (US and EU), and CSS Dev Conference.

Jenn was named one of Mashable’s 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter, and you can find her on Twitter posting development and cat related news. When she's not crafting sites with the finest of web standards, Jenn teaches HTML and CSS for GirlDevelopIt.

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.

Mig is a designer from Chicago, focused on making good things for good people.

With a passion for story telling, he practices his craft designing at 37signals. He also teaches at The Starter League and serves as a mentor with AIGA.

Before 37signals, Mig has done work for other really great companies and clients including Threadless, Google, Harley-Davidson, Rand McNally, Sears and SC Johnson. Gosh darnit, people like him enough that he's had the honor of being recognized with AIGA, HOW, Print, Rockport, UnderConsideration and other fancy design publications. You can often find him speaking about these things with the likes of PSFK, The School of Visual Arts, and Zappos. His talks are usually funny. Mostly. Sometimes.

Emily Lewis is a web designer and developer of the standardista variety, which means she gets geeky about things like semantic HTML and CSS, usability and accessibility. As part of her ongoing quest to spread the good word about standards, she writes about web design on her blog, A Blog Not Limited, and is the author of Microformats Made Simple and a contributing author for the HTML5 Cookbook. She’s also a guest writer for Web Standards Sherpa, Script Junkie, .net magazine and MIX Online.

In addition to loving all things web, Emily is passionate about community building and knowledge sharing. She is a co-host of The ExpressionEngine Podcast and the Managing Editor for Web Standards Sherpa. Emily also speaks at conferences and events all over the country, including SXSW, MIX, In Control, Voices That Matter, New Mexico Technology Council, InterLab and the University of New Mexico.

Josh Higgins is a creative who works across multiple disciplines including print, web, environment, identity and television. For over thirteen years, he’s been refining the art of connecting brands to people with a concept-driven visual style that has earned him national honors. He recently concluded his role as Design Director for President Obama’s 2012 campaign. As the Design Director, Josh built and led the design team for the historic 2012 political campaign, in which the web, design, and technology played a truly pivotal role. The responsibility of Josh and the team was to design the Obama 2012 campaign both online and offline. A main focus of his role was on creating a uniform message and consistent visual language across all touchpoints. With roots in both advertising and graphic design, he has done extensive work for brands including Fender Guitars, The Tony Hawk Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, Qualcomm, Asics Footwear, CBS Radio, Perry Ellis International, IHOP, New Castle Beer, PF Changs, Yamaha and Life Technologies.

Josh dedicates a percentage of his time to social causes. Finding creative ways to support them has manifested into successful exhibits and charitable projects, like The Hurricane, So-Cal and Haiti Poster Projects in addition to lecture series with photographers, designers and film makers with proceeds donated to various charitable organizations.

James White is a visual artist and designer from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, and is the one-man wrecking crew behind the Signalnoise Studio. Drawing since the age of 4, his career started very early and now with 14 years of design experience, he has worked with clients such as Nike, Google, MTV, Diesel, VH1, Wired, Universal Music, and more. On top of that, James prides himself on the many personal art projects he endeavours in order to keep evolving as a creative person, including alternative art movie posters. James has been featured in many international design magazines and has spoken at several conferences around the world.

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.

Nicole Cendrowski is a partner with Sandler Sales Training. In her role, Cendrowski is responsible for business development, client coaching, and sales/sales management training. She is a highly trusted and respected professional in her field, known for her discernment and listening skills, positive energy, fearless attitude, and a keen ability to quickly get in tune to prospects' and clients' needs. Prior to joining Sandler, Cendrowski was the founder and creative director of Big Gnome, a communications and brand development firm. She also was a member of Sandler Training's President's Club, which consists of business owners, managers, and sales professionals that meet weekly for training, reinforcement and coaching.

Lea Alcantara runs Lealea Design, a web consultancy based in Edmonton, Canada. Her international roster of clients include nonprofits, apps, and small businesses. Her goal is design with sass and class: professional, attractive, hassle-free websites and interfaces that fulfill client goals and help them formulate and deliver precisely the right business-building message. For over seven years, she has shared her expertise at prestigious industry conferences, such as this one, and publications like A List Apart and .net magazine. She cohosts EE Podcast, one of .net Magazine's Top 10 Podcasts of 2011, and is a recognized expert in the powerful back-end platform ExpressionEngine.

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.

Jared Ponchot is the Creative Director at Lullabot, an interactive strategy, design and development agency known for its expertise in Drupal and open source publishing platforms. Lullabot's clients include Harvard, NBC, Martha Stewart Living, and Sony Music just to name a few.

Jared received his BFA in Graphic and Interactive Communications from Ringling College of Art and Design and began his career in print design, but has now spent more than ten years designing for the web and interactive applications. Over the course of his career, he has led design efforts for clients like MIT, Time Warner, Intel, AAA, Ogilvy PR and the GRAMMYs. A strong advocate for responsive design, Jared helped create the first fully responsive site for GRAMMY.com for their 54th annual awards show.

Jared is passionate about beautiful, usable design, and has shared his knowledge speaking extensively around the world on design principles, visual hierarchy, and designing for complex content models. He also hosts a bi-weekly Podcast called "The Creative Process", where he and Lullabot co-founder Jeff Robbins chat with designers, artists, musicians, authors and filmmakers about how creativity happens.

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.

Co-founder of Full Stop Interactive, a web shop in Pittsburgh, PA, and United Pixelworkers, a fake union for people who make the things we see on our screens every day. Developer, writer, reluctant businessman. Nathan Peretic would rather be reading.

Jay Fanelli is a client's dream and a boss's nightmare. He's the co-founder and creative muscle behind Pittsburgh-based web shop Full Stop Interactive and trans-national fake union United Pixelworkers. He'll rip your startup idea to shreds soon as look at you.

Jonathan Longnecker is the co-founder of FortySeven Media - a kick awesome design firm specializing in web, print and media creation. He is also 1/2 of the The Kick Awesome Show a video podcast dedicated to design, the web and general nerdery. It’s great!

Jonathan loves simple designs that communicate quickly, and is fanatical about the details that sets their work apart. Find him on twitter (@necker47), and on the web at fortysevenmedia.com.

Since he first raised a wooden spoon to beat on pots and pans, Nate Croft has loved making music. That has nothing to do with design, but Nate couldn't think of any other way to start this tiny biography. He lives in the wonderfully strange land of Knoxville, Tennessee where he designs and creates digital media of various flavors. He is full of ideas and is known to blurt them out out of nowhere, confusing those nearby. He is married to Dena, the woman he has always hoped he could have. Nate readily admits that he is a geek.

Val Head is totally into design, type and code. She is a designer and consultant currently based in Pittsburgh where she works with agencies and small businesses to make fun and effective web sites. She speaks internationally at conferences and leads workshops on web design and creative coding.

Every year she and Jason bring a swarm of web designers to Pittsburgh for Web Design Day. She also runs the local creative coding meet up, Loop and helps keep Refresh Pittsburgh going strong. She likes people. Val tweets too much, occasionally dribbbles, and blogs somewhat inconsistently.

Raquel "@rockbot" Vélez is a really weird engineer. First, she received her BS in mechanical engineering from Caltech. Then she (played with | built | programmed | psychoanalyzed) robots for 8 years, at places like NASA JPL, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and various universities in Europe. She took a break to do that startup thing as a co-founder and CTO... but came to her senses and found a new life online as a web developer. Raquel got her start as a Developer at Skookum Digital Works; she is now an engineer at Storify in San Francisco, working with an amazing team of people to navigate and define the intersection between journalism and social media. In her off time, you can find her baking, hacking on node.js, and speaking. Also, hanging out with her hilarious husband and two cats dressed in dog suits. She's online at raquelvelez.com

Technical Director for Sparkbox, Rob is responsible for operations and leading the development team. On any given day, Rob meets with prospective clients, writes code, or continues to lead the charge in improving development process. Sparkbox has become known as a leader in responsive web design and custom software solutions.

Rob is a software engineer at Sparkbox in Dayton, Ohio. He spends his days writing JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Ruby, PHP, and building tools that help make the Internet a better place for everyone. When not at work, Rob can usually be found building LEGOs with his kids, hanging out with his wife, hacking on his Arduino, or experimenting with what can be done with JavaScript.

Jonathan LeBlanc is a technology evangelist, Emmy award winning software engineer, and author of the O’Reilly book "Programming Social Applications". Specializing in user identity concepts and data mining techniques, as well as open source initiatives around social engagement, Jonathan works on the development of emerging initiatives towards building a more user-centric web.

Hampton Catlin is the inventor of Sass, a CSS generating language, and the Haml markup language He is the original creator of Wikipedia Mobile (m.wikipedia.org) and is also the creator of several successful iPhone applications including Dictionary! Hampton is currently building crazy new technologies to mobilize the web at Moovweb.

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.

Jed specializes in building open source web and mobile applications with Mode Set. He spent 17 years as a professional cyclist, adopting software development as a second career. He now focuses his interest in dynamic languages (ruby, coffeescript, and clojure), test driven development, and bettering the software development experience. First and foremost a husband and father, he also geeks out on crossfit, coffee, world travel, and any combination of said hobbies herein mentioned.

Bermon Painter is the UX Design Lead for Hendrick Automotive Group, where he works with an amazing team that crafts nifty experiences and web applications with Ruby. He's also heavily involved in the local tech community in Charlotte and organizes the Charlotte User Experience Designer, Charlotte Front-End Developers and Charlotte Grok groups. In his free time he works the folks at @teamsassdesign on the redesign of the Sass website.

Outside of technology he enjoys languages, speaks fluent Spanish, working on Italian, plays classical piano and enjoys visiting the beaches and mountains of Ecuador with his family.

Hunter Loftis is in charge of research and development at Skookum Digital Works and is the lead developer and on node.js protyping tool ClickDummy. He is a contributor to several node.js and JavaScript open-source libraries as well as frequent host of SDW TechTalks and an organizer of CharlotteJS (www.charlottejs.org).

Mark Rickert is the Director of Engineering for software development studio Skookum Digital Works in Charlotte, NC. When he's not riding his motorcycle he's writing Objective-C, Ruby, PHP (and just about any other language you can think of) at SDW. Mark has been writing software professionally for over 10 years and has had numerous iPhone app hits as "Mohawk Apps."

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.

Josh Netherton is a biology instructor turned web tinkerer, turned front end dev turned user experience designer. No matter what he's dissecting, coding or researching, Josh knows there's always more to learn. He works in Atlanta shaping the interface and building the front end of Mandrill, MailChimp's transactional email service. You can follow him as @joshnetherton on Twitter where he often gushes about Doctor Who and makes obscure Monty Python references.

Partner and Design Lead at ZurbJonathan is a geek-for-life, equally at home with a good sci-fi flick, baller video game, or front-end code. His days as a huge geek go back to playing that old online maze game on Prodigy and geekdom still plays a huge part in his career as a designer. As the man behind Foundation, our responsive framework, he’s even managed to slip in an Issac Asimov reference or two.

Founder and partner of truematter, an interactive usability consultancy, Dean has championed online simplicity and clarity since the early days of the Web. He oversees truematter's user experience practice leading strategic engagements for innovative regional firms as well as the Fortune 100.

Dean is past founder of Renaissance Interactive (a dotcom boom/bust story). He also writes about the running sub-culture at zerotoboston.com.

President of Jack Russell Software, and Chief Technologist, 15 years of software development experience.

At Jack Russell Software, we create software that makes a difference! We focus on Healthcare applications that provide a enjoyable user experience. We are passionate about providing solutions that allow clinicians to focus on providing care.

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.