8:00am – Registration Opens

9:00am – Introduction

9:15am – 10:00am

Responsive People

with Faruk Ates

Holistic Web Design As The Craft Matures

The World Wide Web turned 21. Our craft has become more complex and comprehensive than ever before. The average team building a decent-sized web product now spreads across many different disciplines. What are the common challenges we face, and how can we make sure everyone “speaks the same language” in such a fragmented yet interconnected work environment?

Faruk Ateş is a designer, developer and entreprenerd. He started his career building Content Management Systems at a small firm in The Netherlands, and then went on to Apple in Cupertino where he worked on the Online Store and MobileMe. After that, Faruk was the Product Designer for Apture in San Francisco, until they got acquired by Google and he left to build his own startup. With some luck, Faruk may yet publish his first Science Fiction novella this year. @kurafire | www

10:00am – 10:45am

Little Big Systems

with Erin Kissane

Embiggening the Magic of Craft

It’s really easy to understand the lure of small, artisanal projects that we can polish to a satin finish: they offer a sense of craftsmanship, a human scale for our work, and the chance to get something really *right*. But larger projects and bigger systems can often feel soulless and unsatisfying, even when we’re excited by the causes and ideas behind them. So is there a way to work on an ambitious scale without losing the purpose and handcraftedness that makes more intimate gigs so much fun? (Hint: yes.)

Via the craft of content strategy and its intertwinglements with design and code, this talk follows the connections between making small-scale, handcrafted artifacts and designing big, juicy systems (editorial and otherwise) that encourage both liveliness and excellence.

Erin Kissane is a reader, writer, editor, and content strategist based in Brooklyn. She is the author of The Elements of Content Strategy (A Book Apart, 2011), a handbook for everyone faced with the task of creating and managing big batches of useful content for real people. Erin leads projects for Brain Traffic, the consultancy behind Confab: The Content Strategy Conference. She was formerly editor of A List Apart magazine and editorial director at web agency Happy Cog Studios in New York. As co-founder of Contents, a new magazine about content and online publishing, she seeks to bridge gaps and strengthen connections between communicators and information-slingers from all over the content/publishing world. When she isn’t doing those things, she cooks with exuberance, shakes cocktails, and reads to excess. @kissane | www

30 Minute Break

11:15am – 12:00pm

Switch: From Freelancer to Entrepreneur without Agency-ing*

with Matthew Smith & Jamin Jantz

How to run a flexible team approach through co-working and resource allocation

Why do designers live under the tyranny of the dichotomy that they must either stay a one man show or become a full scale shop? It doesn’t have to be this way, and in fact these old models have stifled the way our industry thinks and works. We’ll show you how a flexible model of allocating a team based on a project can be an amazing selling point to your clients and put you in a position to make a lot more money on every hour. But if you hate money, and the beer you will have with your extra time, you should probably go somewhere else.

* Agency-ing definition — a crippling mental illness affecting independent web professionals where they think they must build a large agency with a huge payroll, big rents and tons of overhead in order to be successful.

Matthew Smith is the Creative Director at Zaarly and Jamin Jantz is Zaarly’s Project Manager. In their life before Zaarly (LBZ), they ran Squared Eye. They both life in Greenville, SC and continue to work on side projects together, including Matthew’s invention, PatternTap, LifeinGreenville and CoWork Greenville. Their business partnership is the result of a shared passion for quality and craftsmanship in business and design. @zaarly | www

12:00pm – 12:45pm

Lettering for a Living

with Jessica Hische

Embrace Your Speciality

Jessica Hische does a lot of things, but the thing she does best by far is draw letters. In her pep-rally of a talk, learn why it’s important to appreciate niche industries, and why all type designers deserve a hug.

Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, type nerd, and secret web designer best known for her personal projects, obsession with cats, and occasional foul mouth. She currently serves on the Type Directors Club board of directors, has been named a Forbes Magazine “30 under 30” in art and design as well as an ADC Young Gun and one of Print Magazine’s “New Visual Artists”. She’s been lucky to work for amazing clients like Wes Anderson, McSweeney’s, Penguin, Target, and Tiffany & Co. @jessicahische | www

1 Hour Lunch

1:45pm – 2:30pm

Why CSS Preprocessors Matter

with Jina Bolton

Maintainable CSS workflow with Sass or Less

Whether you’re working alone or on a large team, having a solid CSS architecture is incredibly rewarding and essential for good development, design, and business. As continuous integration gains traction in today’s web application development workflows, living style guides and CSS preprocessors like Sass & Less help keep everything in check. Learn how CSS preprocessors can enable you to create smarter, forward-thinking maintainable web interfaces.

Jina Bolton enjoys creating beautiful user experiences with visual interaction design and style guide-driven CSS development (preferably with the SCSS flavored syntax of CSS). She has previously worked at rad companies including Apple, GitHub, Engine Yard, and Crush + Lovely. Jina has cowritten Fancy Form Design and The Art & Science of CSS. She has also created the coffee art gallery, Art in My Coffee. @jina| www

2:30pm – 3:15pm

Unbelieveable eCommerce

with Paul Boag

How a client and web designer came together to increase ecommerce sales on one site by 10,000% in 5 years.

Many believe the secret to a successful ecommerce site is to copy Amazon. However, that rarely works. Your website is not Amazon. Instead it has a unique offering that caters to a specific audience. Once you realize your uniqueness you can achieve unbelievable things. In his talk Paul explains how he took one ecommerce website from relatively successful beginnings to unbelievable heights. In only 5 years he and the team at Headscape increased sales on the site by a staggering 10,000%. What makes the story even more unbelievable is that the average customer is over 80 years old! This one example will act as a case study that guides you towards better understanding your audience and growing your online sales significantly.

Paul Boag has been working with the web since 1994. He is now co-founder of the web design agency Headscape based in the UK, where he works closely with clients to establish their web strategy. Paul is a prolific writer having written the Website Owners Manual, Building Websites for Return on Investment and numerous articles for publications such as .Net Magazine, Smashing Magazine and the Web Designer’s Depot. Paul also speaks extensively on various aspects of web design both at conferences across the world and on his award winning web design podcast Boagworld. Paul likes to pretend he has a life but actually just suffers from an unhealthy obsession with Twitter. @boagworld | www

30 Minute Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

Revert to Type

with Jon Tan

Making web type work with a solid grounding in the technical aspects of web fonts, and typesetting for impact or immersion

This talks will plunge into the how and why of web fonts. Web design has always been part information design, part advertising, and part magic. With a little knowledge of how web type works technically, and a smattering of tips on how typography works cognitively, anyone can set type for the screen that is functional, beautiful, and magical, and that’s what this talk aims to help you do.

Jon Tan co-founded the webfonts service Fontdeck. He is part of Analog, a co-operative of friends working on a new app called Mapalong, an event called Brooklyn Beta, and a co-working studio called Mild Bunch HQ. His addiction to web typography has led him to start co-writing a book on the subject. He also writes for publications like 8 Faces and The Manual, speaks at events like An Event Apart, and works with such organizations as the BBC. @jontangerine | www

4:30pm – 5:15pm

The Burden of Creativity

with Cameron Moll

An analysis of mankind's ability to create, why it's so challenging, and how to make it a little less burdensome

Humans have been endowed with the ability to create; it’s an innate desire. But it’s one of the most challenging things we do, especially as web professionals, as it challenges us mentally, technically, and certainly emotionally. Cameron will analyze the history and fundamentals of creativity, address the creative burdens he’s wrestled with over the course of his career, and share some ideas to make it less challenging and more rewarding.

Cameron Moll is a designer, speaker, author, husband, and father living in the coastal town of Sarasota, Florida. His work or advice has been featured by Forrester Research, Communication Arts magazine, HOW magazine, Print magazine, National Public Radio (NPR), and many others. He’s the founder of Authentic Jobs, a targeted destination for web professionals and the companies seeking to hire them. He’s also the artist behind a unique series of letterpress type posters that re-imagine buildings as if constructed entirely of type. Cameron is a sucker for anything that involves his four sons and sports equipment. He’s also been known to spend a little too much time building, flying, and ultimately crashing R/C airplanes. @cameronmoll | www