DC Design Talks

Known for his entrepreneurial spirit, Alex, a senior consultant and co-founder of nclud, is a passionate advocate of standards based web design and creative design. He has been designing and developing websites since the late nineties. He is a designer and inspiration junkie.  In May 2004 he founded CSS Beauty, a website which purpose was to showcase beautiful websites created using Cascading Style Sheets. Since then CSS Beauty has become one of the top resources for standards based web design/development with endless resources, job listings, forum & contests. Throughout the years, Alex has worked with some very interesting clients including Nokia, AOL, Discovery, SallieMae, Marriott, Good Will and Wolftrap among others. Some of Alex’s work has been featured in popular magazines such as Practical Web Design, .net Magazine, and in books such as Web Design in a Nutshell and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

Erik is a local flash developer who would build his house in ActionScript if he could.  He has designed websites and built flash applications for some of the most exclusive resorts in the country.  Currently, he is working with Viget Labs, where he creates web and flash designs for many web startups, both in the DC area and nationwide.  While some of his work speaks to the contrary, Erik insists he is a minimalist when it comes to flash design.

Jackson Fox leads a double life, working as a UX Designer for Lulu.com in Raleigh, NC by day, and pursuing his PhD in Information Science at UNC Chapel Hill by night. His many interests include (but are not limited to) online identity, social software, personal information management, and wikis. A recovering computer scientist, Jackson has been building websites and obsessing over usability since 1997. He can be found at JacksonFox.org.

Jason Cranford Teague is the Director of Web Design for AOL Global Programming, overseeing the training of designers in using CSS and other core Web technologies. Before assuming that position, he worked as the Creative Director for the top youth culture Web site, AOL RED (beRED.com). He is also a member of the W3C’s CSS Working Group, the advisory board for Sessions.edu, and regularly contributes software reviews to Macworld Magazine. As if that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, he is the Internet Strategist for Yuri’s Night (yurisnight.net) the World Space Party and keeps a Web designer’s blog at webbedENVIRONMENTS.com. Jason writes books (mostly so he can remember how to do all of this stuff) including the best selling CSS, DHTML, and Ajax Visual Quick-start Guide (Peachpit Press). He lives in Reston, VA with 2 cats and 2 kids, but only the one wife.

Nathan Curtis is a founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC. Nathan has been practicing varied disciplines within user experience design since 1996, and areas of interest include information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development. Through EightShapes, Nathan has recently helped improve the design and documentation of the .com experiences at Comcast, Sun Microsystems, Discovery, National Geographic, Sprint Nextel, Cisco, and Marriott. 

Patrick Haney is not a sausage. He is however passionate about design and how it translates to the web. Currently a User Interface Designer at Harvard University, Patrick has also done work for Kodak, Xerox and the RIT Libraries while living in Rochester, NY, not too far from the Buffalo area he grew up in. When he’s not collecting design inspiration, creating new things or practicing web standards, he can be found rummaging around Boston looking for a good chicken wing.

Rob Goodlatte is an award-winning interactive designer and developer.  Currently an undergraduate at Duke, his short design career has included work for Disney, Microsoft, and Stanford University. After graduation, he will be joining Facebook as a product designer.  Rob writes regularly on design at RobGoodlatte.com.

Samantha Warren in an enthusiastic Web Designer at Viget labs. She is deeply involved in a passionate love affair with Typography and has a nagging obsession with the many variations of the letter “R”. After years of evangelizing Gill Sans she recently took a turn for the dark side after overdosing on too many Wes Anderson movie intros and rediscovered the world of Futura. Not limiting her typographic compulsion to pointing out fonts on metro signs, television commercials, and common household products she strives to shed light on the uses of great typography on the Web. A graduate of the design program at James Madison University, Samantha has since merged her passion for design and the web to help launch creative web experiences for brands such as Quaker, Dupont, Ford and the United States Army.

Thomas Vander Wal has a broad and deep background (nearly 20 years) in information technology and web design and development. In 2004 he coined the term Folksonomy and is currently researching, advising those developing and implementing tagging systems, and social web services. He is principal at InfoCloud Solutions, Inc., a social web analysis, consulting, and training firm based in Bethesda, MD.