Leo Arroyo

Leo Arroyo wasn't always an accomplished Senior Designer at Chopping Block in New York City. Once long ago he was a graphic design student at the University of Florida where he was known by classmates for procrastinating and challenging project parameters. Professors knew him for the pure gold in his concepts and design so sweet, a professor was once said to have dipped the corner of a process book in their morning coffee. Crazy, right? Leo's design talent earned him a degree and a few open doors with big name clients throughout the years. Since moving to NYC five years ago he has done web design, animation, storyboarding for music videos, branding and UI design. His more memorable portfolio pieces include work for MTV, Adobe, They Might Be Giants, Phish, HBO, Guitar World and Oxygen Network.

Chris Converse

A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology with a BFA in graphic design, Chris has evolved into a multimedia designer and developer in the Philadelphia area over the past fifteen years, and has worked in the mediums of print, CD-ROM, websites, animation, DVDs, photography, and package design. Chris brings real world project experience to the conference arena. His expertise in Adobe's Creative Suite, is showcased through work-flows and the integration of the tools to get the job done and your meet deadlines. Chris designs and maintains the InDesign User Group and Acrobat Users websites for Adobe Systems, as well as advertisements for Adobe for placement in the creative pro's publication,InDesign Magazine. His portfolio includes work for international pharmaceutical companies, ivy-league academia, as national consumer brands including Nexium, Campbell's Soup, Pepperidge Farms, Tylenol, and Motrin. See examples, watch videos, interact with his work at http://chrisconverse.com.

Jeff Croft

Jeff has been working on the web for over 12 years. He began his career as a web designer in 1995, using SimpleText on Macintosh System 7 and Netscape 1.1N as his development environment. Since then, he has worked in several industries, bringing modern web design and development to places where you don’t always find it, including education and journalism. Beyond his work for Blue Flavor, Jeff is a blogger, author, speaker, critic, and industry thought leader. Prior to joining Blue Flavor, Jeff was a Senior Designer at World Online, an online journalism outfit responsible for a host of award-winning websites and the place of origin for Django, the Python-based open-source web application framework. He has recently co-authored two books, Pro CSS Techniques, published by Apress, and Web Standards Creativity, published by Friends of ED.

Tim Frick

Chicago, IL

Tim Frick has provided creative media services to an extensive client list since the early 1990s. His work has received design, video and interactive awards and has appeared in many publications, web sites, and television broadcasts as well as at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Tim's company Mightybytes has been creating design-driven media solutions for a wide variety of corporate, education, arts, and not-for-profit clients since 1998. He was an instructor for several years in Columbia College Chicago’s interactive media department and has been teaching classes for Ascend Training on various design, animation and interactive topics since 1998. He has held positions on the board of the Association for Multimedia Communications (AMC), as well as on advisory committees for the Illinois Institute of Art's Animation and Interactive Media Departments and the Interactive Media Departments of Columbia College Chicago and Westwood College. Tim is also the author of Managing Interactive Media Projects from Cengage Learning (formerly Thomson-Delmar Learning).

Carole Guevin

Carole is an experienced communication designer, new media pioneer, theorist, philosopher and founding partner of Feed Your Eyes creative continnum, the publisher of Netdiver digital culture magazine. Internationally recognized driving force and unrelenting industry evangelist, activist and catalyst through her work as editor, she champions the LUV of design worldwide, online and beyond. Seeked to judge international design competitions, she has served on the Adobe Design Achievement Award, HOW interactive, AIGA, BuBu and SXSW juries and many others. Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, incl෭ Netdiver as part of his TED University session 100 Websites You Should Know and Use and Vitaly Friedman, chief editor of Smashing Magazine, named Netdiver as one of the 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read.

Molly Holzschlag

Molly E. Holzschlag (www.molly.com) is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She is Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and an invited expert to the HTML and GEO 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.

Christopher Schmitt

Christopher Schmitt is the founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm, based in Cincinnati, OH. 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 90's while he was an undergraduate at Florida State University working on a Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Graphic Design. Afterwards, he earned a Masters in Communication for Interactive and New Communication Technologies while obtaining a graduate certificate in Project Management from FSU's College of Communication.
He is the author of CSS Cookbook, which was named Best Web Design Book of 2006, and one of the first books that looked at CSS-enabled designs, Designing CSS Web Pages (New Riders). He is also the co-author of Adapting to Web Standards (New Riders), Professional CSS (Wrox), Photoshop in 10 Steps or Less (Wiley) and Dreamweaver Design Projects (glasshaus) and contributed four chapters to XML, HTML, and XHTML Magic (New Riders). Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web and Web Reference.
He is the list moderator for Babble, a mailing list community devoted to advanced web design and development topics. With the Web Standards Project, Christopher helps co-lead the Adobe Task Force while contributing to its Education Task Force.
On his personal web site, Christopher shows his true colors and most recent activities. He is 6’7” and doesn’t play professional basketball but wouldn’t mind a good game of chess.

Jean-François Simard

Jean-François Simard (aka JF) is a brilliant multi-tasker whose creative code styling backend makes Netdiver and other projects run smoothly. Sharp, critical, opiniated and single-minded, he acts as the resident assistant art director when needed. He is a talented musician and passionate about the future of interactivity and making things happen. One of his projects was published in Yoko Arisaka wonderful book which covered in-depth tutorials about CSS layout named “Stylesheet Stylebook”. Available in Japanese only. He is the geek-head around the studio.

Daniel Schutzsmith

Daniel Schutzsmith is a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, teaching several web design and business of design related courses. Daniel also teaches several online courses for Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont focusing on Social Networking and Online Visibility. When not teaching he acts as the Principal and Chief Designerd for DSGN DVLP, an interactive design studio creating websites that are beautiful, fun to use, and easy to update with a no fluff attitude.
He also shares his passion for the craft with other industry professionals through his bi-monthly article on the Business of Design for Dynamic Graphics magazine and has spoken at several conferences on best business practices for designers and the importance of Online Visibility for educators.
In his free time he enjoys playing with his son, wandering the streets of NYC, and dreaming under his pear tree in rural upstate NY.

Colin Smith

Colin Smith is a best-selling author, trainer, and award-winning new-media designer who has caused a stir in the design community with his stunning photorealistic illustrations composed entirely in Photoshop. He is founder of the world's most popular Photoshop resource site, PhotoshopCAFE.com. He is a regular columnist for Photoshop User magazine, PlanetPhotoshop.com, and the official site of the National Association for Photoshop Professionals. He has authored or co-authored more than fifteen books on Photoshop, including the best-selling How to Do Everything with Photoshop CS and CS2 and award-winning Photoshop Most Wanted: Effects and Design Tips. Colin is also creator of the Photoshop Secrets Video training series (PhotoshopCD.com). You can see more of Colin's portfolio at pixeloverload.com.

Geoff Stearns

Geoff Stearns is a Flash Engineer at YouTube and the author of SWFObject, a Flash Plugin detection and embedding script that has become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash content. Before joining Google, Geoff worked on web projects for Adobe, MTV, New York 's MoMA, XM Radio, Comcast, Sony Pictures Classics and taught front end web development at The Cooper Union in New York. Geoff also maintains a personal blog at blog.deconcept.com.

Drew Trujillo, aka Dr. Woohoo

Dr. Woohoo (translation: Serious Fun), is a New Mexico based artist, designer and developer creating work for a wide range of clients. Working with digital media since 1993, Woohoo's artwork is available at drwoohoo.com. His personal projects include the web version of In The Mod: Color Analytics ITM , a site which analyzes, finds relationships between and includes downloadable color palettes of (in)famous paintings. In addition, Woohoo has mashed up Flickr and In The Mod into an AIR application that runs within Adobe Illustrator, making it easier for you to find and save beautiful color palettes directly into AI. Woohoo regularly posts new examples of custom AIR applications that he's creating to drive and enhance Photoshop, Illustrator, Bridge and After Effects at Woohoo has won over 50 awards including Communication Arts Interactive award for self-promotion. Image copyright, Monica Hoover, 2008.