Grant Skinner
Bio
Grant Skinner is an internationally recognized leader in the field of interactive development.
His body of work spans experimental interaction, applications, games, websites, installations, embedded devices, and mobile, with a recent focus on projects that span multiple environments.
Grant fuses his experience with design, user experience, development, and business with a driving creativity to produce projects that push the boundaries of interactive technologies.
While building gskinner.com into a leading interactive production shop, Grant has worked with a wide range of high calibre clients including Google, Microsoft, Adobe, AOL, BBC, Salesforce, Nissan, GE, EA, CNN, and DirectTV.
Most recently, Grant has been working on bringing Flash-like interactive experiences to the open web via tools & libraries such as CreateJS, Zoe, and the Flash Pro Toolkit For CreateJS.
Session
Fun, Failure, and Forging Ahead
In his career, Grant Skinner has dabbled in hacking, design, code, UX, digital art, micro electronics, computer vision, teaching, open source, consulting, entrepreneurship, and occasionally even taking time off.
He's won a few awards, spoken at a metric ton of conferences, built a successful business, worked with some really cool clients, and most recently led a major open source project. Grant hasn't founded the next Facebook, become a world-renowned artist, or revolutionized (well, anything, really), but he's avoided failing too spectacularly, has made significant contributions to his industry, and had a lot of fun doing it.
This talk meanders through Grant's life, examining the highs and lows, fun experiments, bad clients, and the ongoing struggle to figure out "what do I want to be when I grow up". There'll be lots of hard-won wisdom, visual experiments, lame jokes, and pointless anecdotes. Because hey, if designers can do "biopic" talks, so can developers. Amiright?