The Start

Samira's grandmother taught her the fundamentals of penmanship at a young age, which later became a love for lettering now seen throughout her work. As a kid she loved to design for herself and family members, starting with Pokemon and Hello Kitty fan sites. She loved design and the web so much she asked her parents to buy the domain, dark-thiry.com. When she was able to actualize her passion, she enrolled at FIT where she majored in Packaging Design. Since then Samira's worked with big and small clients across the web. She's is now the Art Director at Seattle based startup, FlowRote.

Even though Jon liked design as a kid his focus was always on music; his dreamed of becoming a Rockstar. At one point in his life he was kicked out of school and ended up at a vocational school (or at least the US equivalent). He tried enrolling in a video editing course but it was full, so he settled on a design class instead. Still focusing on a music career, Jon helped friends and other bands make flyers and album artwork on the side. Overtime, he realized his love for design, and development, and now makes products he's proud of at Makeshift in London.

Sam’s first experience in development was at age 10, when his mother brought him along to a free HTML class from his local ISP. Sam continued to tinker with development, making $100 for his first website. In high school, he convinced his mother to let him take a road trip to Atlanta to attend an Apple Developers Conference for the weekend. After that weekend, Sam went on to build one of the most popular Bible apps in the iOS app store, work at a few startups and create some projects of his own.

Nathan's political career started with a few internships and ended shortly thereafter. He eventually shifted gears and ventured out to California to work with Olark and sunk his teeth into the start-up world. After a few projects and some start-up attempts, Nathan found a home with General Assembly after creating scratchpad, an in-browser code editor which helped him build Dash with General Assembly.

Jonnie started programming at a young age, thanks to his father who showed him the joy in creating things with his hands. He went to school for design and stumbled upon some flyers that got him his first job and an introduction to Tina Roth Eisenberg (SwissMiss). In college he made things like DestoryFlickr, Dwarf and DestoryTwitter. These projects, along with others helped open doors to amazing opportunities to work with companies like Adobe, FiftyThree, A Book Apart, and Oak Studios.

Tim fell in love with design when he was 15 year old, taking courses at his local community college. Since then, Tim has navigated the working world as a young designer, even in situations facing age-discrimination. Throughout his career, Tim has worked as a full-time designer, podcaster and as a freelancer, building things and learning the throughout his time in the web industry.

Dan worked as a Porker Room Supervisor when he needed some extra cash to save up for his wedding. So he applied for a job in SEO at a studio in Florida. To his surprise they liked his resume enough to offer him a role as a Web Designer. After his first job, Dan created CSS Conf and now works at Envy Labs working on CodeSchool. Dan relives some of those earlier days and talks about how important learning was to him and still is, even five years into the industry.