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DESIGN LESSON

1. Jon Kolko

Jon is a Partner at Modernist Studio and the Founder of Austin Center for Design.

He was previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, the largest educational software company in the world. He joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused on helping students succeed in college and get jobs.

Jon has also held the positions of Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas, and both Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He has been a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in building both the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM. He is regularly asked to participate in high-profile conferences and judged design events, including the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the Center for Design Studies of Monterrey, in Mexico, and Malmö University, in Sweden.

Jon is the author of five books:

Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann,
Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press,
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, published by Austin Center for Design,
Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love, published by Harvard Business Review Press, and
Creative Clarity, published by Brown Bear Press.

Well Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love, published by Harvard Business Review Press, and
Creative Clarity, published by Brown Bear Press.

2. Aarron Walter

Aarron Walter is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEOs and Beyond, and co-author of InterACT With Web Standards: A holistic approach to web design (http://interactwithwebstandards.com). Aarron is the user experience design lead at MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com).

Aarron speaks at conferences on user experience design, findability, web standards, and the web design industry.

Designing for Emotion, the brief book that’s helped designers around the globe create engaging customer experiences.

It makes its users fall in love with your site via the precepts packed into this brief, charming book by MailChimp user experience design lead Aarron Walter. From classic psychology to case studies, highbrow concepts to common sense, Designing for Emotion demonstrates accessible strategies and memorable methods to help you make a human connection through design.

Designing for Emotion, the brief book that’s helped designers around the globe create engaging customer experiences.

4. Edward R. Tufte

Edward Rolf Tufte is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information AND Envisioning Information, this classic book on statistical graphics, charts, tables. Theory and practice in the design of data graphics, 250 illustrations of the best (and a few of the worst) statistical graphics, with detailed analysis of how to display data for precise, effective, quick analysis. Design of the high-resolution displays, small multiples. Editing and improving graphics. The data-ink ratio. Time-series, relational graphics, data maps, multivariate designs. Detection of graphical deception: design variation vs. data variation. Sources of deception. Aesthetics and data graphical displays.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information AND Envisioning Information

5. Mike Monteiro

Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design in San Francisco. He prefers that designers have strong spines. Mike writes and speaks frequently about the craft, ethics, and business of design.

He loves design so much he wrote three books on the topic, Design is a Job, You’re My Favorite Client (both available from A Book Apart) and Ruined by Design. Mike received the 2014 Net award for Conference Talk of the Year for his inspirational polemic on responsibility, “How Designers Destroyed the World.”

Design Is A Job, Based on the book, this master class is a guide to making a living as a designer. It contains the fundamentals of being a working designer, including working with clients and others, valuing your work, and getting paid.