There is an ever present rift between designers and software developers and it is one that has existed since our paths started crossing. Learn how to be mindful of design in your own open source project and how to attract designers to help your project become even more awesome.

How many times have you sat in a dark office after-hours, hand-editing forms, page after page? Software teams spend a lot of time developing the UI. To speed up the process, developers resort to drag-and-drop widget solutions or model-based static generation tools, which only change the appearance of the problem.

HTML5 is ushering in a new era of graphically rich, visually compelling and highly interactive Web sites and apps. This session outlines some of what you can do with new HTML5 and CSS3 features introduced in Internet Explorer versions 9 and 10, including Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts, 2D & 3D transforms, transitions, animations, gradients, box and text shadow, border-radius, multi-column layout, inline SVG, and canvas.

The relationship of design to the world of startups has recently shifted from a question of necessity to a position of criticality. To succeed in this new environment, designers need to adapt their strengths. In several case studies, Neil Wehrle provides insight into how designers innovate in an early-stage startup environment. Specifically, he shows how the Product Experience group at betaworks works to transform ideas into products then companies.

Natural User Interface (NUI) applications are driven in three major ways: multi-touch, voice, and gesture with Kinect for Windows. These NUI applications manifest in multiple form factors and developer technologies and all can leverage innovative capabilities like multi-user, cloud, and parallel computing.

Romain Guy and Chet Haase from the Google Android UI Toolkit team talk about approaches for developing more effective user interfaces (UI) in Android applications. From performance to widgets to layout to animations, you’ll learn tons of top techniques that will make your UIs totally terrific.

Designing for Android can be super complicated due to the multitude of device sizes. But does it have to be that way? In this talk, the presenter will show the design process she used while collaborating with a freelance designer to create Monkey Write. The design goal: To produce a single-device design while keeping an eye on elements that need to be fluid.

Collaboration is the key to an agile team’s success. Yet, even today, Design is too often perceived as a tactic to simply “make things user-friendly and pretty.” To combat that oversimplification, designers often shroud their work in a mysterious cloud of specialized tools and jargon reserved for silo’ed “design phases” that don’t allow outsiders in.

This talk covers experiences writing real HTML5 apps for the cross device web. It dives into code sharing across different form factors, layout considerations using the flexbox model, hardware accelerated positioning, scrolling, simulating :active pseudo-state, multi-touch gestures and other best practices.

The Metro design language is becoming an intrinsic part of the Microsoft user experience. Already, we can find it on Zune (where it all started), Windows Phone 7 (where it was refined and perfected), Xbox, Windows 8, as well as on the Microsoft.com website. This session dives into the history of this design language, studies its characteristics and shows tips and tricks to implement Metro user interfaces in Windows Phone and Windows 8.