In Control 2009 > Web Design Workshop Conference >

The Speakers

A great line-up of 10 internationally recognized educators and industry leaders...

Daniel is the creative director at Digg and a co-founder of silverorange. At silverorange, Daniel worked with a wide range of clients including Mozilla, Ning, Revision3, and Sloan. He's since been lured to San Francisco after Kevin Rose dangled the prospect of In 'N Out burgers and the opportunity to develop the user experience for the social news website Digg.

As Digg's creative director, Daniel has helped the site grow from a niche technology news site into one of the leading media services on the web with a massive and passionate community. Daniel was also the designer and one of the co-founders of the social networking service Pownce, which was acquired by SixApart in 2008.

Christopher Schmitt is the founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm. An award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993, Christopher interned for both David Siegel and Lynda Weinman in the mid-90s while he was an undergraduate at Florida State University working on a fine arts degree with an emphasis on graphic design. Afterward, he earned a master's in communication for Interactive and New Communication Technologies while obtaining a graduate certificate in project management from FSU's College of Communication.

In 2000, he led a team to victory in the Cool Site in a Day competition, where he and five other talented developers built a fully functional, well-designed Web site for a nonprofit organization in eight hours.

Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook, Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web, and Web Reference. At conferences such as Web Visions, Voices that Matter and SXSW, Christopher has given talks demonstrating the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is the list moderator for Babble, a mailing list community devoted to advanced Web design and development topics.

On his personal Web site, christopherschmitt.com, Christopher shows his true colors and most recent activities. He is 6'7" and does not play professional basketball but wouldn't mind a good game of chess because, quite frankly, he's not good at that either.

Kimberly Blessing is a a Web developer, standards evangelist, and technical leader. She has been building Web sites since 1994 and managing style guides and internal standards for large companies since 2000.

Currently the Senior Manager of Web Development at Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia, Kimberly has led Web Development teams and managed standards at both PayPal and America Online (AOL). She is a member of the Web Standards Project, a grass-roots organization that advocates standards-compliance and use to browser manufacturers and developers alike.

Kimberly is also an advocate for increasing the number of women in computing and technology fields, a passion she pursues by teaching Computer Science part-time at Bryn Mawr College, her alma mater. In her free time, Kimberly attempts to maintain a blog and a life.

After getting hooked on the web in 1996 and spending several years pushing pixels and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, Aaron Gustafson founded his own web consultancy: Easy! Designs LLC.

Aaron is a Group Manager of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and is a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS). He serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart and has built a small library of writing and editing credits in both the print and Web worlds. Aaron has graced the stage at numerous conferences and is frequently called on to provide web standards training in both the public and private sector.

Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She is the former Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and an invited expert to the HTML and CSS working groups at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Via each of these roles, Molly works to educate designers and developers on using Web technologies in practical ways to create highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community.

Among her thirty-plus books is the The Zen of CSS Design, co-authored with Dave Shea. The book artfully showcases the most progressive csszengarden.com designs. A popular and colorful individual, Molly has a particular passion for people, blogs, and the use of technology for social progress.

Ethan Marcotte is a respected standards authority who hails from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a senior designer at Airbag Industries, a design consultancy that has enjoyed working with such clients as the Sundance Film Festival, New York Magazine, and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Ethan was a contributing writer to Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design and Web Standards Creativity, and is a much sought-after technical editor. He spends entirely too much time working and learning online, and would like to be an unstoppable robot ninja when he grows up.

Beep.

Juliette Melton is a user experience researcher from San Francisco, CA, where she spends her days at a brain-training game startup called Lumos Labs. She studies and advocates balanced approaches to building products based on understanding user preferences and organizational realities.

Julie has been building sites since 1997 and has been a web professional since 2000. She has worked on web projects in higher education, public health, and publishing, but is now really enjoying playing games every day.

Greg Rewis is the Group Manager, Creative Solutions Evangelism at Adobe Systems. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at trade shows and seminars, speaking at industry conferences, and leading specialized, advanced training sessions featuring Adobe’s Web Tools product line. Greg has been passionate about the web since putting his first “home page” online in 1994. His career has taken him around the world, from the early days of desktop publishing, to a start-up in Hamburg, Germany, the glory days of the web at Macromedia and finally his current role at Adobe. The original GoLive Cyberstudio Product Manager and former Dreamweaver Technical Product Manager, Greg is the co-author of “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4″ published by New Riders.

When not on-the-road, Greg spends his time with his MacBook Pro on his lap, hanging out with his co-author and fiance Stephanie Sullivan, playing the guitar or killing his two sons in “Call Of Duty” on the Playstation 3.

Stephanie Sullivan, founder and principal of W3Conversions, has been a web professional since 1999. A sought-after speaker, tech editor, corporate trainer, author, and coding guru, she's called on to solve especially perplexing problems for high-profile websites. Her true passion is creating impeccable markup and code behind the design, and teaching others how to do the same. Stephanie is available for in-house, customized corporate training.

Stephanie is a leader in the web industry who inspires others to strive for higher standards in their work. She serves as co-lead of the influential Web Standards Project (WaSP) Adobe Task Force, sits on the International Advisory Board for the Web Developer’s and Designer’s Journal, is an Adobe Community Expert, and is a partner at Community MX, a site offering over 2,900 tutorials to web developers seeking to increase their skills.

A tireless advocate of web community education, she is “List Mom” for the long-running WebWeavers discussion list for professional web designers, and a moderator of the search engine marketing discussion group SEM 2.0. She answers questions almost daily in the forums at Community MX where she also writes a widely-read blog.

Although she loves making websites fast-loading and lean, she loves beach volleyball even more. She tears herself away from the little people in her computer at least three times a week to get sandy or play Squash. Stephanie headquarters her business in the desert of Phoenix, AZ, where she lives with her youngest teenaged son, two semi-sons and her fiance, Greg Rewis. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Mark Trammell is User Experience Architect at Digg in San Francisco. His work on the Web spans more than a decade including coauthoring two books on Web standards and tenures with the United States Navy, the University of Florida, the Web Standards Project Educational Task Force, and PayPal. While leading a standards-based rebuilding of the University of Florida Web presence, he started an extensive user research program including tests throughout Florida and taught user-centered design. Mark now leads user research at Digg.