Speakers
Want to learn shiny new things about front-end and design? Our friendly, knowledgeable and approachable speakers will help and inspire you. You’ll also have time to ask all your questions!
We will announce our first speakers and workshop teachers soon! Our speakers and workshop teachers are the best in their fields, and they love to share what they know, how they work and what drives them. On top of that, they are all smashingly nice, and really want to help!
Our speakers show how they work — their setup, techniques and shortcuts for getting work done in live interactive sessions. So expect everything from refactoring and debugging to sketching and redesign, live.
Luke Wroblewski
Luke is currently a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier he was a Product Director at Google after it acquired Polar in 2014 where he was the CEO and Co-founder. Before founding Polar, Luke was the Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Bagcheck which was acquired by Twitter in 2011.
Luke is also the author of three popular Web design books (Mobile First, Web Form Design & Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability) and worked as the Chief Design Architect (VP) at Yahoo!, Lead User Interface Designer at eBay, and Senior Interface Designer at NCSA: the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.
- Talk
- How AI Ate My Website
- On the web
- https://www.lukew.com
Claudio Guglieri
Claudio Guglieri Is The Head Of Design At Opal Camera, The Makers Of The Opal C1, The First Professional Webcam. He lives in San Francisco and his past experiences include working for agencies like Huge, Elephant, B-Reel and Fantasy as well as in-house teams at Lonely Planet, Oculus and Microsoft to name a few, where he led the visual direction of Fluent Design, their current design language. Claudio has extensive experience working across all spectrums of product design, marketing and leading multidisciplinary teams.
Claudio cares deeply about interactive design, emotional experiences and helping others to achieve more through his work. Over the years his work has been awarded by the Emmy Awards (digital product design Nickelodeon App), the One Show Interactive, and the European Design Awards among others.
Claudio’s contribution to the design industry includes inspirational talks at events such as TEDx, UXWeek by Capital One, AIGA, OFFF events and Awwwards!
- Talk
- Trends To Live and Die For
- On the web
- https://guglieri.com
Kat Zhou
Kat (she/her) is the creator of the <Design Ethically> project, which started out as a framework for applying ethics to the design process and has now grown into a toolkit of speculative activities that help teams forecast the consequences of their products. Through her work with <Design Ethically> , she has spoken at events hosted by the European Parliament (2022) and the US Federal Trade Commission (2021), as well as an assortment of tech conferences. Kat has been quoted in the BBC, WIRED, Fast Company, Protocol, and Tech Policy Press.
Outside of <Design Ethically>, Kat has worked as a designer in the industry for years. She lives in Stockholm with her adopted husky, where you can find them running around.
Brad Frost
Brad Frost is a design system consultant, front-end developer, speaker, writer, musician, and artist located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. As a principal and design system consultant at Big Medium, he helps teams establish and evolve design systems, establish more collaborative workflows, and create better software together. He is the author of the book Atomic Design, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems. He co-hosted the Style Guides Podcast and has helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, Style Guide Guide, This Is Responsive, Death to Bullshit, and more.
- Talk
- Is Atomic Design Dead?
- On the web
- http://bradfrost.com
Chiara Aliotta
An award-winning designer, Chiara Aliotta is the founder of Until Sunday, a creative agency that encapsulates her obsession with colour, typography, and detail. Chiara wears many creative ‘hats’, with years of experience as a graphic designer, art director, and brand consultant under her belt. Not only does she write and speak regularly about design-led storytelling, she has also directed impactful visual brand development for renowned global organisations.
Whether she’s creating an immersive digital journey or a compelling design for print, Chiara’s ideas are characterised by the enduring power of storytelling. She skilfully combines her deep understanding of classic tales, with an instinctive sense of what makes a story memorable, to create user experiences that pack an emotional punch.
Born in Italy, Chiara now resides on the beautiful island of Syros with her husband, with whom she co-runs an art gallery and a personal lifestyle project, The Pattern Tales.
And because at Smashing Magazine, cats are the protagonists… Her beloved cat Kissa provides inspiration… and the occasional cuddle!- Talk
- Back FOR the Future
- On the web
- http://untilsunday.it
Oliver Schöndorfer
Oliver Schöndorfer is a UI & app designer from Austria. He's not an UX ninja unicorn rockstar, but he's hopelessly in love with everything type, runs a UI design business and does typographic consulting for international clients. Oliver’s vision is to make the world more beautiful and diverse through typography. To share his knowledge and passion, he launched the YouTube channel Pimp my Type, offers online courses, and gives workshops.
Oliver also runs the weekly Font Friday Newsletter, writes articles, speaks at conferences and podcast, to make the world more readable, one paragraph at at time.
Molly Hellmuth
Molly is a design nerd who’s been sharing her knowledge about Figma for quite some time. She created uiprep.com, a design system UI kit for Figma. And teaches individuals and teams in her course, Design System Bootcamp.
- Talk
- Design System Traps & Pitfalls
- On the web
- https://www.uiprep.com/
Fabricio Teixeira
Fabricio Teixeira is a designer based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a design partner at digital product agency Work & Co, and the founder of design publications UX Collective and DOC. Fabricio has been shipping digital products for the last 18 years, for brands like Google, Samsung, Mailchimp, Equinox, Vistaprint, and several others. Member of the Awwwards jury, IxDA jury, Adobe Design Circle, and AdCouncil UX Committee. Big believer in user-centered design and knowledge sharing. He’s not verified on Twitter.
- Talk
- It’s a Marathon, and a Sprint
- On the web
- https://fabricio.work
Christine Vallaure
Christine Vallaure is the founder of moonlearning.io, a UX, UI Design, and Figma learning platform where design meets code.
With years of experience working for leading brands, agencies, and startups across Berlin, Mexico City, and London, she is now based in sunny Madrid.
Christine is passionate about sharing her expertise in web and app design, particularly in the areas where design and technology intersect.
In addition to creating video tutorials on moonlearning and YouTube, Christine also writes about design and code on her Medium blog, and Twitter, providing insights into the latest developments in the industry.
- Talk
- Design Beyond Breakpoints
- On the web
- https://www.moonlearning.io
Nick DiLallo
Nick DiLallo is a writer based in Brooklyn. He specializes in helping companies integrate writing with design to launch great brands and digital products. His approach blends copywriting with UX writing, and he's written extensively about the way good writing can help make the internet better for everyone.
In his career, he's worked at top digital agencies like Huge and Work & Co. And he's worked with some of the world's most admired companies, including Apple, Etsy, IKEA, the MTA, and Planned Parenthood.
Stéphanie Walter
Stéphanie is a User Researcher and Inclusive Designer who focuses on building user-centered, inclusive and accessible products and services. She spent the last 12+ years helping her clients deliver successful projects in different industries (banking, financial, automotive, healthcare, press, travel, etc.)
She likes to share her passion for her UX work all around the world. She has taken this beyond her successful blog, conferences and workshops. She discusses a wide range of topics, including mobile UX, enterprise UX, cognitive biases, inclusive design, design process and designer — developer relationship. You can follow her on social media for qualitative curated UX design content.
- Talk
- A Journey in Enterprise UX
- On the web
- https://stephaniewalter.design
Mystery Speaker
Obviously, our Mystery Speaker is a bit of a… well, Mystery. In true smashing style, you can expect something wonderful. Make sure to set your alarm on day two of the conference, because you don't want to miss this.
Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems.
- On the web
- https://smashingmagazine.com
