Confirmed Speakers
Jina Bolton
Jina Bolton is a designer and artist, working and residing in Silicon Valley. She is excited to be involved with the CSS Eleven, where she is "committed to helping the W3C's CSS Working Group to better deliver the tools that are needed to design tomorrow's web".
Jina has spoken at conferences (including Future of Web Design New York 2007 and An Event Apart San Francisco 2007), and is a co-author of The Art & Science of CSS. In addition to being featured in CSS Professional Style and Web Designing magazine, Jina has also written articles for publications including SitePointand Vitamin (of which she is an advisory board member).
Jina has consulted for various agencies and organizations including the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and Mass.gov. She holds a BFA in Computer Arts and Graphic Design from Memphis College of Art, and is an active member of AIGA (San Francisco chapter). Jina enjoys traveling, is learning Italian, and considers herself a sushi-enthusiast. Her website can be found at Sushi & Robots.
Daniel Burka
Daniel Burka is the creative director at Digg and is one of three cofounders of Pownce. He is also one of the founders of the Canadian company silverorange where he worked on various projects including branding and user interface design for Mozilla.
At Digg, Daniel works with Kevin Rose to evolve concepts into a cohesive user experience. Enabling the site's vibrant user community to participate on the site is a constant challenge as the site grows and changes. Daniel also designs the user experience for Pownce and works with Leah Culver and Kevin on feature development.
Andy Budd
Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft, Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers online experience.
Andy is a regular speaker at events such as SXSW, and helped organise d.Construct, the first "web apps" conference in the UK. Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions and blogs at andybudd.com.
Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.
Andy Clarke
Andy Clarke is a visual web designer based in the UK. He started his one-man design firm Stuff and Nonsense (http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk) in 1998. His clients include national and international businesses, charities, and government bodies.
Andy is an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group and regularly speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide, educating web designers on how to create beautiful, accessible websites. He is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (New Riders Press).
Hannah Donovan
Hannah Donovan has been the Creative Director at Last.fm since 2006. Originally from Canada's icy north, Hannah obtained a Bachelor of Design from the University of Alberta where she cut her teeth on the web instead of going outside. Since then she's worked on everything from chocolate bar wrappers to wireframes. When she's not immersed in design, Hannah draws monsters.
Paul Farnell
Paul Farnell is the founder of Litmus - a compatibility testing service - where he works with Matt Brindley and David Smalley. Paul also founded Salted, a small web design firm with a focus on blog design.
Paul first started working with the web in 1997 and has been facinated by it ever since. After started Salted and working with local business he moved on to user interfaces for web applications, working alongside David and Matt. In 2005 he founded SiteVista (later to become Litmus), and has more recently taken the leap from client work, and is solely focussing on his own projects.
Jon Hicks
Jon Hicks is one of the creative partnership Hicksdesign, based in Oxfordshire, UK. His professional life started as a natural history illustrator, but soon moved onto graphic design. Most widely known for the Firefox, Thunderbird and Miro icons, but Jon likes to design for both print and 'new-fangled media' as he calls it. He blogs from hicksdesign.co.uk about web standards, CSS, browsers and design, and dreams about cheese a lot.
Elliot Jay Stocks
Elliot Jay Stocks is Senior Designer at Carsonified, and as his involvement with the web and passion for design tends to blur the boundaries between work and play, he's extremely grateful that he gets paid to do stuff that he'd do for his own enjoyment.
As well as designing for both web and print, Elliot writes regularly for industry-leading publications such as .net magazine, speaks at conferences and events, and blogs profusely on elliotjaystocks.com and carsonified.com. His work is frequently featured in online and offline publications, showcased on various 'inspiration' websites, and used as an example of how accessible web design can still look beautiful.
Patrick McNeil
Patrick is a freelance web developer and the creator of Design Meltdown. His diverse interests have merged web technology and design, resulting in work that touches everything from high design to hard-core programming.
Ultimately his love for design, inspiration, and sharing knowledge has fueled his passion for running Design Meltdown where he has cataloged and observed web design trends over the last few years. Patrick is also a monthly writer for .Net magazine and has a book title The Web Designers Idea Book due out in mid 2008.
Larissa Meek
Larissa has over 7 years of experience designing for the web. She is a standards specialist and is extremely well versed in design trends and user experience. As a Sr. Art Director at AgencyNet, Larissa ensures the highest level of quality when it comes to fulfilling each project's creative objectives. She works hand in hand with clients, project managers and the creative team to produce exceptional results.
Larissa has played a key role in designing a number of award-winning AgencyNet projects including MOJOHD, Howard TV, Own Your C, Warner Brothers, Bacardi, and Oxygen Networks.
Additionally, she regularly blogs at LarissaMeek.com which serves as a platform for her creative ideas and personal ramblings.
Steve Pearce
Steve Pearce is Design Director at Poke. Poke is a creative company that makes interactive things for other companies. Steve is responsible for making sure that the things Poke makes look nice. He's passionate about great design. At all costs. He makes sure that the brands we're working for are getting the latest in cutting-edge design technique. They're paying the bills after all. End-users are generally an irrelevance. They'll normally catch up at some point in the future. But sometimes they won't, but that's their own stupid fault.
At least that's what a lot of people would like you to believe he thinks. The first bit of all that stuff is true. But in reality creating a good interactive experience is about understanding the needs of a brand AND how the good people will use their stuff. Steve has a shelf full of metal and glass for clients like, BBC, Topshop, Orange, Alexander McQueen, Jamie Oliver and Yahoo.
But more importantly his mum likes a lot of his work too.
Miguel Ripoll
Miguel Ripoll is the CEO and Creative Director of Cesser Digital, a Spanish web developing firm with a team of over 350 and 9 offices across the country.
His work is often featured in leading publications such as Communication Arts, Computer Arts, Internet Magazine, PC World, .Net Magazine, etc, and has been exhibited in museums in Madrid, Seville, Berlin, New York, Aleppo, Hannover, and other cities both in Spain and abroad. He has also designed the cover for this year's edition of the book The Web Design Index.
A prolific writer, lecturer and designer, Miguel has also produced exhibitions, installations, theatre sets and film titles, participated in seminars at a dozen universities and curated two major web design conferences in Spain. Recent projects include two acclaimed, award-winning sites for the University of California, Berkeley and Jrvelasco.
Conference Chair
Paul Boag
Paul Boag has been working on the web since 1993. He is a user experience consultant for Headscape Ltd (www.headscape.co.uk) a web design agency that he founded back in 2002.
He typically works on large institutional websites including government agencies, higher education institutions and heritage organisations.
Paul also produces and hosts the longest running and popular web design podcast at boagworld.com. He is regularly speaker at workshops and conferences and writes for various publications.