2013 Judges

Chris Coyier

CSS-Tricks CodePen @chriscoyier

Chris is the force behind CSS-Tricks, previously he was with Wufoo and SurveyMonkey as Lead Hucklebucker.

Chris is a Wordpress expert having authored the Digging into Wordpress book and the Lynda.com Wordpress 3 tutorial series.

He is also the host of a kick-ass podcast the Shoptalk Show

Ben Callahan

Sparkbox @bencallahan

President of Sparkbox and founder of the Build Responsively workshop series, Ben shares his ideas about the web on the Sparkbox Foundry and other industry blogs like .net Magazine and Smashing Magazine. His leadership at Sparkbox has driven the team to be a pioneer in responsive web design techniques, and he continues to push for great user experiences outside the context of specific devices.

JD Graffam

SimpleFocus @jdgraffam

JD Graffam runs Simple Focus, a user experience brand firm in Memphis, TN, that helps local and national brands take on the internet with simple ideas, design and technology.

JD serves his city as President of AIGA Memphis and as a director of FirstWorks, mentors eighth graders for The Grizzlies Foundation and is a graduate of the Leadership Academy of Memphis. He also speaks nationally about web design, has published a book, CSS for Print Designers, curates Pattern Tap and serves on the Editorial Review Board for Smashing Magazine

Christopher Schmitt

Heat Vision @teleject

The founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing, design, and event company, Christopher is an award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993. As a sought-after speaker and trainer, Christopher regularly demonstrates the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He also chairs the online and traditional conferences for Environments for Humans including the CSS Summit and AIGA In Control Conference.

He was Co-Lead of the Adobe Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP) as well as Co-Lead of its Education Task Force.

Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including HTML5 Cookbook, Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites, and CSS Cookbook, Christopher has also written for MSDN, A List Apart, .net Magazine, and Web Reference.

Val Head

@vlh valhead.com

Val Head is totally into design, type and code. She is a designer and consultant currently based in Pittsburgh where she works with agencies and small businesses to make fun and effective web sites. She speaks internationally at conferences and leads workshops on web design and creative coding.

Every year she and Jason bring a swarm of web designers to Pittsburgh for Web Design Day. She also runs the local creative coding meet up, Loop and helps keep Refresh Pittsburgh going strong. She likes people. Val tweets too much, occasionally dribbbles, and blogs somewhat inconsistently.

Jen Lukas

jennlukas.com @JennLukas

Jenn Lukas is a multi-talented front-end consultant and freelancer developer in Philadelphia and is the founder of Ladies in Tech. She writes for The Nerdary, is a columnist for .net magazine, and has contributed to The Pastry Box Project. She has spoken at a variety of conferences including dConstruct, An Event Apart, and CSS Dev Conference.

Jenn's past experiences range from creating Navy training simulations to leading the front-end team at Happy Cog as Interactive Development Director. She was named one of Mashable’s 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter, and you can find her on Twitter posting development and cat-related news. When she's not crafting sites with the finest of web standards, Jenn teaches HTML and CSS for GirlDevelopIt.

Bermon Painter

@bermonpainter

Bermon Painter is the UX Design Lead for Hendrick Automotive Group, where he works with an amazing team that crafts nifty experiences and web applications with Ruby. He's also heavily involved in the local tech community in Charlotte and organizes the Charlotte User Experience Designer, Charlotte Front-End Developers and Charlotte Grok groups. In his free time he works the folks at @teamsassdesign on the redesign of the Sass website.

Outside of technology he enjoys languages, speaks fluent Spanish, working on Italian, plays classical piano and enjoys visiting the beaches and mountains of Ecuador with his family.

Jonathan LeBlanc

@jcleblanc PayPal

Jonathan LeBlanc is a technology evangelist, Emmy award winning software engineer, and author of the O’Reilly book "Programming Social Applications". Specializing in user identity concepts and data mining techniques, as well as open source initiatives around social engagement, Jonathan works on the development of emerging initiatives towards building a more user-centric web.

Dan Denny

@dandenney Envy Labs dandenney.com

Dan is a front-end dev at Envy Labs, where he works on client projects and internal products including Code School.

He has been called a "seriously good copy and paster" and he puts those skills to use as he spends his days learning, unlearning and relearning how to build things for the web. Knowledge sharing is one of his biggest passions, so he founded the Front-End Design Conference in St. Petersburg in 2009. It will be hitting the road for the first time in 2014, so there will be events in Portland and St. Pete. He's one of the "bakers" in this year's group contributing to The Pastry Box Project and he infrequently writes posts on dandenney.com.

Jason Beaird

@jasongraphix Mailchimp jasongraphix.com

Jason Beaird is a senior UX designer and front end developer at MailChimp where he enjoys building interfaces that people enjoy building with. As the author of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, he thinks that everyone can learn the language of design and that all designers should also learn to code. Before diving into the world of user-driven app development, Jason spent nearly a decade doing web design and front end dev for clients like Blue Cross Blue Shield, University of South Carolina and Berkley Fishing. When he's not tinkering with the interweb, he can usually be found tackling renovation projects with his wife, posting way too many pictures of his daughter to Instagram or hanging out with fellow web nerds at meetups and conferences. He tweets a lot (see above) and occasionally writes things longer than 140 characters at jasongraphix.com.

Niki Brown

nikibrown.com @nikibrown

Niki Brown (nikibrown.com ) is a designer, front-end developer, podcaster, speaker, teacher, and twitter-er.

Jay Barry

@petridisc UnmatchedStyle

Jay has been working on the web for more than 12 years. He currently designs and develops for the web and is an editor at Unmatchedstyle.com. In his spare time, Jay plays in a band for children called Lunch Money, with his wife Molly.

2013 design created by:

Dan Mall

@danielmall danielmall.com superfriend.ly

Dan Mall is an award-winning designer from Philadelphia, an enthralled husband, and new dad. As the Founder & Design Director at SuperFriendly, Dan and his team defeat apathy and the forces of evil with heroic creative direction, design, & strategy. He’s also co-founder of Typedia and swfIR, and sings/plays keyboard for contemporary-Christian band Four24. Dan was formerly Design Director at Big Spaceship, Interactive Director at Happy Cog, and a technical editor for A List Apart. He writes about design and other issues on Twitter and on his industry-recognized site, danielmall.com.