Speaker Spotlight: Dan Cederholm

Our speakers are always thinking about web and application design, and we pester them as often as possible to find out what's new in their world. This week we caught up with Dan Cederholm, founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio, and co-founder of Dribbble, a design community. Dan will speak for AEA in Atlanta and Boston this year.

Q. What's the main takeaway from your talk?

My favorite talks are those that share insight into someone's particular process. I hope to do just that with Handcrafted Patterns, where I'll be showing the lessons learned while crafting the UI for dribbble.com. I've been thinking about patterns a lot lately, and how we can learn an immense amount for breaking interfaces down into micro frameworks. I hope the main takeaway is: learn from dissecting your own patterns.

Q. What's a useful tip or trick you've learned in the last few months?

Well, I learned to use a pizza cutter when cutting up my kids' waffles in the morn—wait, you probably mean web design.

I've been (finally) using Sass a bit lately (and LESS), and it's extremely helpful for rolling up CSS3 vendor-prefix stacks into reusable modules. I'll be talking a bit about this as well at AEA.

Q. What professional website are you visiting most these days?

Two recent favorites are:

Q. Tell us something we don't know about you.

In the seventh grade, I won an “air band” contest by lip-synching Bon Jovi's “Shot Through The Heart” to a raucous Vermont middle school.