Pixels and people, media and metaphor, business and brand. This summarizes Nathan’s incredibly broad creative career that spans almost every digital medium, most content delivery platforms, and most major software technologies over nearly two decades. If he has a specialty, it’s merging business needs with emerging design paradigms and rich media. He has designed award-winning interfaces, interactions, visuals, motion, and sounds for such clients as Adobe, Charles Schwab, General Motors, General Electric, Leapfrog, Microsoft, Oracle, The North Face, Timberland, and Reebok. He’s been lucky enough to collaborate with Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fluid, IDEO, John Maeda, l.inc design, Tolleson Design, Obscura Digital, and more. He is a published magazine author, book author, frequent awards judge, and speaker on matters of digital imaging, interaction design, rich media workflow, and creative process.

Darren David is an award-winning pioneer in the field of RIA development, with a 13-year career in the industry. His list of firsts includes leading development for the first Flash-based online SAT preparation course, developing the first WPF-based application to be publicly deployed on Windows Vista, and engineering the UI for the world’s largest multi-touch wall. His interests and experiences cover a vast range of creative and technical ground, which he has brought to bear for clients such as Microsoft, General Motors, HP, The North Face, Reebok and JanSport. Darren regularly presents at industry conferences, and has served on advisory boards at both Adobe and Microsoft.

In earlier lives, he held engineering and marketing management positions at Microsoft and Sybase, where he was responsible for enterprise software development and strategy. Officially based in Cynergy’s Capitol Hill headquarters in Washington, DC he is on the road more than he is in the District, espousing Cynergy’s passion for devising incredible new ways for all of us to experience and interact with software.

Workshops take place after lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday. Up to seven workshops will run concurrently and you’ll choose one to attend (unless you have the magical ability to be two places at once). Closer to the conference, there will be a session-picker tool on this website where you will rank your workshop preferences as space is limited. We’ll make lots of noise when the session-picker is up and running. The earlier your register, the more likely you’ll get your top choice.

The goal for this workshop is to provide clear and simple methodologies to empower people to use hand sketching (with pens and pencils) as a means of recording, sharing, and presenting ideas to others. This workshop will focus on helping you to become a more confident/better visual communicator and demonstrate quick methods to use drawing to enrich collaborative design processes.

The format for this fast-paced workshop will be a balanced combination of presentation and discussion with hands-on sketching and drawing. By the end you will have a broader understanding of hand-generated sketching and learn new methods that may help you to work more creatively.

Mark’s work has been featured in design publications and international magazines, and has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), I-Space Gallery (Chicago), the Krannert Museum (Champaign, IL) and the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery (Carnegie Mellon University). His work is also included in the permanent art collection of the University of Illinois. He has won numerous design awards from International Design Magazine (ID) and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and holds multiple product patents.

In addition to his appointment at CMU, he co-directs The Letter Thirteen Design Agency, an interdisciplinary design firm that deals in the design of products, spaces and graphic communication.