Speakers
Here’s the list of the big hitters stepping up to the plate for SmashingConf Toronto! Keep checking back for more exciting reveals and announcements, we’ll be covering all bases with this stellar line up.
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Gemma O’Brien
Gemma O’Brien is an Australian artist specialising in lettering, illustration and typography. After completing a Bachelor of Design at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, Gemma worked as an art director at Animal Logic, Fuel VFX and Toby and Pete before deciding to fly solo as a commercial illustrator in 2012. Her typographic work takes on a variety of forms, from calligraphic brushwork, illustration and digital type, to large scale hand-painted murals.
She splits her time between advertising commissions, gallery shows, speaking engagements and hosting hand-lettering workshops around the world. Her clients include Playboy Magazine, Nike, Adobe, Volcom Stone, Kirin, Heineken, QANTAS, and Angus & Julia Stone. A number of her projects have been recognised by the New York The Type Directors Club with Awards of Typographic Excellence and in 2015 she was recognised as an ADC Young Gun.
- Talk
- Beyond Fonts: Elevating Lettering to Art
- On the web
- http://www.gemmaobrien.com/
- On Twitter
- @mrseaves
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Lea Verou
Lea is currently busy researching how to make web programming easier at MIT CSAIL. She is the author of bestselling advanced CSS book CSS Secrets and has worked as a Developer Advocate at W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, and is one of the few Invited Experts in the CSS Working Group.
Lea has also started several popular open source projects and web applications, such as Mavo, Prism, and -prefix-free and maintains a technical blog at lea.verou.me. She holds a MSc in Computer Science from MIT. Despite her academic pursuits in Computer Science, Lea is one of the few misfits who love code and design equally.
- Talk
- CSS (Variable) Secrets
- On the web
- http://lea.verou.me
- On Twitter
- @LeaVerou
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Sara Soueidan
Sara is an award-winning freelance front-end Web developer and author from Lebanon. She runs workshops and helps companies and agencies build clean front-end (HTML5, SVG, CSS, JS) foundations for Web sites & applications, with strong focus on progressive enhancement, performance and accessibility.
- Talk
- From Icon Fonts To SVG: Workflow, Tools, Techniques And Everything In Between
- On the web
- http://sarasoueidan.com/
- On Twitter
- @SaraSoueidan
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Dan Mall
Dan Mall is a designer from Philadelphia, an enthralled husband and new dad, Founder & Design Director at SuperFriendly. He is the co-founder of Typedia, The Businessology Show, and swfIR. He was formerly Design Director at Big Spaceship, Interactive Director at Happy Cog and a technical editor for A List Apart.
Having worked with clients like Google, Lucasfilm, Microsoft, GE, Wrigley, The Mozilla Foundation, Thomson Reuters, and The Sherwin-Williams Company, he has a passion for playing matchmaker between surprising art direction and intuitive interaction design.
- Talk
- The First Minutes of Design
- On the web
- http://danielmall.com
- On Twitter
- @danielmall
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Yiying Lu
Yiying Lu is an award-winning bilingual artist, entrepreneur, and speaker with 10+ years of experience in Branding, Design & Cross-Cultural Creativity & Innovation Education. She was born in Shanghai China, educated in Sydney Australia & London UK, Yiying is currently based in San Francisco. Yiying was named a Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business, a "Top 10 Emerging Leader in Innovation" by Microsoft, and the first Shorty Awards winner in Design.
Her projects have been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, Forbes, The Atlantic, Fast Company, TIME, CNN, BBC and so on. She was the first artist to join IDEO Shanghai for its Creative in Residence program in China in 2017. Previously, Yiying was the Creative Director at 500 Startups, the world's most active venture capital firm and startup accelerator, where she provided creative user acquisition & branding strategies for hundreds of startups to improve their business.
- Talk
- Designing Across Cultures
- On the web
- http://www.yiyinglu.com/
- On Twitter
- @YiyingLu
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Marcy Sutton
Marcy Sutton works on web accessibility tools at Deque Systems, a company focused on digital equality. In 2016, O’Reilly gave Marcy a Web Platform Award for her work in accessibility. She loves co-leading the Accessibility Seattle meetup and is starting a code club for Girl Develop It Bellingham. When away from the keyboard, Marcy can be found hiking with her dog, riding a bicycle, or snowboarding.
- Talk
- Accessibility Audit (Live)
- On the web
- http://marcysutton.com
- On Twitter
- @marcysutton
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Sarah Drasner
Sarah is an award-winning Speaker, Sr Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and Staff Writer at CSS-Tricks. Sarah is also the co-founder of Web Animation Workshops, with Val Head. She’s the author of SVG Animations from O’Reilly and has given Frontend Masters workshops on Vue.js and Advanced SVG Animations. Sarah is formerly Manager of UX Design & Engineering at Trulia (Zillow). Sarah won CSS Dev Conf’s “Best of the Best Award” as well as “Best Code Wrangler” from CSS Design Awards.
- Talk
- Building an SVG Animation from Start to Finish
- On the web
- http://sarahdrasnerdesign.com
- On Twitter
- @sarah_edo
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Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker. She has written several web development books, including chapters for two Smashing Books and is an A List Apart columnist, writing about the business of web development. She also writes about business and technology on her own site at rachelandrew.co.uk. In addition to offering consultancy services through the company she founded in 2001 – edgeofmyseat.com – Rachel is also one of the developers of the content management system, Perch.
- Talk
- Pattern Library First: An Approach For Managing CSS
- On the web
- http://rachelandrew.co.uk
- On Twitter
- @rachelandrew
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Eva-Lotta Lamm
Eva-Lotta is a User Experience Designer and Illustrator. She grew up in Germany, worked in Paris and London for a few years before packing up her backpack and go travelling the world for 15 months. She has over 12 years of experience working on digital products as an in-house designer for Google, Skype, and Yahoo! as well as freelancing and consulting for various agencies and her own clients.
Besides her daytime mission of making the web a more understandable, usable and delightful place, she regularly takes sketchnotes at all sorts of talks and conferences and has self-published her notes in several books.
Eva-Lotta also teaches sketching and is interested in exploring the area of Visual Improvisation – looking at the parallels between sketching and improvisation to explore how some of the principles from her regular theatre improvisation practice can be used to inspire visual work.
- Talk
- You can sketch. (You might just not know it yet.)
- On the web
- http://evalotta.net
- On Twitter
- @evalottchen
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Joe Leech
Joe is the author of the book Psychology of Designers. A recovering neuroscientist, then a spell as a elementary school teacher, Joe started his UX career 14 years ago. He has worked with organisations like MoMA NYC, Raspberry Pi, Disney, eBay and Marriott.
Joe is also Series Editor of “Aspects of UX”, a series of books on UX from SitePoint.com
- Talk
- Applying Psychology And 13 Years Of UX To Get The Details Right And Leapfrog The Competition
- On the web
- http://mrjoe.uk/
- On Twitter
- @mrJoe
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Seb Lee-Delisle
Seb Lee-Delisle is a digital artist and speaker who uses computers to engage with people and inspire them.
As an artist, he likes to make interesting things from code that encourage interaction and playfulness from the public. Notable projects include Lunar Trails, featuring a 3m wide drawing machine, and PixelPyros, the Arts Council funded digital fireworks display that toured nationwide in 2013.
As a speaker he demystifies programming and explores its artistic possibilities. His presentations and workshops enable artists to overcome their fear of code and encourage programmers of all backgrounds to be more creative and imaginative.
His recent work Laser Light Synths won the 2016 Lumen Interactive Prize. He won 3 Microsoft awards in 2013, and he was Technical Director on Big and Small, the BBC project that won a BAFTA in 2009.
- Talk
- JavaScript Graphics and Animation (live)
- On the web
- http://seb.ly/
- On Twitter
- @seb_ly
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Nadieh Bremer
Nadieh Bremer is a graduated Astronomer, turned Data Scientist, turned Data Visualization Designer. After working for a consultancy & fintech company where she discovered her passion for the visualization of data, she's now working as a freelancing data visualization designer under the name "Visual Cinnamon". She focuses on uniquely crafted (interactive) data visualizations that both engage and enlighten its audience.
Ranging from companies as extensive as Google News Lab to small start-ups. From printed magazines such as Scientific American to an interactive experience for the Guardian to more promotionally focused artful visualizations for press releases, data-driven reports, and data art for in the office. As long as there's data that has a story to reveal.
- Talk
- Creating An Effective & Beautiful Data Visualization From Scratch
- On the web
- http://www.visualcinnamon.com/
- On Twitter
- @NadiehBremer
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Aaron Draplin
Aaron Draplin is a designer and founder of Draplin Design Co. (DDC), located in the mighty Pacific Northwest. The DDC has rolled up its sleeves on a number of projects related to print, identity, web development, and illustration. Priding itself on raftsmanship and quality, the DDC has made stuff for Field Notes, Esquire, Nike, Red Wing, Burton Snowboards, Ford Motor Co., Hughes Entertainment, and even the Obama Administration.
- Talk
- Things That Don't Have A Thing To Do With Graphic Design
- On the web
- http://ddcbook.com/
- On Twitter
- @draplin
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Tim Kadlec
Tim is a web developer living in northern Wisconsin with his wife and three daughters. He is very passionate about the Web and can frequently be found speaking about what he’s learned at a variety of Web conferences.
He wrote 'Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web' and was a contributing author for the Web Performance Daybook Volume 2.
- Talk
- Performance Audit (live)
- On the web
- http://timkadlec.com
- On Twitter
- @tkadlec
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The Mystery Speaker
Can you guess who is going to be the Mystery Speaker this time?
- Talk
- And So The Mystery Begins...
- On the web
- /assets/images/mystery-smashingconf.png
- On Twitter
- @...
