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!
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 rarely show slides: they show how they work — their setup, workflows and techniques for getting work done in live interactive sessions.
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Brad Frost
Brad Frost is a design system consultant, web designer & developer, speaker, writer, teacher, musician, and artist located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He helps people establish & evolve design systems, establish more collaborative workflows, and design & build 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, This Is Responsive, Death to Bullshit, and more.
- On the web
- http://bradfrost.com
- On LinkedIn
- bradfrost
- On Bluesky
- @bradfrost.com
- On Mastodon
- mastodon.social/@brad_frost
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Jessica Hische
Jessica Hische is a lettering artist and New York Times Best-selling author based in Oakland, California. She specializes in typographical work for logos, film, books, and other commercial applications.
Her clients include Wes Anderson, The United States Postal Service, Target, Hallmark, and Penguin Books and her work has been featured again and again in design and illustration annuals both in the US and internationally.
She’s been named a Print Magazine New Visual Artist (20 under 30), one of Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Design, an ADC Young Gun, a “Person to Watch” by GD USA, and an Adweek “Creative 100”.
- On the web
- https://www.jessicahische.is
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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.
- On the web
- https://www.lukew.com
- On LinkedIn
- lukew
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Josh W. Comeau
Josh started tinkering with HTML, CSS, and JS back in 2007, and never stopped. He's worked as a software developer for orgs like Khan Academy, DigitalOcean, and Gatsby. He's also taught web development fundamentals at Concordia Bootcamps.
In 2020, he went independent, creating online courses through his own custom platform, and is thrilled to have taught web development principles to more than 20,000 developers.
- On the web
- https://www.joshwcomeau.com/
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Samantha Gordashko
Sam is a Design Systems expert with a Design Tokens obsession.
As part of the Tokens Studio Team, she's made it her mission to flatten the learning curve for designers and engineers to adopt new technologies in the Design Systems space.
From life-or-death design to genetic testing for psychedelic-assisted therapy, Sam's career as a Design Team of One in tech innovation has given her a unique perspective on ways of working in small teams to build big things. She's known for sharing her pro tips and experiences as Sam I am Designs as a speaker, host of design systems events, and educational content creator.
- On the web
- https://bento.me/samiam
- On LinkedIn
- Sgordashko
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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.
- On the web
- https://nickdilallo.com/
- On LinkedIn
- nickdilallo
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Carie Fisher
Carie Fisher is an author, speaker, and developer with over 15 years of technical experience helping individuals and companies achieve their digital accessibility goals. Carie is the Senior Accessibility Program Manager at GitHub and is a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Computer Interactions at Iowa State University, focusing on XR technology.
She is passionate about the intersection of front-end code and UX, digital accessibility, and diversity in technology. She recently completed writing the evergreen accessibility course Learn Accessibility with Google’s web.dev team.
- On the web
- https://cariefisher.com
- On LinkedIn
- cariefisher
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Catt Small
Catt is a Staff Product Designer at Dropbox, game maker, and developer. She has worked with companies of all sizes including Asana, Etsy, SoundCloud, and Nasdaq. She started coding around the age of 10 and designing at the age of 15. She graduated from SVA with a BFA in Graphic Design in 2011 and later received an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU in 2016. Catt also makes awkward video games, writes about professional development, and draws artwork of all kinds.
Profile photo: Bermon Painter
- On the web
- https://cattsmall.com/
- On LinkedIn
- cattsmall/
- On Mastodon
- mastodon.social/@cattsmall
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Nathan Curtis
Founder and design systems consultant at Directed Edges. He’s passionate about information architecture, UX, front-end dev and design systems. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs frequently on Medium.com today, and speaks regularly at events worldwide.
- On the web
- https://www.directededges.com
- On LinkedIn
- nathancurtis
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Tejas Kumar
Tejas has been writing code since age 8. Since then, he has worked either full-time or contractually for Spotify, Vercel, G2i, and others, picking up things along the way. His jobs have been some mix of Individual Contributor (coding-heavy) roles, and managerial roles between companies.
Today, he travels the world equipping and encouraging developers to do their best work, aiming to make the world a better place through quality software.
In March 2024 his new book Fluent React will released. This practical book will help you take a deep dive into fundamental concepts of React.
- On the web
- https://tej.as
- On LinkedIn
- tejasq
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Kevin Powell
Kevin is a CSS evangelist and educator whose primary goal is to help people fall in love with CSS and, failing that, to at least help them be a little less frustrated by it.
He is best known for his YouTube channel, where he posts weekly educational videos that, he hopes, help both inspire and empower people to improve at CSS.
- On the web
- https://www.kevinpowell.co/
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Vitaly Friedman
Creative Lead and Co-Founder of Smashing Magazine
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
- On LinkedIn
- vitalyfriedman
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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.
