Jonathan Berger

Pivotal Labs

Jonathan Berger is a designer, developer and technologist who’s been active in the NYC technology scene since around 2005, helping to organize events like the Agile Experience Design Meetup, Startup Weekend, Barcamp, Fashioncamp, and Ignite. He spends his days building software with Pivotal Labs and his nights and weekends working on Market Publique. Prior to that, he earned a Bachelors in Philosophy at Vassar College and a Masters in Media Studies at the New School. He has worked as a designer, developer, video editor, animator, and technology consultant for institutions as diverse as Eyebeam, MTV Networks, Yahoo!, Ogilvy, and the American Museum of Natural History.

He speaks about startups and technology at events like O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, New York Tech Meetup, Fashion 2.0 Startup Showcase, Startup Weekend, North Brooklyn Breakfast Club, The Product Group, and others.

Josh Clark

Global Moxie

Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s author of the O’Reilly books “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” and “Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders.” Josh’s outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help creative companies build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis Studios

A proficient illustrator and painter with a passion for technology, Davis’ work brought an entirely new dimension to art. Utilizing randomization in controlled environments, or Chaos Theory, Davis established a new and unique perspective on visual communication and creative expression, pioneering an area previously unexplored in graphic design.

As of 2007, Davis lives in New York with his wife and daughter. He is a professor at New York’s School of Visual Arts, runs his own design studio, and continues to lecture and lead workshops in design conferences.

Steve Fisher

Hello Fisher

Steve is an internationally renowned interactive designer, speaker and open source evangelist. He has done work for companies all over North America and travels the world talking about design, user experience and open source.

Currently Steve is working as the UX Director for Yellow Pencil, serves as the national vice president of web for the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and can be found hanging out with some of the core teams contributing to open source projects like Drupal.

Steve likes running, fancy shirts and twitter. Find him at www.hellofisher.com or on Twitter: @hellofisher

Jesse Friedman

Neal Advertising

Jesse built his first website in 1999 and has been doing it ever since. Today, Jesse is the lead developer at Neal Advertising) where he builds Online Web Environments powered by WordPress and a Professor at Johnson & Wales University shaping young designer and developer minds. Jesse has a passion for WordPress and contributes to the WordPress community online as a developer and offline as an organizer of WordPress meetups and speaker at conferences.

Outside of his work Jesse would be found with his family consisting of his wife and son. Jesse has recently been collecting 50’s tin robots so if you see any on the loose let him know.

Andrea Graham

Big Sea Design

With over 15 years of experience creating custom hand-built websites, Andi now leads a team of fantastic designers and developers at her agency, Big Sea Design & Development in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Big Sea works with clients all over the country to create strategic digital communication strategies featuring award-winning design, custom Wordpress wonders, complex PHP or Ruby-on-Rails applications, iOS and mobile apps and lots and lots of fun.

Andi’s got Bachelor’s degrees in Sociology, Visual Art and Master’s degree in Strategic Communication, where her research on user-experience and communication behaviors in social media led to journal publications and presentations at academic conferences.   

She’s an avid runner (training for her first half marathon on November 20th) who spends her days chasing her toddler, baking and drinking expensive beer.  

Aaron Gustafson

Easy! Designs

Aaron Gustafson is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Easy! Designs, a web development consultancy. He is Group Manager of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) where he has spearheaded both Web Standards Sherpa and a small business outreach effort.

He wrote the JavaScript library eCSStender, serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a contributing writer for .net Magazine, and has filled a small library with his technical writing and editing credits. His latest book is Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement

Brad Haynes

Salesforce

Nashville native and super-creative Brad Haynes recently joined the seriously smart and talented team at Salesforce as the UX, Creative Director. There he helps lead the charge impacting powerful products used the world over. Before Salesforce, Brad ran the creative team at Paramore | The Digital Agency in Nashville Tennessee, guiding and delivering great experiences for a wide variety of happy and successful clientele.

Brad loves strategy, design, experience and his trusty Golden Retriever Sydney and enjoys meeting and working with bright folks who are driven to do things right.

Whitney Hess

Whitney Hess

In August 2008 Whitney quit her full-time job to become an independent user experience design consultant. She had been freelancing on the side for three years, and it was finally time to take the plunge. Most recently she was on the design team at Liquidnet, an international financial software company that runs the leading electronic marketplace for wholesale stock-trading.

Previously she has worked at interactive marketing agencies Digitas and Tribal DDB, where her clients included American Express, New York Times, Allstate, Claritin, Tropicana, and EarthLink. She’s proudest of helping to conceive, design and test an innovative card search tool for American Express and am named as a co-inventor on its U.S. patent.

Lis Hubert

Freelance

Lis is a user experience design consultant based in New York City. She works with businesses of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, to make their products and services enjoyable and delightful to use. Most recently, she has had the opportunity to partner with deal aggregator 8coupons as their Chief Experience Officer where she is not only responsible for the user experience design of the product, but also works to integrate user experience design methodologies and thinking into the product development and strategy.

Lis has also worked with interactive agencies such as Naviscent and Moment on clients such as ESPN Mobile, espnW and Viacom Media Networks. Before going independent, Lis worked with such companies as Weight Watchers International and USAA to create compelling and engaging user experiences.

Randy J. Hunt

Etsy

Randy J. Hunt is Creative Director at Etsy. He co-founded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace. Previously, he founded Citizen Scholar Inc. and worked at Milton Glaser Inc. and Number 17.

Hunt writes and lectures about design, and has been a visiting designer at Parsons, Pratt, Mississippi State, Portland State, and the Hartford Art School. In 2009 he was named a New Visual Artist by Print. Hunt is a graduate of the University of Central Florida and received his MFA in design from the School of Visual Arts.

Brandon Mathis

Brandon Mathis

Brandon is an independent iOS and web application developer with the mind of a programmer and the heart of a designer. He grew up just outside Birmingham, Alabama, spending his childhood studying art, practicing magic tricks and working in the family business — a cave attraction called DeSoto Caverns Park.

Brandon is infatuated with new technology and how it redefines the role of designers. An early adopter of Sass and a Compass core team member, he’s actively developing cutting edge tools for web designers. Recently Brandon released an excellent HSL Color Picker and is knee deep in the next version of Fancy Buttons — both open source tools for helping designers easily work with color and CSS3.

Brandon’s idea of a good time is a night in, playing board games or watching a RiffTrax with friends, but most of all he delights in spending time with his wife and their two year-old son.

Chris Meyer

Extensis

Chris is a senior product manager for Extensis, where he manages product development for the font management product lines. In his decade working for Extensis, he has played an integral role in product management and training for Extensis’ digital asset management and font management solutions. Chris came to Extensis with a background in developing publishing workflow systems, having designed, implemented and managed such systems for Hachette Filipacchi. Chris’ varied print/publishing background also includes serving as the Editorial Production Director of Elle Magazine, where he guided the development of Elle’s desktop publishing environment, and as an advertising designer for Ziff Davis Publishing. Chris grew up in Queens, NY and graduated from the New York Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design. He minored in Photography, Typography and Art History.

Cameron Moll

Authentic Jobs

Cameron Moll is a designer, speaker, author, husband, and father living in the coastal town of Sarasota, Florida. He’s the co-author of CSS Mastery, now in its second edition. His work or advice has been featured by Forrester Research, Communication Arts magazine, HOW magazine, Print magazine, National Public Radio (NPR), and many others.

Cameron is the founder of Authentic Jobs, a targeted destination for web and creative professionals, and the companies seeking to hire them. He’s also the artist behind a unique series of letterpress type posters.

Amid all this craziness, somehow he still finds time to play ball with each of his four boys.

Sarah B Nelson

Tapir & Tine

Sarah B. Nelson is Founder and Principal at Tapir & Tine, a design leadership, strategy, and research consulting studio in San Francisco. Sarah believes in—and has learned the hard way about—the importance of clear communication, honest relationships, and servant leadership in the design of complex interactive systems.

After 10 years leading web site projects, Sarah realized that a deep understanding of business, technology, and the people who interact with both would lead to better products and services. At the Institute of Design in Chicago, she developed theories for effective collaboration in innovation work based on research with the Neo-Futurists, an experimental theater group with the longest running show in Chicago. She tested her ideas on the ground, developing product strategies, digital experiences, and practice development frameworks for clients such as Nike, The Metropolitan Opera, United Airlines, Skype, Vanguard Funds, PayCycle, Zappos, Intel, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has held creative leadership positions at POP in Seattle, Adaptive Path, and most recently was the Principal of User Experience at Hot Studio.

Of all the people she has “managed” over the years, she still thinks that managing herself is her biggest challenge.

Jason Pamental

Thinking In Pencil

Jason has been blending design & technology since the early days of Mosaic and Netscape. Through years in both creative and technical leadership roles for Fortune 100 clients, well-renowned professional sporting sites and a host of other clients large and small, Jason brings in-depth experience in a broad range of disciplines. Ranging from branding, print design, all aspects of web design & development and even data center infrastructure management, he most enjoys challenges that draw upon all his diverse experiences to truly transform his clients’ businesses. In recent years he’s also begun sharing more of his unsolicited advice with the Drupal community, speaking at various web conferences and writing on sites like Fonts.com about things he’s done wrong in the hopes that others might fare just a bit better than he.

When the pixels are put away he tends to be hanging out with family, walking the dog, riding his bike or working on a 40-yr-old car with no computers in it whatsoever.

Nick Pettit

Carsonified

Nick is a web design teacher at Treehouse (formerly Think Vitamin Membership), a video training service that specializes in web design, web development, and more recently, iOS development. Nick’s passion for the web and technology is only matched by his appreciation of design and traditional art. When he’s not on camera, Nick enjoys movies, video games, and kittens.

Daniel Rhatigan

Fonts.com

Daniel Rhatigan is a senior type designer at Monotype Imaging, based in the UK. He worked as a designer and typographer in Boston and New York for 15 years before coming to study at the University of Reading, and then research and design non-Latin typeface families, concentrating on Indic scripts. He also lectures on typography and branding in the Netherlands and the UK.

Dan Rose

Dan Rose Online

Dan Rose is a User Interface Designer in Syracuse, NY. Enamored with pixel perfection and interactive process, he’s truly a student of design and workflow.

Dan’s passion for standards led him to create The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers)–a call to arms approach for improving the transfer of design. A Layer Mayor in his own right, he owns the tidiest PSD’s this side of the North Pole. He’s involved with numerous web communities and contributes to Smashing Magazine, Computer Arts and .net magazine. Pixel-crafting aside, he’s a husband, Christian, ice cream aficionado, and chronic tweeter, and has debunked all the names bullies called him in his childhood.

Tina Roth Eisenberg

Swiss Miss

Tina Roth Eisenberg, who refers to herself as a Swiss designer gone NYC, started swiss-miss.com in 2005 as a personal visual archive. Little did she know that only five years later, she would help fan the imagination of an average of 900,000 monthly visitors from all around the world. In her talk, Tina will trace her path from the Swiss Alps to “making it in NYC.” She will tell the story of how her blog became a vibrant part of her unusual, multi-faceted business model, and talk about the power of side projects and why we all need a crazy aunt in our lives.

Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer gone NYC and is often referred to as swissmiss, her popular “design blog”:http://www.swiss-miss.com/. Besides running swissmiss the blog, she organizes a monthly lecture/breakfast series called CreativeMornings, manages a “collaborative workspace”:http://studiomates.com/ in DUMBO, is the force behind the simple, browser-based to-do app called TeuxDeux and just recently launched Tattly, a design temporary tattoo shop

Dave Shea

Mezzoblue

Dave Shea is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential website csszengarden.com, and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005) with Molly Holzschlag.

By day he works on design projects of all types through Bright Creative, his one-man studio in Vancouver, Canada. He is fortunate to count among his clients New York University, Google, CNet, Joyent and others. He speaks internationally at conferences and workshops and was an organizer of the North American arm of a popular international conference series, Web Directions.

His recent extracurricular interests have included icon design, the Processing visual language, GPS tracking his road cycling trips, and brewing beer at home. Find Dave on Twitter as @mezzoblue

Kevin Systrom

Instagram

Kevin Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram, a photo sharing application for the iPhone. He also founded Burbn, an HTML5-based location sharing service.

Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. He was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google, the first working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products and the latter where he worked on the Corporate Development team.

Grablet Team

Grablet

Grablet® got its start when a husband and wife made a joyous addition to their family — a new iPad.

Along with their longtime friend John, the couple (Ryan and Shanna) immediately started brainstorming: How could they get a better experience from their iPad? Ryan, an IT pro, and John, a talent management exec, tossed ideas back and forth late into the night, while Shanna worked at her freelance design practice. Eventually, the best ideas coalesced into The Grablet.

Exactly what is The Grablet? In short, it lets you use your iPad in ways you couldn’t before. Learn how to get a handle on your iPad… come visit the Grablet booth and try it for yourself!

Nick Walsh

Envy Labs

Nick speaks like a Rubyist but thinks like a designer, serving as a front-end developer and occasional designer at Envy Labs, a Rails consultancy in Orlando, FL. In addition to working on mobile and web-based applications for clients like Caterpillar, he is a substantial contributor to the interactive training startup Code School and the newly relaunched Try Ruby.

When not arranging pixels, Nick can be found planning his upcoming wedding and training up to take on the office ping pong prodigies.

Aaron Weyenberg

TED

Aaron Weyenberg is the UX Lead at TED in New York. Over the last 13 years Aaron has served in key roles at a range of companies, from small design agencies to fledgling startups to internationally recognized media brands. As an Art Director for ESPN, Aaron guided best practices, developed core UI components and designed pioneering real time game and scoring apps. His work appears in places like Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions and Tripwire Magazine.

His offline hobbies involve learning about social psychology and human behavior, photography, reading, and an intrepid quest to find the perfect iPod earphones.

Tim Wright

CSS Karma

Tim is an Interface Designer at Boston University,
blogger, mobile junky, conversationalist and a delight
to have at any dinner table. He has helped bolster
the local Web communities of cities such as Raleigh,
Boston, and Los Angeles over the past 7 years through
meetups, articles, debates, and even the occasional soap
box on a street corner.

Questioning the status quo is what drives Tim. Asking
“why” and always looking for ways to improve even the
smallest element of the Web the move in a direction that
not only benefits overall user experience but even the
experience of the folks who build it.

Tim has also written for the likes of Smashing Magazine &
SitePoint while maintaining his blog on csskarma.com and
tweeting like a madman @csskarma